Trouble in thy breast

I've been working on a post about why some music makes me cry, which has already spun off one tangent (yesterday's look at a tiny flaw in Annie Lennox's tear-jerking "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye"). Here's another: Today I happened to be talking to a friend who years ago asked me to look under the hood of the Band's wild and woolly "Jawbone," which I did with surprise and satisfaction. And this time he said, "Why don't you write about 'When I am laid in earth'?" His son had learned this Baroque greatest hit from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas on piano, and my friend had taken note of its heart-stopping potency, even sans vocals. He could tell there was some sorcery in the music and he thought I might sort it out.

I'm a bit late to this question, of course—Purcell wrote Dido's lament in 1689, after all, and this ground has been well tilled since then. So I can't claim any entirely new insights into the song's aching splendor, but I would point out at least two of the more obvious ones. The first is the descending bass line, also called a "ground bass," which creeps down in ominous half steps in a series of musical trochees (long/short, or whole note/half note), before dropping down a third, then curling back up in the equivalent of an iamb. This pattern repeats with grim insistence 11 times through the aria:

The melody Purcell lays over that bass stretches across two of these bass forms, but I think more importantly, it mostly ascends while the bass descends, a counter-movement I think we intuitively feel as a cleavage, a prying open of a space into which emotion can swell:

Of course, the melody doesn't only go up, but it very clearly sounds like it's trying to leap up before tumbling back down, a flame flickering up from the funeral pyre. This is especially true of the aria's most famous and justly memorable phrase (following the pickup note from above):

Let's not dwell too much on the contradiction inherent in that sentiment; "Remember me but ah! Forget my fate," is a misdirection on par with Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" or "Don't cry, whatever you do" in "Hello, Young Lovers." Dido may wish not to be defined by her tragic death but this song says otherwise with every note.

The other secret weapon Purcell employs mercilessly here is one I've celebrated in this space in slightly different terms: appoggiaturas, or suspended notes. Indeed this is the garment-rending harmonic signature that runs subtly through the whole piece. In this video Trevor Pinnock points out a few:

Even the harmonies and intervals that aren't strictly suspensions have the feel of struggle and slippage against the inexorable tectonic shift of that relentless bass. And after the singing stops, the strings (or in this score reduction, the piano) execute a series of appoggiaturas, one on practically every measure:

Appoggiaturas are essentially yearning in musical form, but when there are this many piled up in the road, the emotional effect goes beyond yearning to something deeper and darker; it evokes a slow-motion torment, or the final, uncomfortable twists and twitches of a body seeking its final rest. I'm not sure I can say this piece makes me cry every time I hear it—it's almost like it's already doing all the crying for me—but I certainly never fail to feel it.