Imagine you’re a London schoolgirl and one of the greatest composers wants to premiere a new masterwork—the first major English opera, actually—in your school. Oh, and you and your friends will be in all the roles save that of a legendary hero of Antiquity. Heads must have been spinning fast in 1689 at Josiah Priest’s boarding school for girls when students heard that Henry Purcell would be presenting the first performance of Dido and Aeneas there, and that they were the singers.

“I find the work very interesting because it’s a simple opera, but it’s also difficult—with the idea that it was written for a school for young gentlewomen in Chelsea,” says soprano Monica Whicher, who plays Dido, the ill-fated queen of Carthage, in the production being presented at the Early Music Vancouver Festival (which runs from Sunday [July 26] to August 7). “The work went through various permutations as a masque performed in various concerts, and I think it speaks to its beauty that it remains a staple today, both in concert and stage performance.”

The piece has multiple levels of significance. “Who knows why Purcell and Nahum Tate chose that text and section of the Aeneid?” asks Whicher, reached at her Toronto home and speaking of the epic by Roman poet Virgil. “Probably because it’s the most overt representation of the humanity in the story—the rest is a lot of travelling, a lot of war, a lot of the supernatural. This section includes love and lust and fate, and interference with fate, both by natural and supernatural means.

“I think that when music represents things that are both very earthly and otherworldly, it makes a great representation of what we all experience in life. What makes magic is that very sensation of something that really grabs our hearts, and what better than a love story, where people and witches and other spirits are interfering with this relationship that’s quite brief, but is everything to Dido?”

Purcell’s operatic depiction of a legendary but misguided Trojan prince and the queen of Carthage may also have had a sharp political edge. Aeneas’s abandonment of his lover due to the supernatural connivance of witches was seen by some as an elegant allegory of the “abandonment” of his people by ill-advised King James II, who attempted to restore Catholicism. He was ousted after an invasion of England late in 1688 by Dutch forces under William of Orange, the husband of James’s eldest daughter, Mary—both of them Protestants. Purcell’s opera was staged within months of these dramatic dynastic and religious events. The EMV production also includes Come Ye Sons of Art, Purcell’s musical ode of 1694 celebrating the birthday of Queen Mary II.

“When people update all such works, if they’re staged for a more modern context, they become another allegory for another population. It’s fun to represent so much difference in a story that stays the same,” says Whicher, who performs with baritone Sumner Thompson, as Aeneas, and other soloists—tenor Charles Daniels, countertenor Reginald Moberly, and fellow sopranos Pascale Beaudoin, Jacqueline Woodley, and Catherine Webster—under the musical direction of Alexander Weimann.

Whicher thinks that the addition of witchcraft to Virgil’s original plot line—a sacrilege to some—is simply a matter of Purcell and Tate reaching for broad appeal rather than always alluding to the literary and classical. “It was what people were dealing with in their own lives—supernatural worries and/or excitements,” she says with a laugh.

At Josiah Priest’s boarding school it was no doubt another part of the excitement.

The Early Music Vancouver Festival presents Dido and Aeneas at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts next Thursday (July 30).