So They Gave Me Opium
for countertenor and piano
2021
6’
commissioned by the St. Marylebone Festival
premiered by Andrew Watts and Gavin Roberts
text from a letter by Elizabeth Barrett Browing to Robert Browing:
…it might strike you as strange that I who have had no pain—no acute suffering to keep down from its angles — should need — [opium in any shape]
… I don't take it for 'my spirits' in the usual sense; you must not think such a thing—But I have had restlessness till it made me almost mad: at one time I lost the power of sleeping quite—and even in the day, the continual aching sense of weakness has been intolerable— …as if one's life, instead of giving movement to the body, were imprisoned… within it, and beating and fluttering to get out, at all the doors and windows.
So [they] gave me opium— …and ever since I have been calling it my amreeta draught, my elixir, — [because] the tranquillising power has been wonderful… — it would be dangerous to leave off [the calming remedy, Mr. Jago says —]
…And after all the lotus-eaters are blessed beyond [the opium-eaters; and the best of lotuses are such thoughts as I know.]