Yesterday afternoon in the War Memorial Opera House, the Fall portion of the 93rd season of the San Francisco Opera (SFO) came to a conclusion with the fourth and final performance of The Fall of the House of Usher: A Double Bill. Over the course of this brief run, it became clear that there was more than enough in not only the two one-act operas, both based on the Edgar Allan Poe's tale of the same name, but also the way in which they were paired to make for a satisfying experiencing of not only the music but also the staging. In many respects the attentive viewer needs one performance for "basic orientation," after which (s)he can begin (and probably just begin) to appreciate how much detailed thought has gone into the entire production as realized by David Pountney's staging and David Haneke's imaginative use of video projections.

Regarding the entire experience, this site previously noted the advantage of beginning with Gordon Getty's "Usher House" and following it with Robert Orledge's reconstruction and orchestration of Claude Debussy's unfinished opera "La chute de la maison Usher." Through both his understanding and embellishment of Poe, Getty wrote a libretto that took a tale that was almost entirely description and turned it into a highly compelling narrative. Having experienced the straightforward account of that narrative, the audience could then move on to the more meditative reflections on Poe that occupied Debussy's authorship of his libretto.

Pountney, on the other hand, unified these two perspectives into an overarching theme in which the Usher mansion itself is as much of a character as Roderick Usher, his sister Madeline, the doctor treating at least one, if not both, of them, and the friend (Poe himself in Getty's opera) that provides the vehicle for the unfolding of the narrative. Getty's "Usher House" is elegantly framed by Poe's opening and closing sentences, the appearance of the house after an arduous journey leading to an obscured path through the woods and the physical fall of the house itself....

On the musical side the pairing is very much one of contrasting rhetorical stances. Getty makes use of a wide variety of instruments, but most of them are solo parts. He thus serves up music that is almost a counterpoint of sonorities, more concerned with how the different instrument sounds engage with each other than with the integration of all the voices. In addition, the "plain speaking" stance taken by each individual instrumental part recalls many of Virgil Thomson's orchestral efforts, both operatic and symphonic. As a result, one gets the impression that Getty draws upon the poetry of his instrumentation to complement is approach to the prose qualities of the text (dismissed by some less sympathetic listeners as monotone chant)....