While Usher House and The Canterville Ghost may have been Oscar Wilde retro they turned out to be nearly as charming as their counterparts were the first time around. Both operas had a genuinely American feel to them – the cowboy lilt of a waltz or a simple populist tune – they also shared a common theme: of being haunted by inheritance. Of course they they come to different conclusions. Usher House ends anticlimactically in dust and a last echo of Rheingold; the Ghost in a Norman Rockwell hymn of peace.

In each, Getty's ability to write for singers trumps almost all his shortcomings. It's clear that the singers can't wait for their next big set piece, or their next bit of business, because they know that the audience will love them (if they sing beautifully) even if the vehicle is not yet Mozart. It made for a delicious, slightly overlong afternoon in which everybody on the stage, was magnetic, and the audience responded not only with applause at the end but a surprising volley of cheers.

The better of the two operas was the Usher House, which had its world premiere in 2014 at Welsh National Opera. Its title is a gracious gesture to distinguish it from the Poe story from which it is adapted; it needn't have worried. Getty has his own way with the very curious tale that is alternately intriguing, downright sexy, and just plain dolorous, all in a sort of comic bookish way....

The Canterville Ghost had its moments. It was originally given by Oper Leipzig in 2015 in an incongruous double bill with Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, but some of the narrative was really too long and a series of scene changes as the end neared were longer than the scenes....

Having reached the ripe age of 84, composer-philanthropist Gordon Getty can look back upon a fairly sizable body of work, mostly for the voice, that he has written over the last three decades.

His music gets a mixed bag of reviews which — good, bad and indifferent — are unflinchingly documented on his website. Yet the PentaTone label diligently records much of his output, and his music does get live performances — if more in his home base, the Bay Area, than in Southern California. To round out its 2017-18 season, Los Angeles Opera Off-Grand took a chance on two recent Getty works, a pair of hourlong one-act operas.

Composed of “Usher House” and “The Canterville Ghost” — which are based upon tales by Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde, respectively — the double-header was marketed as the “Scare Pair,” though neither piece would scare a fly... The two operas do make a logical twin-bill — the spooky, enigmatic “Usher” followed by the comic relief of “Canterville” — much like LA Opera's pairing of Bartók's “Bluebeard's Castle” and Puccini's “Gianni Schicchi” back in the Kent Nagano era (2002). Of the two, though, only “Canterville” strikes me as something that might catch on, and the lively cast and staging had a lot to do with that.

In “Usher House,” Getty inserted Poe himself into the opera as the narrator who visits his old “friend” Roderick Usher, the inhabitant of the doomed house. Much of the opera is an overly talky back-and-forth between Poe and Roderick, with a gracefully written instrumental ballet sequence in its center featuring Roderick's writhing, contorting, terminally ill twin sister Madeline and some onscreen ghostly ancestors.

Getty's score is spare, inward-looking, unapologetically tonal, channeling Benjamin Britten in mood and texture if not actual style, and consisting of mostly unmemorable recitative with little connection between the orchestra and the singing line. Poe's murky tale doesn't seem to inspire the best in composers — Debussy couldn't finish his own version and Philip Glass' take on “Usher” consists of mainly routine minor-key underscoring — so Getty is not alone in being unable to come up with a compelling piece of music theater.

Ultimately, Dave Dunning's scenery designs and David Murakami's elaborate projections scored the main points in “Usher's” favor. Through direct projections on Gothic-shaped (of course) arches onstage and others from a giant 20 foot-by-24-foot video monitor in the back of the stage, they provided stunning simulations of the dark, gloomy Usher library and observatory, as well as a ballroom in which hologram-like images of ghosts danced.

“The Canterville Ghost” came off as the more engaging piece, with 20 mostly brief scenes tracing Wilde's storyline about a rich American family circa 1890 that buys an English mansion with its own resident ghost. There is satire about how Americans rely upon consumer products and litigation to solve their problems, and the ghost (Sir Simon de Canterville) can't scare the bejeebers out of any of these Yankees, least of all a pair of twin boys who torment the poor fella.

The scoring is lighter in weight than in “Usher,” still mostly recitative, but now with flashes of humor like the interpolations of “Yankee Doodle” and “Rule Britannia.” And in the final scene, for the first time all night, Getty hits upon a couple of attractive melodic ideas for the audience to take home from the theater. The video screen displayed a riot of bright, vibrant color in the cemetery, as well as in the scenes of croquet in the park — and a library of amplified sound effects during scene changes mostly added to the hilarity....

Altogether, LA Opera Off-Grand's cast made a much better case for Getty's ghost comedy than the PentaTone recording.

This weekend, Santa Monica's Broad Stage held two performances of L.A. Opera's double bill of works by composer Gordon Getty. The two pieces were based on Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (first performed by Welsh National Opera in 2014) and on Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost (first performed by Leipzig Opera in 2015). The show, which featured Getty's adapted librettos, was called Scare Pair, and it successfully achieved a unique fusion of classic spooky stories and opera....

The show began with the Poe adaptation titled Usher House. The libretto made several departures from Poe's classic tale. Principally, these included having Poe as a character in the story (in the place of the unnamed narrator from the original); the addition of a mad scientist/doctor, Dr. Primus; and a romantic history between Poe and Madeline Usher (Jamielyn Duggan).

The performance, which was in English, featured projected subtitles over the stage; these helped one's understanding of the libretto quite a bit due to the complexity of the archaic verbiage throughout Usher House... In Usher House, the principal number was in the form of an old poem that symbolized the bond between Poe and Madeline. The score was alternately whimsically lighthearted and suitably threatening. Such dynamism conveyed the natures of both light opera and stories of gloom and doom.

The inherent challenge of Usher House is that Poe's tale does not have a lot of action. Thus, several sequences were added to the story, including a ball of spectral attendees (the Ushers of generations past) and a visit to the house's astronomy room, wherein Dr. Primus explains the connection between the cosmos, life and death, and the arcane scientific knowledge held by the Usher family. These sequences were successful at conjuring a strong mood, and the sparing use of the Madeline character (who elicited the passion of the Poe character) was successful at generating the sense of mystery. While Usher House succeeded in its ambiance, the dialogue was excessively expository, and this revealed the limits to attempting to adapt Poe's words to opera. Furthermore, although the score was very good in the hands of conductor Sara Jobin, the opera might have benefited from more individual songs to punctuate the piece as a whole.

The second opera, The Canterville Ghost, was a great complement to Usher House. While Usher House was successful at maintaining an unsettling tone throughout, The Canterville Ghost took the theme of haunting to the light side. Wilde's tale features an ages-old ghost named Sir Simon, who meets his match in an obnoxious American family, which seems immune to his attempts at scaring them or causing them harm....

The Canterville Ghost made for an enjoyable short opera (the entire running time of Scare Pair was about 2 hours and 20 minutes). Like Usher House, this piece was punctuated with a single love song... Adaptations of literary works into theatrical productions are always a challenge. In this case, the challenge of adapting Poe to opera yielded an appropriately atmospheric show with some chilling and enthralling moments, but it never quite broke free of its literary roots. Perhaps this was done intentionally so as to show reverence for Poe's writing. In any case, Wilde's comedy provided a more relaxed piece that did not challenge the linguistic capacity of its audience. Collectively, L.A. Opera's Off Grand presentation of Scare Pair...was an entertaining hybrid of spooky stories and opera, providing fans of scary stories with an eloquent theatrical experience and fans of opera with a particularly colorful program.

[Translated from Dutch] The American composer Gordon Getty (1933) adapted Oscar Wilde's novella himself for the libretto of his approximately one-hour long, one-act opera The Canterville Ghost. It is an opera in sixteen short scenes that possibly could catch on during a staging, but merely listening, frankly, it leaves a meager impression. I listened to this recording, which was staged in the Leipzig 2015 opera, with the libretto at hand, while following all the descriptions of decor, characters, and actions but never got in the mood. Some apparitions of the crying or growling ghost, whether covered with chains or not, were, in a purely auditory sense, ridiculous. Getty's score is also not able to bring you into the right ambiance. Only in the last scene does the music flourish in the duet between Virginia and Cheshire and is the Gewandhaus Orchestra able to display its rich sound. 

[Translated from Dutch] The musical idiom is accessible and economic. It is a kind of romanticized parlando drenched in declamation and melodic fragments. There is no large, thematic development or dramatic intensification. Getty pieces Wilde's text together with safe musical effects, but avoids a sense of recognition and the music at no point feels new. Ultimately the opera The Canterville Ghost has the same effect as the ghost of Sir Simon: there is no surprise or uncertainty. 

On October 21, Center for Contemporary Opera served up a spooky double bill by Gordon Getty at the Kaye Playhouse, pairing his ghoulish, disconcerting Usher House, based on Edgar Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher", with his adaptation of Oscar Wilde's lightheartedly supernatural The Canterville Ghost. Getty, also the librettist, made the savvy choice of turning Poe's unnamed narrator into the author himself, “Eddie” to his old friend Roderick Usher. The opera was most compelling when it followed the outlines of the original: the reminiscences of the two men, the strange, symbiotic relationship between Roderick and his deteriorating twin Madeline, and her climactic emergence from the grave to claw Roderick and the house down with her. The addition of an obscure plan by a Dr. Primus Usher, who may be the reincarnation (or even the ghost) of a prior Usher, was more confusing than illuminating.

Getty's recitative-heavy score hews to natural speech patterns and is chock full of dissonances and singular effects. There could have been room for more lyricism, however; strophic settings for Primus's plan and Roderick's explanation of the family curse might have clarified the former and focused the latter....

[In The Canterville Ghost], Getty's consonant, upbeat music suited the proceedings, and the piece ended with a lovely, lilting duet for Virginia and her suitor, Cecil. The opera is composed as a series of short vignettes, and many of them simply stopped, rather than ending with any definition. Without transitional music to connect the scenes, the piece felt choppy....

Gordon Getty's latest venture into opera is a setting of Oscar Wilde's comic novella about the The Canterville Ghost.... This opera surely is a pleasant experience, but hardly memorable. 

“Stage and page have different needs,” writes composer Getty...explaining in the CD's booklet the alterations in his libretto when adapting Oscar Wilde's novella. Wilde's whimsical tale remains essentially intact, however.... Getty's bright, witty score strongly supports the action. This is a very stage-worthy and entertaining addition to the repertoire of one-act, English-language operas.

Gordon Getty, as usual, acts as his own librettist here, and it has to be said that he sticks pretty closely to Wilde's original even when this results in some over-melodramatic language....

Otherwise Getty has made a very good redaction of Wilde's text, condensing it into twenty scenes with some additional material added at the beginning and the end. But some of the scenes are very short indeed, three dispensing with sung text altogether; and each one is separated out into a self-contained unit. That was probably inevitable, especially in realistic scenery as appears to have been the basis for the production at Leipzig opera on which this studio recording was based. But it must have made for a very stop-and-start effect in the theatre. I see that there are proposals to give the opera in Los Angeles and New York as a double-bill with Getty's earlier Usher House (of which I reviewed the world première production in Cardiff for Seen and Heard three years ago, with considerable enthusiasm), and it seems to me that some revisions to provide a more continuous flow of music might be beneficial. As it is, far too many of the scenes seem to stop and start abruptly, often with only a couple of chords to begin or conclude the action.

The sheer wordiness of Wilde's text too seems to be the source of problems. Even in the extended scene between the Ghost and Victoria, where the words cry out for some emotional and lyrical expansion, much of the action proceeds in recitative-like setting over atmospheric but fundamentally static chords. Only in the final scene (where Getty provides his own lyrics) is there any sustained melodic writing, which in the event comes rather too late after the principal action is over. Nor does Getty seem to provide enough music to accommodate some of the stage action called for in the libretto, a failing which I had previously noted in his earlier opera Plump Jack....

In the past I have thoroughly enjoyed much of Getty's music, especially when he allows himself to give his singers lyrical lines to sing; but, as I have observed, these seem to be in dangerously short supply here. Perhaps revision, including some expansion of the orchestral score to provide interludes between scenes, might give a more appealing impression.