Purcell's Fairy Queen

The audience responds enthusiastically, but the costs are sky high by the standards of the day: 3000 pounds to cover the expenses of the actors, singers, dancers and musicians, plus the décor, the costumes, and the special effects. Building on the so-called ‘masque’, Henry Purcell composed the music for a series of mini-operas, combining music and theatre. This hugely popular hybrid form would dominate the heterogenous and controversial corpus of English baroque opera for many decades.