Purcell was an English composer of the early Baroque period, most remembered for his more than 100 songs, the miniature opera Dido and Aeneas, and his incidental music to a version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, called The Fairy Queen. Purcell composed music covering a wide field: the church, the stage, the court, and private entertainment. In all these branches of composition he showed an obvious admiration for the past and a willingness to learn from the concomitant forms and styles of the day, particularly from his contemporaries in Italy.  His alertness of mind went an individual inventiveness that marked him as the most original English composer of his time as well as one of the most original in Europe.