Getty extracted his own libretto from Poe's short story. In his adaptation, the narrator, anonymous in the original, becomes Poe himself, and the character of Roderick usher is to a certain extent normalized; he's no longer the neurotic, hyperaesthete, and instead of the ornate exercise in Gothic horror that the story provides, the opera becomes a more straightforward battle between good and evil, with the narrator and Roderick on one side, and the sinister physician Primus on the other, with Madeline Usher offering the possibility of redemption.

So far OK, but Getty sets most of his rather wordy text as strenuous declamation, whose persistent upward cadences become as irritating as the equivalent inflections in spoken estuary English. Otherwise stylistically the score wanders happily through much of the history of opera in the 20th century: Poe's introduction inescapably recalls the opening of The Turn of the Screw; later there anods towards Janacek and the folksy Americana of Copland and Rorem, among others. The dramatic pace is more or less unvaried, though attempst to introduce a sense of impending catastrophe though the interejections of the orchestra end to over do it, so there is little in reserve when the denouement does arrive. There are very few conventionally operatic set pieces -- the song thaat the narrator/Poe sings about Madeline, which Roderick composed when they were at school, is an exception, and takes the opera into the territory of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Les Miserables.