Let no one pretend the Getty score is great music. The long chunks of verbiage (the libretto is the composer's own) were less often sung than declaimed, punctuated by chunks of instrumental lines, mostly cliche-laden and signifying little.

Getty extracted his own libretto from Poe's short story. In his adaptation, the narrator, anonymous in the original, becomes Poe himself, and the character of Roderick usher is to a certain extent normalized; he's no longer the neurotic, hyperaesthete, and instead of the ornate exercise in Gothic horror that the story provides, the opera becomes a more straightforward battle between good and evil, with the narrator and Roderick on one side, and the sinister physician Primus on the other, with Madeline Usher offering the possibility of redemption.

So far OK, but Getty sets most of his rather wordy text as strenuous declamation, whose persistent upward cadences become as irritating as the equivalent inflections in spoken estuary English. Otherwise stylistically the score wanders happily through much of the history of opera in the 20th century: Poe's introduction inescapably recalls the opening of The Turn of the Screw; later there anods towards Janacek and the folksy Americana of Copland and Rorem, among others. The dramatic pace is more or less unvaried, though attempst to introduce a sense of impending catastrophe though the interejections of the orchestra end to over do it, so there is little in reserve when the denouement does arrive. There are very few conventionally operatic set pieces -- the song thaat the narrator/Poe sings about Madeline, which Roderick composed when they were at school, is an exception, and takes the opera into the territory of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Les Miserables. 

Painless, faceless, unabashedly eclectic, pleasantly decorative, sporadically engaging music.... Getty, 53, has assimilated a century of operatic cliches with crafty zeal. He knows his way around Verdian parlando and straussian ooze. He savours the impact of a pretty melodic fragment here and a pompous bit of declamation there. He obviously loves his literary source. He haso has the good sense to avoid anything deja-entendu involving the fat knight and the merry wives of Windsor. However, his biggest talent...involves his uncanny ability to be pretentious and naive at the same time. The pretension is reflected in the unrealistic grandeur of his rhetoric and the self-confidence of his ambition. The naivety emerges in the simplistic, antiquated devices he chooses to recycle, content to embroider the text with safe sound feffects. There is no room in this tight little structure for the dramatic amplification or thematic development implied by the old-fashioned idiom. Nor are Getty's one-shot expressive strokes bold enough to command much interest as isolated statements. The static little scenes...certainly don't work as new music. For all their economy and accessibility, they don't work particularly well as old music either.

Joan and the Bells offers a typically tuneful Getty creation, dramatic and picturesque in its telling of Joan of Arc's trial, her confinement and execution.