Dido and Aeneas and Gilbert and Sullivan

I do not claim to be any kind of scholar, but sometimes I notice things that occupy my mind.

Now that the (very short) run I played of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is over (I got to play my new-to-me old violin with a baroque bow), I am allowing myself the chance to follow up on some observations I had about the opera. I ask you in advance to forgive me for assaulting your ears with YouTube ads before the samples.

The first thing that caught my ear was the chorus of sailors at the beginning of act three (in Dido and Aeneas):

which reminded me of "No Never" from H.M.S. Pinafore (sung here by Kelsey Grammar playing the part of Sideshow Bob, singing the part of the Captain of the Pinafore):

Then from The Pirates of Penzance I noticed that "Stay Frederic, stay!" Nay Mabel, nay,"



has a parallel (at least for me) in Act three of Dido and Aeneas, at the moment Aeneas tells Dido that he will stay, but Dido urges him to leave because Jove told him to:



There is a pervasive "sense of duty" motive connected with Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid that I can't seem to stop associating with Frederic's pervasive sense of duty, remembering that the alternate title for The Pirates of Penzance is "The Slave of Duty."

Maybe it is all the stuff of the British opera stage, and is otherwise meaningless, which is probably why I found nothing about in JSTOR articles or on google, save an "incipit" from the google "artificial intelligence" telling me that sometimes Pirates and Dido were performed on the same program.

Maybe it happened once. I can imagine the two operas sharing a set, but it would have been a long night for the audience and the singers.