Ibert: La ballade de la geôle de Reading

Jacques Ibert (1890-1962)

La ballade de la geôle de Reading


Oscar Wilde’s poem 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' was written in exile after his release from prison in 1897 and was the last major work he completed. He had been sentenced in 1895 to two years’ hard labour after being found guilty of gross indecency (the legal term at the time for homosexual acts). By the time he was released his health had deteriorated severely and he would die three years later. In prison he had been addressed not by his name but by his cell number: Prisoner C.3.3 (Block C, Landing 3, Cell 3), and the Ballad was initially published under the pseudonym “C.3.3”. The first edition of 800 copies sold out within a week. The third edition, a limited signed run of 99, first revealed the identity of the author, but it was not until the seventh edition in 1899 replaced the number with Wilde’s name that the identity of its author became widely known.


The inspiration and dedicatee of the poem was Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a soldier in the Royal Horse Guards who had been convicted of murdering his wife. He was also imprisoned at Reading and hanged there in 1896 while Wide was resident. Wilde’s poem makes no judgement of the inmates or the laws that brought them to prison , but reflects on how the brutality of prison dehumanises its inmates. Wooldridge's experience is widened to stand for all prisoners, including Wilde himself: he famously observes that “each man kills the thing he loves” (itself an allusion to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice).


Ibert’s orchestral work inspired by Wilde’s poem was written between 1920 and 1922. He had studied at the Paris Conservatoire until the First World War intervened. Ibert worked as a nurse and stretcher bearer at the front and later as a naval officer at Dunkirk. Despite this interruption to his studies he still managed to win the coveted Prix de Rome at his first attempt in 1919. La ballade de la geôle de Reading is thus the work of a young man, still absorbing the influences of Debussy and Dukas, but filled with confidence, and undoubtedly drawn to the subject matter buy his own experience of the brutality of war. Its première in October 1922 was the first public concert to feature his work and established him as a major composer. In 1937 it was choreographed and presented as a ballet at the Opéra Comiquei. Ibert’s music has taken rather longer to cross the channel: tonight’s performance is the first time that La ballade de la geôle de Reading has been performed in the U.K.


The work is divided into three sections which run without a break. Each of them is headed by translated quotations from Wilde’s poem. The brooding opening movement sets the scene, portraying the oppressive prison and its inmates. Strange limpid interludes suggest the “little tent of blue / Which prisoners call the sky.” The second part evokes the terrors of night, when distant, disembodied sounds seem to suggest ghosts and spirits haunting the prison: “in ghostly rout they trod a saraband... And loud they sang, For they sang to wake the dead.” The final section returns to the mood of the opening, and builds to a passionate outburst before sinking back into Stygian mist. It is headed by lines relating to the execution of Woodridge, and his burial: “The warders stripped him of his clothes, And gave him to the flies... And there, till Christ call forth the dead, In silence let him lie.”