15 April 2013: The Ensemble for the Romantic Century’s third seminar held in conjunction with its 2012-13 season, MONSTERS!

Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 novel began as a late-night parlor game with her husband the poet Percy Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, the poet Lord Byron, and Byron’s doctor John Polidori, centering on who could write the best horror tale. Since then, Shelley’s novel has been adapted to stage and film and has generated innumerable interpretations. The story of the scientist Victor Frankenstein and his ill-conceived effort to create a human-like monster has been read as a parable of science gone awry, a critique of Romanticism, a contribution to the tradition of “female gothic,” an autobiographical narrative of tormented creation (Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary), a Miltonic tale of “God-like” man, and as an allegory of overreaching industrial ambition. Mary Shelley’s mythic text will be discussed through its many interpretations, from its first theatrical adaptation in 1826 to Boris Karloff’s appearance as the monster in two “Frankenstein” films directed by James Whale (whose image of the monster may have derived from his experience in the First World War) to Jonny Lee Miller’s 2011 appearance at the National Theatre in London. Dreams and nightmares provided Romantic composers with an inexhaustible source of inspiration, as they employed an increasingly sophisticated musical language to depict the infinite shades of the human mind. Dreamlike and nightmarish scenarios, represented in works by Romantic composers from Schubert to Strauss, and later in the expressionist music of the Second Viennese School, will be examined in connection with similar literary techniques.

Monday, 15 April 2013, 5:30-7:30, at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Skylight Room, 9th floor. FREE ADMISSION