For four years the Duluth Opera Festival has been providing Minnesota music lovers with top-quality classical performances. These opera presentations are performed in collaboration with the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra. This festival has won numerous awards, including the Depot Foundation’s 2008 Community Cultural Enrichment Award.This would be a wonderful way to spend a winter evening while staying at our Minnesota Bed and Breakfast!

This weekend there will be a performance of Dido & Aeneas, which is sometimes called “the greatest Opera ever written in the English language”. The English baroque opera will be presented with the outstanding string players from the MacPhail String Ensemble of Minneapolis and the choral singers of Sonomento, joined by a cast of professional soloists that is sure to be an intensely emotional performance. Opera has always been a timeless musical style, that can bring you into the deepest levels of human emotion.

The 30-year-old composer Henry Purcell, considered to be the greatest English composer of any era, completed this dramatic piece in 1689. It is considered the first English opera ever written and was premiered at the Chelsea girl’s school in London. Based on the Fourth Book of the Aeneid, it tells of the tragic and touching love affair between Aeneas, hero of the Trojan wars and the beautiful Dido, Queen of Carthage.

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