Remember me (Due Radici version)

Maybe the most intense moment in Dido and Aeneas. Published in London in 1689, the libretto of Nahum Tate for the music of Henry Purcell retells the story told in Book IV of Vergil’s Aeneid. How many times have we felt guilty of something for which we were not to blame? How many times have we failed to listen to someone telling us of their innermost feelings? How many times have we remained deaf to a plea for help which we knew to surpass our strength?
It is not the disgrace of being abandoned that is unbearable for Dido, but the devastating power of love. By singing these few, unadorned lines of verse without the recitative that precedes them, I have aimed to make the text more universal, and thus more intimately personal.

When I am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, but ah!
Forget my fate.

(Quando giacerò nella terra 
possano i miei torti
non turbarti il cuore.
Ricordati di me 
ma dimentica il mio destino!)
- - - - - - - - -
Hands inviting, hands receiving, hands that touch, hands that caress, hands embracing, hands responding, hands that entwine, strong hands, soft hands, hands exhausted by love, hands that find each other, sleeping hands, anxious hands, hands pressed to your breast, hands that do not understand, hands filling with tears, hands that become distant, hands that greet the sea of nothing, hands without hope, lonely hands, hands grasping the hilt of the sword, hands that plunge the blade into your own heart, hands that kill, hands that die.
("Hands", by Marco Beasley)

Marco Beasley - voice
Stefano Rocco - archlute
The hands and the artistic drawings are by Paola Brancato
English translation by Marjolein Van Zuylen
CD and LP of DUE RADICI are available at www.marcobeasley.it or at the concert venues