“Uncouth and inarticulate sounds”. Musicoliterary traces in Frankenstein and Frankenstein in art music

This essay examines Mary Shelley’s awareness of the intersection of music and the literary imagination and suggests the need for a careful study of the musico-literary resources and strategies she employed throughout her creative production and which have not received the same attention granted to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s. If possible, Frankenstein’s art-music compositional reception—i.e. the creation of art-music compositions of any genre that set it to music either in part or in full—by coeval and later composers is even more obscure and understudied than its musico-textual constituents. The reason for this neglect may lie in the exacting nature of musico-literary analysis, which requires an approach that is both analytical and hermeneutic, drawing simultaneously from the literary and musicological fields. By applying this transdisciplinary perspective, the final part of this essay will offer a tentative typological map of Frankenstein’s afterlives in art music and investigate some notable modern musico-literary approaches and compositional responses to the novel’s “uncouth and inarticulate sounds.”