The music has a kind of charming, late-Romantic appeal, spiced with some more modern harmonic touches. If you listen to the program straight through you notice that Getty relies on particular mannerisms, such as setting a line of poetry to an upward-rushing musical line, holding on a chord, then descending rapidly in a mirror image of the initial gesture. And after a while, the music does seem a little too well-behaved for its own good. For example, one of the poems in Victorian Scenes is “Blow, Bugle, Blow” from Tennyson’s The Princess, which Benjamin Britten included in his famous Serenade. There, where it contrasts with much darker, more dangerous music, Britten achieves a stunningly evocative effect with these lyrics. Getty’s setting is simply pretty.

How does Usher House stand up? Like the house, it doesn’t. It falls, and on two counts. One is that the libretto, written by Getty himself, is over-long, clumsily written, under-edited and full of absurd touches. There is, for example, a list of ancestral Ushers who don’t appear in Edgar Allan Poe’s original tale, and whose names would look better in illustrated books by Edward Gorey. The use of Poe as Roderick Usher’s friend who witnesses the events is clever, but would work out better if he had been shown to have some kind of relationship with Roderick or his sister Madeline... Musically, the opera is mostly reminiscent of 50s B-movie scores, with spooky woodwind underlying a relentlessly tedious arioso, or heightened recitative, which plays heavily on rising fourths. 

The overture to Gordon Getty’s opera Plump Jack made a lively curtain raiser. Getty’s music is tuneful and individual and deserves to be more widely heard. The overture is a bit episodic yet paints the bibulous knight Falstaff with fine brush strokes, by turns galumphing and energetic. A loopy horn and early trumpet entrance apart, the [Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra] offered a vital and spirited performance with [David] Danzmayr bringing out the quirky humor of this engaging music.

While the Poe atmospheres oozed in and out of your mind the Getty Usher House, libretto by the composer, elaborated the Poe narrative into a complex plot woven by an evil scheming doctor who easily defeats a Poe sicko, his sick sister and his weird friend. Getty's music was much like recitative accompaniment though handsomely elaborated. It worked for a while....

Gordon Getty is better known as a philanthropist of opera than as a composer of opera. Nonetheless Usher House is real music, and the opera was not without some splendid moments, notably the danced scenes.