Stephen Smoliar, Usher House
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)....
Stephen Smoliar, Usher House
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...
Robert Thicknesse, Plump Jack
You have to be brave, or mad, to take on Shakespeare: you can count the successful musical translations of his works, from Otello to Kiss Me, Kate, on the fingers of one hand. Gordon Getty has been working on his Falstaff opera Plump Jack for years, but this performance at St John's was the premiere of the complete work.
This is the chap from the Henry plays, not the reduced Sir John of The Merry Wives; and Getty's 12 scenes include all those you would expect - Gad's Hill, Hal and Falstaff's kingly role-playing, the death of Henry IV, the coronation - interspersed with the capers of Shallow and co. The words are straight from the plays, in filleted form.
Oh, and the music. "Two hours of recitative," a grumpy fellow said as he made for the door: a bit unfair, I'd have called it more a kind of free arioso, admittedly of a sort that became increasingly annoying. Set against an orchestral score ready for a film to be made around it, the angular vocal lines have a curious habit of always ending on a high note, giving every speech an inflection more usually associated with Neighbours than Shakespeare.
But it seemed unnecessary for the music to be so mean with its favours. The style is hardly modernistic, tending more to a free succession of chords or a minimalist-type repetition of short figures, but tunefulness is strictly limited to the very occasional episode - Falstaff's uncanonical wooing of Mrs Quickly, for example - and is gone in a flash. It is a procession of ideas going nowhere: there is little for the ear to get hold of beyond a few recognisable motifs and a certain flavour of scoring for different characters; only a couple of the scenes, notably Falstaff and Shallow in the garden, manage to sustain a mood. It's not awful, just frustrating, a mix-and-match of opera and musical techniques which doesn't reap the benefit of either.
Georgia Rowe, Usher House
Poor Roderick Usher. As the central character of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," he endures unspeakable torments.
Adding insult to injury, the San Francisco Opera's new double bill also makes him dull.
This unfortunate twofer, which opened Dec. 8 at the War Memorial Opera House in the first of four performances, pairs Gordon Getty's "Usher House" with Debussy's "La Chute de la Maison Usher." Each opera adapts Poe's macabre 1839 short story, which recounts Roderick's final days in his ancestral home with his dying sister, Madeline, and his visiting friend, who witnesses their ultimate demise.
One of Poe's classic tales of terror, the narrative is designed to be dark and dreary. But this production, co-owned by Welsh National Opera, comes down heavily on the dreary side.
Each opera runs about an hour. Both seem longer. Neither adaptation succeeds, though Getty's "Usher House," presented before intermission in its U.S. premiere, registered as the evening's biggest misfire.
The composer, setting his own libretto, takes a literal approach to the story, and the opera quickly bogs down in arcane riddles and obscure references. Set to a meandering, repetitive score, it's musically bland and dramatically inert.
Stephanie Power, Usher House
Edgar Allan Poe's quintessential Gothic horror tale The Fall of the House of Usher has spawned many an homage on stage and screen. Thanks to the House of Getty, Welsh National Opera have been able to fund this striking double-bill of British firsts: the world stage première of Gordon Getty's Usher House and the British première of Robert Orledge's completion of Debussy's La Chute de la Maison Usher.
It is a triumph of mesmeric staging by director David Pountney, transcending Getty's thin material and Debussy's anguished self- identification. In each opera, the house itself looms largest through David Haneke's gliding, bewitching videos; we are sucked into malevolent ancestral halls and then crushed by the weight of weeping stones. Classic cinema is invoked from Hammer Technicolor to chilling black-and-white.
Vocally, a parlando spirit reigns, with Debussy's roles more nuanced by far. Both casts were strong: Kevin Short and Mark Le Brocq made twisted medics - and if only we heard more of Anna Gorbachyova's enticing Madeline. But it's filmic vision which brings to twice-thrilling denouement Usher's self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.