The next free concert from the Santa Barbara Music Club takes place at 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 27, in the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Central Library.
This year the library is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s cautionary tale, Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus, and is collaborating with the Music Club in this concert to provide a kind of musical context of the novel.
Accordingly, we will hear Felix Mendelssohn’s “Violin-Piano Sonata in F-Major” (1820), written when the composer was 11 years old, performed by violinist Nicole McKenzie, and pianist Betty Oberacker; and Franz Schubert‘s “Grande Sonate in Bb-Major for Pano, Four Hands, D. 617” (1818).
Oberacker will be joined by pianist Eric Valinsky. for the Schubert.
It’s a daunting task to speak briefly about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, but, in the interest of psychic economy, I’ll give it a go.
Mary was born in 1797, the daughter of the author and political reformer, William Godwin, and of the author and feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary’s mother died less than a month after giving birth to her, and she was raised by her father.
When Mary was 4 years old, her father married a neighbor. As is often the case, Mary did not get on with her stepmother, but she formed a strong bond with her stepsister Claire Clairmont.
In 1814, when Mary fell in love with one of her father’s political acolytes, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and ran away to the Continent with him (Shelley was already married), Claire went with them.
They had a hard time of it; and their first-conceived child, a daughter, was born prematurely and died. They didn’t marry until late 1816, after Percy’s first wife Harriet committed suicide.
In the summer of 1816, Mary and Percy rented a house on Lake Geneva in Switzerland with Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and a young physician named John William Polidori. It was a momentous residence for all concerned.
Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon and Prometheus, and began to write Manfred, which was to dominate the imagination of romantic artists for the next 50 years. Byron also conceived a daughter, Allegra, with Claire. Shelley wrote Mont Blanc.
Mary, of course, began to compose Frankenstein, and Polidori got the idea for a story, ultimately published in 1819, as The Vampyre, which was, in fact, the first modern retelling of the vampire myth.
“In the Western classical tradition,” says Wikipedia, “Prometheus became a figure who represented human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences.
“In particular, he was regarded in the Romantic era as embodying the lone genius whose efforts to improve human existence could also result in tragedy.”
Zeus punished Prometheus, we recall, by chaining him to a rock in Scythia and tasking an eagle to tear out his liver every day, which grew back every night.
Prometheus was a titan, often credited with creating man out of clay, and always credited with stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity.
In giving humans the ability to work things out for themselves, he plays a role similar to that of the Serpent in Genesis, who persuaded Eve to acquire knowledge of good and evil by eating the fruit.
However, the specific theme of humanity “overreaching” — that is, striving to free themselves from God and the weight of the past — is more fully developed in the story of the Tower of Babel.
John Milton‘s poem, Paradise Lost, which Frankenstein’s creature reads and identifies with, is a kind of retelling of the Promethean myth in Judeo-Christian terms.
By the time she wrote Frankenstein, Mary Shelley had obviously turned away from the fierce romantic individualism of Byron, and while she remained a reformed to the end of her days, she believed the most effective reforms were based in family life and administered by women.
“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril,” wrote Oscar Wilde.
I take this as a warning against, among other dangers, looking too closely into the biography of the artist(s) whose art pleases you.
From 200 years on, that summer by the lake is bound to seem pretty damned glamorous, but great art does not arise from a situation of peace and harmony.
The Lake Geneva Club members were more like W.H. Auden described his contemporaries in September 1, 1939:
“Lost in a haunted wood/ Children afraid of the dark/ Who have never been happy or good.”
Byron was 36 when he died, Shelley was 30, Polidori was 26. Mary died at 53, but Claire outlived them all, dying when she was 80. There is a moral here, somewhere, but I am not sure I want to know what it is.
The opportunity of hearing Betty Oberacker play Mendelssohn (with Nicole McKenzie) and Schubert (with Eric Valinsky) would be irresistible, even if it weren’t for free.
Like Lou Reed said: “It’s a lover’s trust — no money down.”
For additional information about this or other Santa Barbara Music Club programs and performing artists, visit www.sbmusicclub.org.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.