Debussy - The Edgar Allan Poe operas

The Guardian 60

Dazeley/Villanueva/Hartinger/Fan/Dries/Göttinger SO/Mueller
(Pan Classics, two CDs)

Debussy did not complete any operas after the first performance of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902. In the wake of that premiere, though, he made plans for no less than three more, and in 1908, after the successful US debut of Pelléas at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he promised all three of them to that company. One was to be a version of the Tristan and Isolde legend, using a French source of the story, while the other two were intended to be a contrasting double bill, based on tales by Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Devil in the Belfry.

No musical traces of the Tristan project seem to remain. But the Poe double bill got much farther, and Debussy repeatedly returned to it almost up to the end of his life in 1918. While extensive musical sketches for Usher survive, amounting to roughly half of the projected score, all that survives of The Devil in the Belfry is an outline scenario and a few pages of thematic ideas. Three musicologists have subsequently made performing scores from the Usher material, of which Robert Orledge’s totally convincing version has become the most widely heard. Orledge’s score was used for the WNO staging two years ago, and for this 2013 concert recording from Göttingen. Here, for the first time, the double bill was performed as Debussy intended, with The House of Usher alongside The Devil in Belfry, which has also been completed and orchestrated by Orledge.