The "Curtain Tune" served as incidental music designed to transition the audience from the spoken drama to the musical "masques" within the play.

It is part of a "semi-opera," a Restoration-era English theatrical form that combined spoken dialogue with elaborate musical and dance interludes.

While the Curtain Tune sets the stage, the full work is celebrated for several other notable movements often found in recordings such as the one by John Eliot Gardiner :

: One of the few songs in the collection that scholars universally agree was composed by Henry Purcell.

Many experts now attribute the majority of the score to , who likely wrote it for a revival of the play around 1712.

The string writing closely resembles that of , differing from Purcell’s established style.