Musical Scenes in Two Seventeenth-Century Versions of El Eneas de Dios (The Aeneas of God) Attributed to Agustín Moreto y Cabaña (1618-1669)

The essay analyzes the function of music in Agustín Moreto y Cabaña’s El Eneas de Dios in order to explore how songs/song texts contributed to the overall performance. In addition, given the anomalous and intriguing situation of having two similar versions of the play attributed to the same dramatist, the study of the play’s musical scenes contributes possible answers to which one of the versions is most likely the original and to whether or not both versions of the play indeed belong to Moreto. The first is the disseminated printed version, and the second is an unedited variant in manuscript form that some scholars believe to be the original work. Even though there are discrepancies, the printed and the manuscript versions seem to be interrelated not just because of various counterparts in the details of the action, but also since both versions appear to complement one another musically. Equally tantalizing is that some versions of music for certain song texts imbedded in the manuscript version of El Eneas de Dios appear to have been preserved in “Novena,” an early eighteenth-century collection of music written for a number of popular and frequently performed dramatic works of the latter part of the seventeenth century.