Frankenstein

1° A modern Prometheus

The idea of creating an opera to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus came up in a conversation between that Spanish director and co-founder of the artistic collective La Fura dels Baus, Àlex Ollé, and the director of La Monnaie / De Munt, Peter de Caluwe. This very first science-fiction novel was published in 1818, two years after Shelley hit upon the idea for it while staying with Lord Byron near Lake Geneva. Interpellated by the technological and scientific developments of her time and their unforeseeable consequences for man and society, she wrote her own ‘what if’ scenario. And, as in all good science fiction, that scenario goes beyond futuristic speculative fiction. Frankenstein touches on essential philosophical and ethical questions which, transposed to the present day, apply equally to creative experiments in biotechnology, genetics, information science and medicine.

2° Bolts and stitches

The successful 1931 Hollywood adaptation of Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff borrowed the sets and costumes from the Dracula filming of the same year, thus searing into the collective memory forever the image of a lethargic monster brought to life by a mad scientist in a Gothic castle. Since Karloff's portrayal, the creature almost always appears in popular culture as a towering, undead-like figure, often with a flat-topped angular head connected to his body by stitches and with bolts on his neck to serve as electrodes. But in their twenty-first century opera, Mark Grey and Àlex Ollé are returning to the source, which they see as highly topical. At a time of atom bombs, genetic engineering, artificial bio-selection and social media, the gap between our ability to invent and our inability to understand could be even greater than in Shelley’s time. The need is greater than ever to experience a moral and emotional awareness in parallel with what we have just created.

3° In cold storage

Grey and Ollé asked librettist Júlia Canosa i Serra to turn the novel into a stage play and to update Shelley’s poetic English. The opera Frankenstein is set in an unspecified future. Several scientists discover a creature frozen into the ice fields of the North Pole. One of them, Dr Walton, takes the lead in bringing him back to life in a bold experiment. Gradually the ‘Creature’ returns to consciousness. Snatches from a murky past surface and, with the help of high-tech equipment, the scientists also succeed in visualising those mental images. The crucial scenes from what took place so many years ago (in Mary Shelley’s novel) manifest themselves in flashbacks. At the centre is the relationship triangle between Victor, Elizabeth and the Creature, which becomes strained through Victor’s commitment to his wife - a romance that will always be denied his creation.

4° Back in Brussels

For the American composer and sound designer Mark Grey, the world premiere of his first full-­length opera at La Monnaie / De Munt is something of a homecoming. Back in 1991 he worked in Brussels as the right-­hand man of fellow countryman John Adams on the creation of the latter’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer. Grey’s musical writing is based on a very inventive ‘recomposition’ of diverse musical material: old or romantic music, industrial noise, electro-acoustic sounds, and the harmonic language of John Adams and Aaron Copland. When combined together, these different elements produce powerfully emotional music in which moments of intense energy are interspersed with calm meditation.

5° American beauty

Though as yet less well­‐known in Europe, on the other side of the Atlantic, Mark Grey can pride himself on an impressive track record, initially as sound designer for artists like Adams, Steve Reich and Philip Glass but, since his debut with the Kronos Quartet at Carnegie Hall, also as a composer. In 2007-08 he was composer-in-residence with the Phoenix Symphony, where he composed his first large-scale work, Enemy Slayer; A Navajo Oratorio for baritone, 130 singers and orchestra. The soloist at the premiere was Scott Hendricks, who has since developed a strong bond with Grey. Having recently performed at La Monnaie / De Munt as Barnaba in La Gioconda, Tonio in Pagliacci and in the title role of Macbeth, the American baritone now returns to the Brussels theatre to create the role of Victor Frankenstein in this new opera.