Dido's Lament

It is included in many classical music textbooks to illustrate the descending chromatic fourth (passus duriusculus) in the ground bass.

The text, as well as Purcell's opera, is based on the Aeneid, the Roman epic poem by Virgil about the Trojan warrior Aeneas, travelling to Italy from the fallen Troy in order to settle there and secure his son Ascanius's lineage.

Their ship is blown off course from Sicily, and they land on the shore of North Africa in Carthage, a town newly settled by refugees from Tyre.

Distraught at his betrayal, she orders a pyre to be built and set ablaze so that Aeneas will see from his ship that she has killed herself.

Purcell has applied word painting on the words "laid", which is also given a descending chromatic line portraying death and agony, and "remember me", which is presented in a syllabic text setting and repeated with its last presentation leaping in register with a sudden crescendo displaying her desperate cry with urgency as she prepares for her fate: death.