Foreword
edusa was one of the three
Gorgon sisters, the only mortal one, whose looks turned people to stone. She
was seduced by Neptune the sea god, in the temple of Minerva, goddess of war.
Later, Perseus decapitated her, and put her head on the shield of Minerva,
which he had borrowed. Blood from the head, now covered with snakes, dripped to
produce the snakes of Africa. It retained its power to turn the onlooker
to stone.
Medusa was the name of the
French ship, whose wreck was celebrated in the famous, scandalous picture by
Géricault, as the raft, bearing crew members and passengers, was left by the
officers to drift for thirteen days while they fled in the ship’s boats.
Note
The reference
to Werner Egk was to his best known opera, The Betrothal in Santo Domingo,
a plea for racial tolerance (with unintended resonance to the Haitian
earthquake which happened after but not because of writing Medusa), and
to Hans Werner Henze who wrote a piece, The Raft of the Medusa, in terms
of class struggle.