Edgar Allan Poe's nightmare of dread, The Fall of the House of Usher, has continually inspired visual artists and musicians alike. No less than five film versions exist, the earliest being the 1928 La Chute de la Maison Usher, on which the great Spanish surrealist, Luis Bunuel, cut his teeth as an assistant director. The late French cinema historian Henri Langlois called it "the cinematic equivalent of Debussy."
Not coincidentally, it was Debussy who began an opera on the Poe work, the second such work he considered worthy of operatic adaptation (the other being Maurice Maeterlinck's equally melancholy Pelleas et Melisande). The unfinished work, a little over thirty minutes of music, is an eerie extravaganza of sound--music with plenty of weeping and gnashing of teeth in it. The fragmentary Debussy work is arguably the scariest music ever written, with Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead giving it stiff competition.
It is easy to see why musicians can be attracted to The Fall of the House of Usher, a compressed work of great intensity in which sound plays a predominant part: wailing, screaming, flapping window shuters, the howling wind, and so on.
So it is no surprise that the current king of crossover classical music, Philip Glass, was moved to attempt what Debussy regrettably never finished. As his visual collaborator Glass chose iconoclastic New York theater director/playwright/designer Richard foreman (Rhoda in Potatoland, Film Is Evil: Radio is Good). The two are well-met by dark corridors and dungeons.
The world premiere of the Glass/Foreman The Fall of the House of Usher ran all through the summer at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard. It was the kind of production about which one could hardly remain neutral. Extremely interesting for Glass' growth as a manipulator of orchestral forces and filled with all manner of trickery from Foreman, some of it was theatrical hocus-pocus, but most of it was sensationally effective.
For both director and composer, Poe's tale seems tailor-made. The narrator, William (sung by baritone David Trombley), arrives at the House of Usher at the request of a desperate letter from his childhood friend, Roderick Usher (tenor Dwayne Croft), whom he has not seen for many years. It quickly becomes clear to William that Roderick is deeply distressed, a hypochondriac overwhelmed by anxieties. He and his sister Madeline (soprano Sharon Baker), who suffers from a mysterious disease, Roderick explains, are the last of the Ushers, wasting away spiritually as much as physically. "To an anomalous species of terror, narrates William, "I found him [Roderick] a bounden slave."
Glass' The Fall of the House of Usher opens in silence, as William receives his friend's urgent request to visit. It is the anticipatory silence of fear--of something unwanted about to happen. William goes to a mirror and looks into it. Mirrors will figure prominently in this version of the Poe story, for it becomes clear in both the transparency of Glass' music and in Foreman's design that the action of the story occurs in William's imagination. Whenever William watches Roderick's fatal lassitude and wan, sorrowful aspect, he is seeing his own reflection.
Breaking the silence, Glass' hurried music, like a spider quickly
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