Work Is the Curse of the Drinking Classes 4-Part - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1832816

Juan María Solare

Work Is the Curse of the Drinking Classes

for mixed choir a cappella (SATB) - 2:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNGTuksugTg

Oscar Wilde’s aphorism.“Work is the curse of the drinking classes”, may sound today, when read superficially, like a politically incorrect provocation. However, its original meaning is not an apology for drunkenness, but an ironic critique of Victorian puritan morality, which glorified work as an absolute value, associated drinking with the working (“lower”) classes, and turned pleasure into a sign of degeneration, while ignoring social inequalities and the hypocrisy of the upper classes. Wilde inverts the cliché (“Drink is the curse of the working classes”) in order to expose its contradictions: he does not celebrate alcoholism (at least not here), but rather unmasks the rigidity of an ethical system that reduces human life to discipline, sacrifice, and utility.

This aphorism retains an uncomfortably contemporary relevance because it challenges an idea that is still dominant: that a person’s worth is measured by productivity. In an era marked by self-exploitation, exhaustion, and an obsession with performance, Wilde’s phrase can be read as a warning against an ethic that turns ceaseless work into a measure of identity. When productivity becomes a moral criterion, everything that does not yield quantifiable results is seen as suspicious, useless, or blameworthy. Contemplation, art, even rest, come to be treated as system failures rather than human necessities.

My work does not celebrate drunkenness nor glorify alcoholic escapism, nor does it justify idleness; rather, it reclaims irony as a critical tool against any morality that presents itself as unquestionable.

More than setting an anachronistic provocation to music, the aesthetic intention is to function as a mirror. And mirrors are not politically correct: they are precise.

Juan María Solare
Worpswede, Germany, 15 February 2026.