JASMIN WOLFF
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Dido
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The Series Dido was comissioned by the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, in collaboration with Tischlerei Magazine. The images frame a personal interpretation of composer Michael Hirsch’s Dido, his adaptation of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.
When I met Hirsch in December 2016, our conversation revolved around an opera that resisted the familiar framing of Dido and Aeneas’ story as a tragic romance. Instead, Hirsch put Dido’s interior world of grief at the center of the narrative, and the strange endurance of memory that comes with longing for those we miss.
Hirsch had died just weeks after these images were taken. His death is forever embedded in these images which have now become a record of of an artist reflecting on the grief of being left behind by another’s departure, without either of us realizing how soon those words would become inseparable from the lives of those he himself would leave behind.