1. Dryden and Lee’s tragedy was premiered at Dorset Gardens around 1678/9. Dryden tells us (The Duke of Guise, 1683) that he wrote only the first and third acts, and ‘drew the scenery of the whole play’. Purcell only set the portion of the play written by Dryden. ‘Musick for a while’ is sung in Act III, sc. i.
2. One of the Furies, whose head was covered with serpents and who with her whip chastized men for their misdeeds, breathing vengeance, war and pestilence.
1. The operatic version, with music by the Purcells, was so successful that it immediately replaced the play in the repertory. The manuscript (in the British Museum) of the songs in the Indian Queen was published with the date 1695.
1. Purcell died at the age of thirty-six.
3. Hades and Persephone, King and Queen of the Underworld.
1. Originally written for countertenors, the song was published by Blow in Amphion Anglicus (1700) in a version for sopranos. The poetic scheme of Dryden’s roundelay allows Blow to repeat the sensuous passage that depicts the kiss.
1. Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander. Alexander’s mother was Olympias of Epirus.
2. Men of high rank, not equals. Alexander in a letter to Darius once wrote: ‘do not write to me as an equal’ (Arrian, Book 2).
3. Military excellence.
4. Thais was a famous Athenian courtesan who accompanied Alexander on his campaigns through Asia and persuaded him to burn the royal palace of Persepolis.
5. Timotheus, a famous poet and singer, was reputed to have invented choral music, and in Dryden’s poem he is Alexander’s master of music.
6. Olympias was Alexander’s mother, who claimed that he was the son of a supernatural serpent, not of Philip of Macedon – an assertion that encouraged belief in Alexander’s divine origin; he himself demanded that he be worshipped as a god.
7. wonder at.
8. Alexander.
9. takes upon himself the character of the god.
10. Because Alexander was not a god.
11. God of wine and mystic ecstasy.
12. honourable (ironic).
13. oboes.
14. Because Bacchus, according to legend, discovered wine.
15. in his memory.
16. Timotheus.
17. Alexander’s.
18. The subject is Timotheus.
19. King of Persia, defeated by Alexander.
20. deserted by his own followers.
21. turning over in his mind.
22. Timotheus.
23. The sound of love resembles that of mourning.
24. the assembled crowd.
25. Alexander.
26. the pleasurable pain of love.
27. Thais.
28. The Roman Furies are compared with the Greek Erinyes: the violent goddesses, with snakes in their hair and whips in their hands, pursued victims to make them mad.
29. dead Greek heroes.
30. Thais’s desire for vengeance is explained by the fact that Xerxes, whose throne Alexander now occupies, once destroyed the city of her birth.
31. those which provide the wind for organs.
32. organ. Cecilia, a Roman virgin martyr of the third century, was much later in the sixteenth century associated with the invention of the organ, becoming the patron saint of music.
33. one divinely inspired.
34. Because organ notes could be sustained by the blowing of bellows.
35. According to medieval legend St Cecilia is accompanied by a guardian angel.
1. A Platonic doctrine. See also Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ and ‘At a Solemn Musick’.
2. Jubal was the son of Lamech and Adah, the ancestor of all who played the lyre and pipe (Genesis, iv. 21).