Le Fleurs Du Mal
Long enthralled by Charles Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allen Poe, Claude Debussy once set about turning two stories into one-act operas. Of the first, The Devil in the Belfry, there remains but a few rough sketches, but the second, The Fall of the House of Usher, became something of an obsession. According to music scholar Robert Orledge, Debussy came to identify with the central character and his debilitating neurasthenia as he labored for nearly a decade, but never finished it before his death. Tonight, two versions — Orledge’s own reconstruction of Debussy’s La Chute de la Maison Usher, and Gordon Getty’s interpretation — will be staged. While Poe’s stories always strike morbid emotional tones, Usher — with its fallen aristocrats, hints at incest, madness, ghosts, and vivisepulture — is particularly well-suited to operatic tragedy. Immersive video projection will conjure the crumbling ruins of the family grounds, enhancing the psychological claustrophobia of the production and while exemplifying Roderick Usher’s more literal mental descent.
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