Mudgett: Monologues by a Mass Murderer, J.K. Randall, 1965
with Melinda Kessler, soprano
The two completed movements of Mudgett (1965), were commissioned by the Fromm Foundation for performance at Tanglewood in August, 1965. Its text, a collage of assorted literary documents, unconnected with the events which they have been compounded to narrate, sets forth episodes in the career of Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes, who was hanged in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896. The “Electronic Prelude” was intended to suggest the overall “style” of this projected four or five movement work, within which the aggressively simplistic “ballad” style of the completed vocal movement [“Toronto”, dealing with the murder of two children] would serve as the reductio ad absurdum of the textual and musical characteristics of the whole. Whether or not this “whole” will ever exist is another question.
