Sonnet 43

Album: All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • Three of the songs on All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu are adaptations of Shakespeare's sonnets. Wainwright composed music for each of the trio, along with several others, after playwright/director Robert Wilson asked him to help on his 2009 production Sonette, which premiered in Berlin in April 2009. "I knew a little bit about the sonnets, but I'd never immersed myself in them before, and I really did for this project," Wainwright explained to Billboard magazine. "Once you dip into that stream you're pretty much rushed down the river by the beauty of it all. There is an innate musicality within the vowels and the consonants and the spaces and so forth. My life changed after the sonnet, so I thought it was necessary to present that new addition to my lexicon."
  • The first part of the album title, "All Days Are Nights", comes from the final couplet "Sonnet 43" ("All days are nights to see till I see thee...").
  • This is one of 154 sonnets that Shakespeare wrote, which were circulated amongst colleagues of his patron the Earl of Southampton. 1-126 were addressed to a "fair youth," 127-154 to a "dark lady."

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