LIBRETTI AND TEXTS FOR VOCAL WORKS

adapted by Simon Crosby Buttle and the composer

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PROLOGUE: The Trial

adapted from the Oscar Wilde Trial transcripts 

B [spoken]       Is your name Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde?

T          It is.

B [sung]           Please state your age.

T`        Thirty-nine.

B          I think you are over forty. You were born on the sixteenth of October, 1854?
T          I have no wish to pose as being young. I am thirty-nine or forty.

B          But being born in 1854 makes you more than forty.

T          Ah! Very well.

B          What age is Lord Alfred Douglas?

T          Lord Alfred Douglas is about twenty-four, and was between twenty and twenty-one years of age when I first knew him. I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

B          I quite admit that I adored you madly. Have you ever adored a young man madly?
T          No, not madly; I prefer love: that is a higher form.
B          Never mind about that. Let us keep down to the level we are at now.
T          I have never given adoration to anybody except myself.
B          I suppose you think that a very smart thing?
T          Not at all.
B          I have adored you extravagantly.—Do you mean financially?
T          Oh, yes, financially!
B          Do you think we are talking about finance?
T          I don’t know what you are talking about.
B          Don’t you? Well, I hope I shall make myself very plain before I have done. I was jealous of every one to whom you spoke. Have you ever been jealous of a young man?
T          Never in my life.
B          I wanted to have you all to myself. Did you ever have that feeling?
T          No; I should consider it an intense nuisance, an intense bore.

B          Where was Lord Alfred Douglas staying when you wrote that letter to him?
T          At the Savoy; and I was at Babbacombe, near Torquay.
B          It was a letter in answer to something he had sent you?
T          Yes, a poem.
B          Why should a man of your age address a boy nearly twenty years younger as My own boy?
T          I was fond of him. I have always been fond of him.
B          Do you adore him?
T          No, but I have always liked him. I think it is a beautiful letter. It is a poem. I was not writing an ordinary letter. Nobody but an artist could write it.

B          Do you think that an ordinarily constituted being would address such expressions to a younger man?
T          I am not happily, I think, an ordinarily constituted being.
B          It is agreeable to be able to agree with you, Mr. Wilde. I can suggest, for the sake of your reputation, that there is nothing very wonderful in this red rose-leaf lips of yours?
T          A great deal depends on the way it is read.
B          Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. Is that a beautiful phrase?
T          Not as you read it, Mr Carson. You read it very badly.
B          Have you often written letters in the same style as this?
T          I don’t repeat myself in style.
B          Is it the kind of letter a man writes to another?
T          It was a tender expression of my great admiration for Lord Alfred Douglas.

B          May I take it that you, as an artist, have never known the feeling described here?
T          I have never allowed any personality to dominate my art.
B          Then you have never known the feeling you described?
T          No. It is a work of fiction.
B          You have no experience of its being a natural function?
T          I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man.

B          You exalt youth as a sort of god?
T          I like to study the young in everything. There is something fascinating in youthfulness.
B          These youths were much inferior to you in station?
T          I never inquired, nor did I care, what station they occupied. I found them, for the most part, bright and entertaining. I found their conversation a change. It acted as a kind of mental tonic.

B          You made handsome presents to all these young fellows?
T          I gave two or three of them a cigarette case: boys of that class smoke a good deal of cigarettes. I have a weakness for presenting my acquaintances with cigarette cases.
B          Rather an expensive habit if indulged in indiscriminately, isn’t it?
T          Less extravagant than giving jewelled garters to ladies.

B          Did any of these men who visited you at the Savoy have whiskies and sodas and iced champagne?
T          I can’t say what they had.
B          Do you drink champagne yourself?
T          Yes; iced champagne is a favourite drink of mine—strictly against my doctor’s orders.
B          Never mind your doctor’s orders.
T          I never do.
B          What was there in common between these young men and yourself?

T          I delight in the society of people much younger than myself. I like those who may be called idle and careless. I recognise no social distinctions at all of any kind; and to me youth, the mere fact of youth, is so wonderful that I would sooner talk to a young man for half-an-hour than be—well, cross-examined in Court.
B          Do I understand that you would talk to a street arab?
T          If he would talk to me. Yes, with pleasure.
B          And take him into your rooms?
T          Be it so.
B          Do you know Walter Grainger?
T          Yes.
B          How old is he?
T          He was a servant at a house in Oxford where Lord Alfred Douglas had rooms. Grainger waited at table. I never dined with him.

B          Did you ever kiss him?
T          Oh, dear no. He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly.

B          Was that the reason why you did not kiss him?... So far as your works are concerned, you pose as not being concerned about morality or immorality?
T          I do not know whether you use the word pose in any particular sense.
B          It is a favourite word of your own?
T          Is it? I have no pose in this matter. In writing a play or a book, I am concerned entirely with literature—that is, with art. I aim not at doing good or evil, but in trying to make a thing that will have some quality of beauty.
B          Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others. You think that true?
T          I rarely think that anything I write is true.
B          Did you say rarely?
T          I said rarely. I might have said never—not true in the actual sense of the word.
B          Religions die when they are proved to be true. Is that true?
T          Yes; but it is too big a question to go into here.
B          If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
T          That is a pleasing paradox, but I do not set very high store on it as an axiom.
B           Is it good for the young?
T          Anything is good that stimulates thought in whatever age.
B          Whether moral or immoral?
T          There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought.

B          Pleasure is thc only thing one should live for.
T          The realisation of oneself is the prime aim of life, and to realise oneself through pleasure is finer than to do so through pain.

B          A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
T          Perfectly. That would be my metaphysical definition of truth.
B          The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
T          Oh, yes; I think so. Half of it is true. The life of contemplation is the highest life, and so recognised by the philosopher.
B          You think that is humorous?
T          I am concerned only with my view of art. I don’t care twopence what other people think of it.
B          The majority are Philistines and illiterates?
T          I have found wonderful exceptions.
B          Do you think that the majority of people live up to the position you are giving us?
T          I am afraid they are not cultivated enough.
B          Not cultivated enough to draw the distinction between a good book and a bad book? You are acquainted with a publication entitled The Chameleon?
T          Very well indeed.
B          Contributors to that journal are friends of yours?
T          That is so.
B          I believe that Lord Alfred Douglas was a regular contributor?

T          He wrote some verses occasionally.
B          The poems in question were somewhat peculiar?
T          They certainly were not mere commonplaces like so much that is labelled poetry.
B          Did he read that poem to you?
T          Yes.
B          You can, perhaps, understand that such verses as these would not be acceptable to the reader with an ordinarily balanced mind?
T          I am not prepared to say.

B          I daresay!

T          I should say that one man’s poetry is another man’s poison.
B          One poem is entitled Two Loves. It contains these lines:

‘Sweet youth,
Tell me why, sad and sighing, dost thou rove
These pleasant realms? I pray thee tell me sooth,
What is thy name?’ He said,

A                                 ‘My name is Love.’’

B          Then straight the first did turn himself to me,
And cried,

S                                  ‘He lieth, for his name is Shame.
But I am Love, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night. I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’

B         Then sighing said the other,

S,A,B                                       ‘Have thy will,
I am the Love that dare not speak its name’.”

T          The Love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century so much misunderstood that it may be described as the Love that dare not speak its name, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

B [spoken]   Oscar Wilde, the crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon oneself from describing the sentiments which must rise in the breast of every man of honour who has heard the details of these horrible trials. It is the worst case I have ever tried. I shall, under the circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for a case such as this. The sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for two years.

T          And I? May I say nothing, my Lord? 

COMMENTARY I

comments from The Trial of Oscar Wilde, written and published anonymously at the time of his death

B          Thus perished by his own act a man who might have made a lasting mark in British Literature and secured for himself no mean place in the annals of his time.

A         He forfeited, in the pursuit of forbidden pleasures, if pleasures they can be called, all and everything that made life dear.

T          He entered upon his incarceration bankrupt in reputation, in friends, in pocket, and had not even left to him the poor shreds of his own self-esteem.

S          He went into gaol, knowing that if he emerged alive, the darkness would swallow him up and that his world – the spheres which had delighted to honour him – would know him no more.

B          He had covered his name with infamy and sank his own celebrity in a slough of slime and filth. He would die to leave behind him what? – the name of a man who was absolutely governed by his own vices and to whom no act of immorality was too foul or horrible.

THE COLOUR OF HIS HAIR

poem by A E Housman

Oh, who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?

And wherefore is he wearing such a melancholy air?

Oh, they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;

in the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is,

though hanging isn’t good enough, and flaying would be fair

for the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

Oh, a deal of pain he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid

to hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;

but they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare

and they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet

and the quarry gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,

and between his spells of labour, in the time he has to spare

he can curse his God that made him for the colour of his hair.

COMMENTARY II

sentences from a letter from Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, written while awaiting the verdict

A         It is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter waters sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you.

B          In my solitude you will be with me. I am determined not to revolt but to accept every outrage through devotion to love, to let my body be dishonoured so long as my soul may always keep the image of you. Pleasure hides love from us, but pain reveals it in its essence.

T          O dearest of created things, if someone wounded by silence and solitude comes to you, dishonoured, a laughing-stock, oh! you can close his wounds by touching them and restore his soul which unhappiness had for a moment smothered. Nothing will be difficult for you then, and remember, it is that hope which makes me live, and that hope alone.

S          What wisdom is to the philosopher, what God is to his saint, you are to me. To keep you in my soul, such is the goal of this pain which men call life. O my love, you whom I cherish above all things, white narcissus in an unmown field, think of the burden which falls to you, a burden which love alone can make light.

IN CARCERE ET VINCULIS: The imprisonment

adapted from Oscar Wilde's letter "De Profundis" to Alfred Douglas whilst incarcerated

As I sit here in the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long monotonous days of pain, it is myself that I blame. The gods are strange. It is not of our vices that they make instruments to scourge us; they bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.

Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are; by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love.

Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape-gatherers treading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms, or strewn with fallen fruit, we know nothing, and can know nothing.

For us there  is only one season, the season of Sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always midnight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

Where there is Sorrow there is holy ground. It is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh of many tears. The poor are wiser, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy, a misfortune, something  that calls for sympathy in others.  There is only one thing  for me now, absolute Humility.

My Gods dwell in temples made with hands, and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete. I have found in it not merely the beauty of Heaven, but the horror of Hell also.

To reject one’s own experience is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experience is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial    of the Soul. For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and unclean no less than those that a vision has cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye: so the Soul, in its turn, has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought, and passions of high import, what in itself is base, cruel, and degrading: nay more, may find in these its most august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or destroy.

Love of some kind is the only possible explanation for the amount of suffering in the world. For, if the world had been built out of Sorrow, it has been by the hands of Love, to reach the full stature of perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but Pain for the beautiful Soul.

I have a right to share in Sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world, and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things.

Behind Sorrow there is always a soul. And to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing. Unbeautiful are their lives who do it.

All the spring may be hidden in a   single bud, and the low ground-nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns, and so perhaps whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some moment of surrender, abasement and humiliation.

There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or  the curve of a shell, to which my nature does not answer.

Still I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it be, there is some Spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but moods of manifestation, and it is with this Spirit that I desire to become in harmony.

I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature: this is what I am looking for, and in the great symphonies of Music, in the initiation of Sorrow, in the depths of the Sea I may find it.

Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.