​Programme note

A Strange Power is a c​antata about the ​tangled web of romance, free love, creation, and death in the early lives of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley and her step​-sister, Claire Clairmont. 

 

The two are sixteen-years-old and best friends when they run away from their London home with the married poet Percy Shelley. They travel across war-torn Europe and eventually rent a villa near Lord Byron on Lake Geneva​. Mary ​has already lost a child and is the mother of a young baby when she writes a gothic story that becomes Frankenstein. Claire is pregnant with a child she has conceived with Byron, who displays utter contempt for the young woman. The choices made by Percy Shelley and Byron wreak havoc on the lives of Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. The young women are pulled together and eventually torn apart by sex, love, childbirth, and death.

 

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The workshop premiere took place on November 19, 2024 at Princeton University with soprano Charlotte Mundy, Sputter Box (Alina Tamborini, soprano, Kathryn Vetter, clarinets, Peter White, percussion), cellist Aaron Wolff, and pianist Isabelle O'Connell.

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