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Whole Score:
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Monster, an
opera with music by Sally
Beamish and words by Janice Galloway, was premiered by Scottish Opera on 28th February, 2002. The original cast included Gail Pearson (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin), Stephen Rooke (Percy Shelley), Gwion Thomas (William Godwin), Claire Shearer (Mary Wollstonecraft), Arlene Rolph (Claire Claremont), Roderick Williams (Lord Byron), Jonathan May (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and Stephen Allen (Victor Frankpierre). This page has Janice's programme note from the original performance.
Introduction:
Act 1: Scii:
Whispers:
I am going into unexplored regions to the land of mists and snow.
(Curtain rises on dustsheets, halflight. Shuttered windows beyond
with gauze curtains. Slowly, the light begins to lift.)
Whispers:
Look, Mary! The sun!
It is the question most asked of any author: where do your ideas come from? No amount of opining that ideas are common as sneezes and often as mysteriously generated, that knowing their genesis is as precise a science as measuring the length of an electric current placate the question. Insist it's not the idea, but craft, ear, persistence and capacity to connect that is the substance of an author, and you will meet polite smiles. Yes, it's agreed. Quite. But where do your ideas come from?
The wish that there should be such a thing as a definable "moment of conception" is a persistent human desire, and Mary Shelley, the all-too human author of Frankenstein, knew it. She was asked so frequently about the origins of her most famous novel that she wrote, in what became the standard preface to the book, a startlingly candid analysis of " how I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea". She details her reading, a handful of events and people, her travels. One driving undercurrent of the novel, hinted in her choice of verb in the quotation above, remains hidden. This opera, MONSTER, attempts to interlace all these possibilities as an act of remembering. It comes through Mary's eyes.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in 1787. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after Mary's birth, leaving her father, William Godwin, to rear Mary and half-sister Fanny Imlay for four years until Godwin's remarriage to a "widow" with two children: Jane (who later changed her name to Claire) and Charles. Godwin's friends compared the second Mrs Godwin unfavourably to the great Wollstonecraft, and her resentment sometimes surfaced as helpless spite. Godwin's favouring of Mary, his own daughter by Wollstonecraft, did not help: for all his refusal to "spoil" his "godesses" with even a passing embrace, the whole household was aware that Mary was the repository of his highest hopes and expectations.
Godwin, author of Political Justice (one of the most celebrated philosophical authors of his time), styled himself the soul of reason yet was the possessor of a stiff temper and such lack of financial common sense that he was twice on the verge of being sent to debtor's prison. Wollstonecraft, a great beauty, was notorious on account of her extended essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She as also a fearless traveller, rumoured to have been a spy for the English government, and had famously attempted suicide following her abandonment by her first lover, Imlay. From the first, Mary, the fusion of these elemental forces, who, even as a child swore she had "never been carefree", had her work cut out. That she coped with the challenge was thanks, in part, to her eclectic reading and Godwin's stimulating social circle. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Southey read their own works aloud in the house and discussed contemporary politics with the child. And in an age where school remained an exclusively male preserve, she read Homer and Aeschelus, Virgil, Aesop, Milton, Shakespeare and Dante from her father's magnificent library shelves.
Her home environment, however, was stuffy enough for Coleridge to abhor its "sepulchral silence", and when Scottish benefactors made the suggestion Mary stay with them in Dundee, she seized the opportunity. In the Scottish hillsides, she found her first stirrings of active literary ambition: restored to London, she saw her family in a different, more repressive, light. By co-incidence, at precisely this time, Mary met 20 year old red-haired, radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. By their third meeting, the two were mutually infatuated and "declared love" (open to a number of interpretations: given Shelley's energies, all are likely) on Mary's mother's tombstone. Shelley's wife, pregnant with his second child, seemed no impediment and the lovers fled the country leaving Godwin to fume. Jane travelled with them; sometimes a helpmate, more often, however, a thorn in Mary's flesh. The return to London drove Shelley into hiding from his creditors and Mary, seventeen, penniless and pregnant, stayed home with the hysterical Jane, fruitlessly begging an audience with her father. Mary's first baby arrived prematurely on 22 Feb 1815 and lived only six weeks. Less than a year later, Shelley prepared to leave the country with Mary for Geneva. Jane, pregnant to Lord Byron, came too in the hope of again meeting the great poet, who had been all but exiled following an incestuous affair with his sister. It was in Byron's hired mansion, at Diodatti, that Mary, Shelley, Jane, Byron and Dr Polidori (Byron's personal physician and a man with literary ambitions of his own) talked late into the nights on poetry, politics and current scientific thought. On the evening of 16th June, 1816, Byron announced, "We will each write a ghost story". Not long after, Mary imagined "the hideous phantasm" in what she called a "waking dream" of a motherless creature, made in defiance of all Natural Law from "charnel house scraps", abandoned by its maker to the icy wastes. She began writing the next morning.
On first publication of Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, Shelley was suspected as the "real" author, a fiction not quickly dispelled. That a young woman had written this shocking tale was not easy for many to digest; indeed, attempts to explain the book away as unpleasant evidence of neurosis or to dismiss Mary as "a mere conduit for the ideas of the Great Men who surrounded her" persisted until at least the 1960s. Mary Shelley herself, however, kept writing irrespective of discouragement or prurience about her fame-scarred life; it may be said that writing sustained her through her tragedies - and tragedy was in no short supply. Almost immediately following the return from Diodatti and in quick succession, Harriet Westbrook, Shelley's wife, drowned herself in the Serpentine. Fanny Imlay took an overdose of laudanum. Of the four children Mary subsequently bore, only one survived and Shelley himself, a mere eight years after Mary's first meeting with him, drowned off the coast of Spezia, sailing in a storm against all advice. When Byron died, Mary's memories of the charmed time at Diodatti were nothing but ruins. At this, her lowest ebb, Mary wrote yet another work of genius, The Last Man, a powerful work of a nightmare future, where entire populations fall to plague.
The Last Man and its bleakly futuristic imagery has also had a powerful effect upon the contemporary psyche: few, nowadays, know its source. Fewer still hunt down Valperga, Lodore, Falkner, or Perkin Warbeck, Mary's other novels, and fewer again her travel books. Frankenstein, the book she wrote when she was eighteen, holds a unique place not only in her oevre, but in the whole canon of Western Literature.
Almost everyone knows the tale of the doctor of medical science whose experiments went too far and horribly wrong; everyone, too, has a mental picture of the nameless Monster, rejected by its maker into loneliness and violent revenge. Frankenstein is certainly these things, but far more. It is stuffed with archetypes, moral problems and psychological tripwires. As its subtitle, The Modern Prometheus makes clear, it is also a book about the relationship between God and humankind. It is a book about endless wastes of ice and the frozen wasteland that is human loneliness. It is a book about educational systems and the power of the written word; a book about creation and decay; about motherlessness and paternal rejection; about nature and science; language and love; and about the terrifying, largely unremarked, fears that surround the traumas of pregnancy and birth.
These ideas, and Mary Shelley's own introduction to Frankenstein, were the raw materials for the libretto. It works as a double-shell of memory, echoing the tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale structure of the novel, radiating outward from the evening of Mary's "waking dream".
To write about such famous, near-legendary, writers as occur in this tale placed very particular demands. Writers' lives, after all, are not their work, and mere storying of events would not do. Reading is as much if not more the shaper of writerly thinking than the twists of fate they endured, so a great deal of direct literary sourcing seemed essential. Those same literary quotations, however, would need to be integrated into the general flow of the text and some quotations, especially those from prose or letters, would require alteration to render them singable. The words of Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Claire, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Jane Claremont and Aeschelus as well as the words of Mary herself all appear in the text (scraps of other people seemed a useful pun on the creature itself). The hatchet job conducted upon Coleridge provided my biggest nightmares, and is one I hope an audience and he can forgive. The cri de coeur of the creature -"Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come?" - recurs. And though the words of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein raddle the libretto, the book itself is never written in the opera's time-scale. Near the end, the voice of the long-dead author speaks directly to the audience as the lightening cracks overhead. A collusion in this "waking dream", that the watcher brings his or her own vision of the mythic monster to complete the whole, is demanded. It is not, I think, too awkward a demand to fulfill.