Monster 2002Scottish Opera
Read more about the opera Monster
A large team of excellent singing actors worked together to give this new opera on a potentially fascinating subject the best possible start. In spite of the rapid action spread through the twenty-five scenes, with plenty of period detail, even down to composed recitatives with fortepiano accompaniments, the work failed to work as a consistent whole. One observation was that the libretto reads very well as a fascinating literary play text on its own, and therefore, perhaps, could be said to obviate the need for music at all. There is so much attractive and dramatic music in the piece that it is unthinkable that it should not be heard again. Like a number of new operas, it would gain from the composer and librettist, with the benefit of experience of performance, being permitted to revise the work before further performances. Sadly, in the current financial climate there seems little prospect of that happening.
Back in the seventies, when Scottish Opera mounted four new operas by notable composers - Iain Hamilton, Robin Orr, Thomas Wilson and Thea Musgrave - they were all given tight parameters within which to work - a discipline which benefitted all four works, and which would surely have paid dividends both with Monster and the immediate previous commission, David Horne's Friend of the People.
Performance Cast
- First Italian Servant
- Second Italian Servant
- Lord Byron poet
- Percy Bysshe Shelley poet and reformer
- John Polidori Lord Byron's physician
- Jane Clairmont step-sister to Mary Godwin
- Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin later Mary Shelley
- Mary Wollstonecraft author, Mary's mother
- William Godwin philosopher & political reformer, Mary's father
- Charles Lamb friend of William Godwin
- Mary Lamb sister to Charles Lamb
- Second Mrs Godwin mother of Jane Clairmont and step-mother to Mary
- Victor Frankpierre a doctor of medical science at Ingolstadt
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge poet and friend of William Godwin