- Moonlight on a Midnight Stream: A Romantic Entertainment (1994) vocal quartet and piano 30'
- Texts: Byron, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, E. J. Trelawny
- Commissioned by The Schubert Club and Vern & Phyllis Sutton.
- Premiere—1995, by Jean Del Santo, soprano; Glenda Maurice, mezzo-soprano; Clifton Ware, tenor; Lawrence Weller, baritone; Margo Garrett, piano, Mpls., MN.
- Invocation
- Waltz brillante
- Albé's Song
- A Ghost Story
- The Castle of Chillon
- Sailing to the Madhouse
- Duet
- Mutability
- Shelley's Immolation
- Valediction
Program Note
Moonlight on a Midnight Stream is not exactly a song cycle, nor is it a chamber opera, so I have called it an entertainment. The characters: poets Byron and Shelley, Shelley's not-yet-second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and her half-sister, who came to call herself Claire Clairmont. (Claire is a fascinating figure, a women who pursued Byron-who detested her-and gave birth to his child, living into old age and finding a central place as the former lover of a famous poet in Henry James's Aspern Papers.) The legends which surround them are more fabulous than lives could be—flight to Switzerland to escape Mary's father Godwin; their summer in 1815 on Lake Geneva, with excursions to castles and mountain valleys in the area; entertaining ghost stories which led to Mary's Frankenstein; years later, Shelley's death in a squall off the coast of Italy, followed by the burning of his body on the beach, vividly reimagined years later by Edward Trelawny. Other details enter into the score of Moonlight which have some basis in fact. Byron did indeed amuse his companions with songs from his travels in Albania. The waltz, which had invaded Vienna as early as 1754, had become a craze by the turn of the century. And there is an intriguing account of the pianist Steibelt in Prague who "had with him an Englishwoman whom he introduced as wife and who played the tambourine, accompanying him with it," Steibelt's friend so "electrified the gentlefolk" that "the wish likewise to manipulate this instrument stirred in all the ladies." All of this makes for good entertainment and bad history.
I have placed the introspective Shelley at the center of the work, as a sort of tragic hero, and his words are often sung by the other characters. The texts are culled from a variety of sources: three different poems, a letter to Thomas Peacock about the poets' visit to the castle of Chillon, Frankenstein, Chapter V, Mary Shelley's journal, and Trelawny's Last Days of Shelley and Byron. And my own research, crossing one of Montana's many Rock Creeks at midnight, in the company of friends, to catch the gushing, black water-and the moonlight struggling to be reflected off its oily surface.
Text
I. Invocation
QUARTET
Spirit of Beauty, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim, vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
CLAIRE
I will follow my love wherever it leads,
I am a lover of poets, a singer of songs, an actress!
My new name will be Claire Clairmont.
QUARTET
Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven.
MARY
To these lakes and crags have I fled
with the father of my child.
I'll soon be Mary Shelley.
QUARTET
Thy light alone, like music through the night wind sent.
SHELLEY
I—Shelley—love all waste
and solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.
QUARTET
Thy light alone—like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night wind sent.
Through strings of some still instrument.
BYRON
Behold Byron: Lord of the age!
QUARTET
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. (Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty)
II. Waltz Brillante
III. Albé's song
An Albanian folk song in which the singer compares his love to a red apple.
IV. A Ghost Story
MARY
I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark into the lifeless thing at my feet. It was already one in the morning: rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my lamp was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull, yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard. How to describe my emotions.? How delineate the wretch? Yellow skin scarcely covering muscles, arteries; hair a lustrous black, and flowing; teeth all pearly whiteness. I had chosen these features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter V)
V. The Castle of Chillon
SHELLEY, BYRON
We passed on to the castle of Chillon.
SHELLEY
Close to its very walls, the lake is eight hundred feet deep; iron rings are fastened.
and on them were engraven the names of prisoners.
BYRON
That iron is a cankering thing
For in these limbs its teeth remain
With marks that will not wear away.
BOTH
A double dungeon wall and wave
Have made—and like a living grave.
SHELLEY
Close to this long and lofty dungeon was a narrow cell, and a beam, black and rotten, on which prisoners were hung in secret. The gendarme told of an opening to the lake, of a secret spring which might fill the whole dungeon with water.
BYRON
Below the surface of the lake
The dark vault lies wherein we lay.
BOTH
A double dungeon.
We heard it ripple night and day.
Sounding o'er our heads it knocked;
And I have felt the winter's spray
Wash through the bars when winds were high.
A double dungeon.
VI. Sailing to the Madhouse
QUARTET
We sailed.
Through the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea
We sailed to the island where the madhouse stands.
We disembarked.
CLAIRE
The clap of tortured hands,
Moans, shrieks, curses and blaspheming prayers
Accosted us.
QUARTET
We climbed the oozy stairs
Into an old courtyard
CLAIRE
I heard on high
Then, fragments of most touching melody,
But looking up saw not the singer there.
BYRON
Through the black bars in the tempestuous air
I saw, like weeds on a wrecked palace growing,
Long tangled locks flung wildly forth and flowing,
Of those who on a sudden were beguiled
Into strange silence.
QUARTET
We sailed.
SHELLEY
Most wretched men are cradled into poetry by wrong.
They learn in suffering what they teach in song. (Shelley, Julian and Maddalo)
VII. After an Evening of Music
CLAIRE/MARY
During a long evening of dancing,.music,.how often one's sensations change! And swift as the west wind drives the shadows of clouds across the sunny hill or the waving corn, so swift do sentiments pass. Life seems to weigh itself. I look to Heaven and would demand of the everlasting stars that the thoughts and passions which are my life may be as everliving as they. I would demand from the blue empyrean that my mind might be as clear as it, that the tears which gather in my eyes might be the shower that would drain from its profoundest depths the spring of weakness and sorrow. But where are the stars? Where are the blue empyreans? A ceiling clouds all that, and a thousand swift consuming lights deride the eternal ones.
During a long evening of dancing, music, how often do one's sensations change. (Mary Shelley's Journal)
VIII. Mutability
SHELLEY
The flower that smiles today
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies;
What is this world's delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.—
Virtue, how frail it is!—
Friendship, how rare!—
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!.
Whilst skies are blue and bright,
Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day:
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep. (Shelley)
IX. Shelley's Immolation
BYRON
More wine was poured on Shelley's drowned body than he had consumed in all his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull fell off, and the brains seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time. Is this a human body? Why it's more like the carcass of a sheep than like a man, a satire on our pride and folly. Don't repeat this with me. Let my carcass rot where it falls." (Trelawny, Last Days of Shelley and Byron)
X. Valediction
QUARTET
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside a helm conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, for ever,
Upon that many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound.
(Shelley, "Asia's Song," from Prometheus Unbound)