Aeneas loves Dido but abandons her to fate …
The Death of Dido is one of a group of masques written in and around 1715; it has music by Johann Pepusch, a German composer who had arrived in England in 1704. Booth’s libretto uses the same part of Virgil’s story used by Tate for Purcell’s more famous opera, Dido and Aeneas; Aeneas, searching for a new Rome, called at Carthage and the gods intervene to drive him off, and Dido thrown into despair, dies.