Music Based On The Works of Oscar Wilde

This is an incomplete list of music based on the works of Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, poet, novelist, short story writer and wit, whose works have been the basis of a considerable number of musical works by noted composers. In classical genres, these include operas, ballets, incidental music, symphonic poems, orchestral suites and single pieces, cantatas, and songs and song cycles. Of more recent times, some have been the subject of musicals and film scores. Some are direct settings of Wilde's words or libretti based on them, and some are wordless settings inspired by his writings.

Famous quotes containing the words oscar wilde, music, based, works and/or wilde:

    “Better the rule of One, whom all obey,
    Than to let clamorous demagogues betray
    Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.”
    —Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    “Since a man must bring
    To music what his mother spanked him for
    When he was two ...”
    —Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

    “Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.”
    —Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)

    “Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
    —Josiah Royce (1855–1916)

    “Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.”
    —Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)