The Picture of Dorian Gray (opera) a wrinkled old man, covered in blood, with a knife in his heart. The Picture of Dorian Gray (opera) The Picture of Dorian Gray, op. 45, is an American opera in two acts and 12 scenes, with libretto and music by Lowell Liebermann, based on the novel of the same name by Oscar Wilde. The opera had its world premiere at the Monte Carlo Opera on 8 May 1996, in a production by John Cox, conducted by Steuart Bedford. Bedford also conducted the American premiere, on 5 February 1999 by Florentine Opera, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Center City Opera Theater in
The Picture of Dorian Gray by attending a high-society party only twenty-four hours after committing a murder. Moral duplicity and self-indulgence are evident in Dorian's patronage of London's opium dens. Wilde conflates the images of the upper-class man and lower-class man in Dorian Gray, a gentleman slumming for strong entertainment in the poor parts of London town. Lord Henry philosophically had earlier said to him that: "Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. ... I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations"—implying that Dorian is two men, a refined aesthete and a coarse