Program notes:

Isola Wilde was just nine years old when she died, while recovering from a fever during a visit to Edgeworthstown Rectory, Ireland. Her death affected Wilde greatly, and as notebooks from this time demonstrate he even felt partly responsible for it.

'Requiescat', after the latin phrase "Requiescat in Pacem" ("may he/she rest in peace") became Wilde's literary response to his sister's sudden passing; a heartfelt, personal and deeply poetic meditation on the nearness of death.

A setting of this text is something I have been
wanting to attempt for a long time; Wilde is an author who occupies a special place in my heart shared only by a few others, and this text is some of his most heartfelt and intimate. It shows another side of him than the one we're perhaps familiar with; the witty, charming, aphorism-penning man who declared "nothing but my (his) genius" at the American customs is nowhere to be seen.

Oskar Österling, 2022