FROM POE TO DEBUSSY

In attempting to fashion an opera from Edgar Allan Poe’s horrific, decidedly unoperatic short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Claude Debussy indulged a librettist’s prerogative, altering the text substantially to suit the composer’s--in this case his own--purposes.

Debussy completed the text in 1909, subsequently producing 21 pages of completed vocal score. Other projects, and ill health, intervened, and at his death in 1918 nothing had been orchestrated.

Until the mid-1970s that was the extent of our knowledge of “La Chute de la Maison Usher,” to give the score--and Poe’s story--its French name. Then, at virtually the same time, a team of Yale musicologists and the Chilean composer Juan Allende-Blin independently set about making orchestrated, performing editions of Debussy’s fragment.

Both the Yale and Allende-Blin versions would seem to have had their first performances in 1977. Yale drew little favorable comment. Allende-Blin sparked some interest, but only in Europe, resulting in the present, surprisingly delayed world-premiere recording (Angel DS-38168).

The Chilean composer had access to more material than his American competitors, most significantly sketches (in the possession of Debussy’s stepdaughter) for portions of vocal score beyond the 21 completed pages. The result is 400 measures of fascinating music, setting about half the libretto in a playing time of half an hour.

“La Chute,” being both a fragment and scored for huge orchestra (with triple woodwinds), is unlikely to gain wide concert-hall (to say nothing of stage) exposure. But it should repay frequent at-home listening.

Recognizable in the vocal writing is the declamatory-cum-arioso style of “Pelleas et Melisande.” But the later Debussy of “Jeux,” with its restless rhythms, vague tonality, alternately sighing and fragmented pinpricks of melody, governs the orchestra of “La Chute,” if one is to trust Allende-Blin’s interpretation, and there is no reason not to.

The libretto--which Angel should have reproduced in its entirety with this recording--is a workable construct, on the basis of the half that we are shown here. Debussy has the ghostly Madeline, silent save for a single “low moaning cry” (Poe’s words) in the original, declaim some of the story’s most evocative lines, while cleverly expanding the tiny part of the Doctor to save the two principals, the nameless narrator (whom Debussy calls “The Friend”) and the half-mad, exquisitely anguished Roderick Usher, from bearing all the expository burden.

Debussy’s text does, however, concretize what Poe only vaporously suggests in the nature of Roderick’s feelings for his sister Madeline, thereby trading off some characteristic literary style for musico-dramatic immediacy.

The present performance, conducted with stunning power and intensity by Georges Pretre, and handsomely played by the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic, is an altogether brilliant accomplishment.

The little-known singers--soprano Christine Barbaux (Madeline), baritones Jean-Philippe Lafont (Usher), Pierre-Yves Le Maiget (The Friend) and Francois Le Roux (The Doctor)--are all superior vocal actors; and Angel provides recorded sound that evokes the physical and mental darkness of the setting while cutting to the heart of the instrumentation.

The opera is coupled here with two other Poe-inspired compositions (note that Poe was well into this century far better known in France than in his American homeland, having been translated into French by Baudelaire and, later, Verlaine as early as the 1860s): a spookily enjoyable “Conte Fantastique,” inspired by “The Masque of the Red Death,” for harp and strings by Debussy-acolyte Andre Caplet; and a positively dreadful lump of post-Wagnerian bombast by Florent Schmitt after the poem “The Haunted Palace,” a portion of which appears in “La Chute,” where it is set with masterful economy of gesture by Debussy/Allende-Blin.

Pretre and the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic are again the expert performers.

If “La Chute de la Maison Usher” represents Debussy close to the end of his creative life, his Trio in G for piano, violin and cello takes us back to the beginning--to the 18-year-old student at the Paris Conservatoire already celebrated for his skill as a pianist.

The world-premiere recording (Laurel LR-127) of this pretty, Massenet-like trifle, a work until recently presumed to be lost, is charmingly played by the Western Arts Trio on a program that also includes the more substantial Trio in F minor, Opus 65, by Dvorak.