Early gay activists that I knew spoke of Oscar Wilde, who died in 1900, as having been martyred for being gay and one of them, Craig Rodwell, for whom I worked for six years in the 1970s, named his Village bookstore, founded two years before Stonewall, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Wilde’s memory. Also during the ’70s, I once asked Quentin Crisp, who was born just eight years after Wilde’s death and later achieved fame and notoriety as “The Naked Civil Servant,” “one of the stately homos of England,” if he and his early contemporaries ever talked about Radclyffe Hall and the censorship of her “Well of Loneliness” and Oscar Wilde and his trials and tribulations and, if so, what they thought of them. Crisp told me that they admired Hall as a good and noble woman, but scoffed at Wilde for allowing himself to get caught.
The former viewpoint, of Wilde as victim of society and gay hero, is reflected in composer and co-librettist Theodore Morrison and co-librettist John Cox’s new opera “Oscar,” co-commissioned and co-produced by the Santa Fe Opera, which gave its world premiere in 2013, and Opera Philadelphia, which is giving its East Coast premiere performances this month. The deeply moving opera, written in an accessible, spare and lyrical Benjamin Britten-esque idiom, opened at the venerable Philadelphia Academy of Music on February 6, and I attended the second of its five performances, on February 8, with conductor Evan Rogister and director Kevin Newbury impressively presiding and memorable designs by David Korins (sets), David C. Woolard (costumes), and Rick Fisher (lighting). Seán Curran served as choreographer and Elizabeth Braden, as chorus master.
While the opera begins on the night of Wilde’s first theatrical triumph, the opening night of “Lady Windemere’s Fan” (1892), its focus is his downfall—his accusation by the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie, for “posing as a Sodomite;” his humiliating trial (1895); and his sentence to two years’ hard labor in Reading Gaol (pronounced Jail—1895-97), which broke his spirit and ultimately killed him, at the age of 46.
“Oscar” stands as a personal and triumphant tour-de-force for countertenor David Daniels, its raison d’être, as Wilde, a creative and flamboyant figure, cut down, dogged, and disgraced by his foes, epitomes of Victorian prigs at their most heinous. Beside the lines that follow the natural flow of conversation, there are times when Wilde, and others as well, wax rhapsodic and, in the spirit of bel canto, take full advantage of Daniels’ proficiency at florid coloratura. An early solo, filled with fioriture, finds him gleefully limning in detail the hallucinatory effects of absinthe, echoed later on when, in full, dramatic cri de coeur, he hallucinates that Bosie, comely dancer Reed Luplau, is climbing about his cell and cavorting, bare-chested, before him, in a horror of a prison, all metal bars, bridges, and walkways, out of Sweeney Todd’s London. Dwayne Croft, as the great gray gay poet Walt Whitman, rhapsodizes as well, about his beleaguered friend and colleague Wilde.
Soprano Heidi Stober, as Ada Leverson, whom Wilde calls “Sphinx” and who gives Wilde, awaiting the jury’s verdict, shelter in her daughter’s nursery, and tenor William Burden, as Frank Harris, who later gets Wilde’s sentence lightened from uselessly turning a crank 10,000 times a day to working in the prison garden, with access to writing materials and books, join forces for a forceful duet, in which they, in vain, urge Wilde to flee to Paris before he’s condemned and incarcerated. In one of the most memorable scenes, which functions as the finale of the first of the opera’s two acts, the toys in the nursery come colorfully to life and enact Wilde’s trial by a jury of stuffed rabbit, bear, and monkey, marionettes, toy soldiers, circus clowns and strongman, and Napoleon on a hobbyhorse, before a jack-in-the-box judge (bass-baritone Wayne Tigges).
In his two villainous roles, Tigges functions as a sort of Claggart figure, playing not only the judge, but also the unspeakably harsh Reading Gaol Governor, the gruff Colonel Henry B. Isaacson. At one point, the prisoners are made to witness the hanging of one of their number, in another reminiscence of “Billy Budd.” In this scene, the Grim Reaper dances around the prisoners and tellingly proves to be Luplau, as Bosie, in another guise. When the prisoners are shuffled, in shackles, off to chapel, with tenor Roy Hage, as the unctuous chaplain, presiding, they curse Isaacson in counterpoint to the hymns. During the service, Wilde becomes ill and is taken to the infirmary, where he bonds with lyric baritone Jarrett Ott and bass-baritone Thomas Shivone, as fellow prisoners with whom he finds rapport, and with baritone Ricardo Rivera, as Thomas Martin, Reading’s singular humane warden, who asks Wilde his opinions about various writers. In a lighthearted moment, the four join voices in a merry music hall number, made famous by early drag king Vesta Tilley, impersonating “Burlington Bertie.” Wilde also expresses empathy for a scared 10-year-old boy, imprisoned at Reading for stealing a rabbit. Rivera in addition portrays, in contrast, a trio heartless hotel managers, who in turn refuse admittance to Wilde, after being warned by the Marquess’ thuggish allies, Inspectors Littlechild and Kearley, played by tenor Joseph Gaines and bass Benjamin Sieverding respectively, who taunt Wilde with cries of “Queer!,” “Bugger!,” and “Sodomite!”
At this writing, remaining performances of “Oscar” take place on February 11 at 7:30 p.m., 13 (LGBT night) at 8 p.m., and 15 at 2:30 p.m. The season continues with “Ariadne auf Naxos,” given by Curtis Institute of Music’s Opera Theatre, at the Perelman Theatre, on March 4, 6, and 8; “Don Carlo,” at the Academy of Music, with Dimitri Pittas, Leah Crocetto, Michelle DeYoung, Eric Owens, Troy Cook, and Morris Robinson, on April 24, 26, and 29, and May 1 and 3; and Schnyder and Wimberly’s “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” with Lawrence Brownlee, Angela Brown, and Will Liverman, at the Perelman Theatre, on June 5, 7, 10, 12, and 14. Visit www.operaphila.org or telephone 215/893-1018 for further information and to buy tickets.