by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “feature” we watched last night was a complete — more or
less — performance of Debussy’s second opera, La Chute de la Maison Usher, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the
House of Usher” and left incomplete after his death. (At least two other
composers, Peter Hammill and Gordon Getty — yes, a relative of those Gettys — have written operas based on “The Fall of
the House of Usher.”) What survived was a complete libretto (Debussy’s own
adaptation of the Poe story) and the first 25 minutes of what was projected to
be an hour-long short opera (he planned to pair it with another Poe adaptation,
“The Devil in the Belfry,” which he never even started), plus nine disconnected
fragments from later in the piece. Debussy never orchestrated any of it, but
his orchestral style is well known enough that various attempts to reconstruct
it have been made, including one by Carolyn Abbate and Robert Kyr in the
1970’s, by Chilean composer Juan Allende-Blin also in the 1970’s and by Robert
Orledge in the 2000’s. The Allende-Blin version — recorded on EMI in the 1980’s
and issued first on LP and then on CD, coupled with two more works by French
composers based on stories or poems by Poe (André Caplet’s The Masque
of the Red Death and Florent Schmitt’s The
Haunted Palace — ironically, based on a
poem that occurs within “The Fall of the House of Usher”) — merely orchestrated
Debussy’s surviving fragments. Orledge attempted to fill in the gaps and
present the work “complete,” though towards the end he seems to have given up
on attempting to duplicate Debussy’s style of vocal writing and the characters
merely speak their lines
accompanied by Debussyan instrumental music (the original meaning of the term
“melodrama,” by the way: a spoken text declaimed against a musical
accompaniment). What we were watching last night was a 2008 performance on
Dutch TV, with a Dutch cast — baritone Geert Smits as Roderick Usher, baritone
Henk Neven as his friend (the character who narrates the story in Poe’s
original), tenor Yves Saelens as the doctor (though Debussy originally marked this role for a baritone, too — in his one completed
opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, he
had also written the male lead on the cusp between tenor and baritone) and
soprano Cécile de Boever as Roderick’s sister Madeline, who has basically
driven her brother crazy by suffering from a long, wasting disease (remember
this was a personal issue for Poe; both his parents died of tuberculosis as,
much later, did his wife) and coming back to life after she has been pronounced
dead and interred in the Usher family crypt (Poe also wrote a story called “The
Premature Burial” and the idea of being buried by mistake while one was still
alive clearly haunted him). Not that we could make out much of the story from
what we were watching, which was a semi-staged concert performance in the original
French with Dutch subtitles — and about the only attempt at staging was to have
de Boever come out and walk down a staircase in front of some red curtains at
the beginning and again at the end, when all she has to do is scream to let
Roderick Usher, his long-suffering friend and the audience know she’s still
alive.
It’s clear both from this and from Pelléas (Debussy’s one completed opera and the only one
performed during his lifetime — among his unrealized projects were not only
another Poe adaptation but Romeo and Juliet and a spit-in-Wagner’s-eye attempt to do his own Tristan
et Isolde, using the French version of the
legend by Joseph Bedier rather than the German one by Gottfried von Strassburg
Wagner had used) that Debussy’s tastes in operatic material ran towards shadowy
stories that were frankly unrealistic and concerned more with mood than
realistic human emotions or actions, and his style of setting text basically
used the voices to carry the principal texture and relegated the orchestra to
the background — the opposite of Wagner’s style and, I suspect, a deliberate
rejection of Wagner by a composer who had such a bizarre love-late relationship
with Wagner he referred to him as “Old Klingsor’s Ghost” and tore up the first
draft of Pelléas because he
thought too much Wagnerism had sneaked into it. What that means is that
Debussy’s operas can work but only if you know what the singers are singing
about — which requires you either to be a native speaker of French or to have
learned it so well you can absorb it instantly. This is why Mark Elder’s 1980’s
recording of Pelléas was such a
revelation to me: it was in English, and while English translations of German
and Italian opera are usually disasters, the English version of Pelléas brought home the score’s dramatic beauty and
intensity in ways no French-language recordings ever had. All of this is a
rather roundabout way of saying that I don’t think I can really judge Debussy’s
The Fall of the House of Usher
until I can see a staged performance sung in English; what emerges here is a
lot of convincing atmosphere that seems to capture the aura of terror and dread
that suffuses Poe’s tale and is effectively communicated by his matter-of-fact
(at least by 19th-century standards) writing style, and an effective
frisson at the end when the
supposedly dead Madeline reappears and screams. But it’s little more than an
operatic curio by a composer whose instrumental works have become cornerstones
of the standard repertory for both orchestra and piano, but whose one finished
opera, Pelléas et Mélisande,
still has no more than a toehold on the operatic repertoire — as I noted to
Charles, Debussy may have only written one finished opera, but so did
Beethoven, and Fidelio is a
repertory work while Pelléas
nestles on the fringe!
