Author of some of the most musical language in all of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe got his night at the opera Tuesday when a double bill of works based on his short story The Fall of the House of Usher was presented at San Francisco Opera.  Yet while the evening had its musical and theatrically haunting moments, this pairing of Gordon Getty’s Usher House and Debussy’s La Chute de la Maison Usher struggled to make a compelling operatic case.

Brooding orchestral palettes, monologue-clogged librettos and a surfeit of projections were the dominant impressions of the evening.  However tempting Poe’s tale of a deeply haunted house and a dying sister might have been, the atmospherically rich but dramatically static Usher story proved to be a daunting challenge....

Getty, a noted philanthropist and San Francisco Opera donor, filled his portion of the evening with a ponderous book and largely unengaging score. Weighed down by bookish verbiage, the conversation between “Eddie” Poe (an eager but handcuffed tenor Jason Bridges) and [Brian] Mulligan’s Roderick plowed on through pages of wooly academic dialogue. The language seemed to stifle the occasional wrinkles of musical charm – a strophic folk song, a lightly burlesqued ballroom waltz.

The opera’s ideas, both literary and musical, steadily wore thin.  Getty threaded a few motifs through the score, but they never took hold or developed. Bass Anthony Reed looked and sounded imposing as Doctor Primus.  And Duggan was both rag-doll limp and febrile as the dancing Madeline.

Without a strong musical or dramatic spine, however, this Usher devolved into incomprehensibility at times. Madeline’s onstage death was indifferently staged and scored. Even as the projected house crumbled and that storm set in, the music, all too fittingly, withered away to an anticlimax.