[1] While Voss, another collaboration between Malouf and Meale, is often considered the best Australian opera, some critics, including Andrew Ford, believe Mer de Glace may be superior.
[1][2][3] Mer de Glace is a postmodernist opera of the order of John Adams's Nixon in China.
[3] Malouf enriches this by taking Mary Shelley, the novelist, her lover and friends into the narrative of the opera.
She has a nightmare in which they assume the character of protagonists: scientist, monster, abandoned child, exploited lover, friendly observer.
Meale's music refers to operas of Wagner (Tristan und Isolde) and Debussy (Pelléas et Mélisande) as commentary on the action; the conventional moral views of the 19th century public are shown in musical parodies of the era's choral writing.
[1] The headings shown here come from Michael Hannan's The Music of Richard Meale.
Claire loved Percy and bore his child, but Mary was the guardian of his legacy.
Then Claire finds herself on the slowly moving glacier on Mont Blanc, the Mer de Glace.
Claire feels the glacier is "some sleek animal" with frozen blood in its veins.
The women call to Shelley, but he is preoccupied with his own supremacy to the ice, "I never dreamed ... far above, snowy and serene".
A guide appears, reducing the mountain first to a mere tourist object; then to a figure of the benign God.
Shelley predicts the "little drama" of Claire being re-united with Byron, great poet and outcast among men.
Shelley is glad to meet "Childe Harold", but Byron points to his damaged and down-at-heel appearance.
Byron claims he is the weary one, a monster outcast from England who has dared fly in the face of nature's laws.
William (Shelley) returns to their marriage feast from the dead — to marry Lenore.
His question torments Claire, who protests helplessly that Shelley and Mary are "changing the words".
Shelley tries to send her to sleep with a bland poem, but she notices a quiver in the limbs of the glacier.
As the atmosphere darkens Mary's child William, blindfolded, sings "Love in a mist".
The monster hides William's body, but is distracted by the sound of a festive violin.
He hears Mary's lament for her dead son and realizes that in a sense he, the Monster, has killed his own brother.
[10] Mary expects Shelley as Frankenstein, the "new Prometheus", to meet his creation, the Monster, on the Mer de Glace.
Shelley is deeply ashamed of what he has wrought: "Hide me for a thousand centuries from the eyes of men.
The Monster pleads for loving acceptance from his creator, release from wretchedness and misery.
Instead Shelley screams at him that he, the Monster, is a murderer who deserves to be condemned forever to an icy death.
The Monster is in tears for being excluded from the human happiness of "couples dancing two by two on the grass".
Then he turns Shelley's curse against him: Deny me this and I will haunt you down the ages to your last icy breath.
The cast was: David Collins-White in the dual part of Shelley/Frankenstein; Kerry Elizabeth Brown as Mary Shelley; Linda Thompson as Claire Clairemont; Lyndon Terracini as Lord Byron/The Monster; and Dominic Natoli as Polidori/the Tourist Guide.
[15] A complete recording of the 1991 performance broadcast live on ABC Classic is available on YouTube at 480p quality and lacks video, subtitles or libretto.
In transcription the voice parts are taken by an oboe, trumpet, cor anglais or saxophone.
On the 2009 ABC recording Richard Meale: Cantilena Pacifica is a performance of "Concert monologue from Mer de glace" by soprano Merlyn Quaife and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Mills.