Music for Orchestra

Program Note

She Will Hang the Night with Stars is a hymn-like elegy inspired by a passage in Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis,” a long letter written during Wilde’s two-year prison sentence for homosexuality (in the vernacular of the day, “gross indecency with men”). The letter details Wilde’s spiritual journey during his trials and incarceration, and provides a stark contrast to his earlier philosophy of hedonism. 

Upon his release, Wilde emigrated to France, and never returned to Ireland. In France he wrote the final work of his life, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a poem that detailed the harsh realities of prison life. Oscar Wilde died destitute in Paris, at the age of 46. “De Profundis” concludes with the following paragraph:

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but 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.

For me, these words are words of worship, with Nature clearly representing divine protection and comfort, especially for the queer community, and the theology they represent mirrors my own. – Sonya Leonore Stahl