Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera (SFO) gave the first of four performances of the final program in the Fall portion of its 93rd season. The title in the program book was The Fall of the House of Usher: A Double Bill. This consisted of two one-act operas, both in a single scene and about one hour in duration, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's tale of the same name...

The composers of the two operas were, in order of performance, Gordon Getty ("Usher House") and Claude Debussy ("La chute de la maison Usher"). Both composers prepared their own librettos, drawing upon Poe's text as appropriate...

Poe's tale is an odd choice for an opera. The text consists almost entirely of description, and there is almost no dialogue. Getty handled this difficulty with great ingenuity. Since the tale is a first-person narration, Getty made Poe a leading character (sung by tenor Jason Bridges, making his SFO debut); and almost the entirety of the libretto is a dialogue between Poe and Roderick Usher (baritone Brian Mulligan). That dialogue allows much of Poe's language to emerge intact. Nevertheless, there is still very little in Poe by way of plot; so Getty invented one of his own, entirely consistent with Poe's text, to endow his opera with a clear narrative thread....

Each performance emerged as persuasively compelling in its own way. Getty clearly understood his Poe; and [director David] Pountney developed that understanding into well-conceived personalities for each of the vocalists (not to mention the many silent ghosts of ancestors, who appear only through projection and even take bows as projected images). Musically, Getty made use of a rich diversity of instrumentation, all of which was more than capably balanced against the thoroughly engaging vocal work by conductor Lawrence Foster...