Night and Dreams

The death of Sigmund Freud

Librettist's Program Notes
by Margaret Morgan

When, four years ago, Andrew Ford invited me to write to the libretto for a solo music theatre work for Gerald English, he asked me to think about possible subject matter. The name, "Sigmund Freud" leapt unrehearsed from my lips and I am still not sure why. Andy agreed immediately, saying, "Apart from anything else, Gerald looks like Freud." It wasn't until Gerald had some publicity shots taken, with beard, glasses and a Freudian cigar, that I realised just how uncannily true that was. The logic of the choice of subject soon made itself clear to me: two men profoundly important to their fields, in the centre of the maelstrom of, respectively, social and musical change. Now as Gerald approaches the end of his career, it was appropriate to place Freud at the end of his. The work, then, would aim to sum up Freud's life.

Having made this decision, I encountered the difficulty not of what to write, but what not to write, for not only did Freud write copiously about his theories and his life, the forest of books devoted to the discussion of psychoanalysis and of the man himself-including the invaluable works of Peter Gay-is remarkable. How to choose? The answer came in my resolution to write from Freud's own imagined perspective, as he neared death. I would focus on those events and people in his life that I felt would most preoccupy him towards the end and cause him regret or a need for resolution. This subjective approach to his experience also had the advantage letting me bypass-at least consciously!- more recent criticism of Freud from the standpoints of feminism, scientific method or modern psychological theory, which would otherwise crowd any exploration of Freud and Freudianism.

Of course, no work about Freud could ignore the realm of dreams, and this gave the key to the piece's structure. Freud dreams, recounts his dreams to the audience-his "psychoanalyst"-and then, following his own ideas on "the talking cure", seeks to analyse what the dreams mean. Of course, the dreams are entirely invented, and since the process started with the analysis of the dream, then moved backwards to the imagery of the dream itself, it is in effect reverse psychoanalysis-and perhaps reveals more than I'd care to admit about the murky depths of my own unconscious!

The "unreliable narrator" is a favourite of any writer, and Freud, who discovered denial, is not immune to its effects in Night and Dreams. For all his failings and self-delusions, though, I found myself fond of the old man and affected by his death, just as I had fallen in love-and lust-with Giacomo Casanova in my last collaboration with Andrew Ford.

Night and Dreams is set at the beginning of WWII in London, where Freud has moved in self-imposed exile. Distanced by miles and by failing health from the Nazi horror in his Austrian homeland, his is the private death of a public man.

January 2000
Sydney

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