This work’s title comes from DM Thomas’s dramatic poem on an imagined episode in the life of Cleopatra. Cleopatra offers any three men from her royal court a night of unbridled passion, in return for which they must forfeit their lives the next morning. Three men step forward, the last of which is the son she had by her brother Ptolemy, whom she gave away at birth. Unaware that Cleopatra is his mother, he gives her wine laced with mandragora and makes his escape before daybreak.
The grisly tale provided the composer many opportunities for dramatic characterisation. The use of a narrator necessitated an episodic structure in which the music captures the atmosphere suggested by the text, and mirrors the different moods as the journey unfolds and the three characters live out their different fates.