La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher) is an unfinished opera in one act (divided into two scenes) by Claude Debussy to his own libretto, based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher. The composer worked on the score between 1908 and 1917 but it was never completed.
Debussy had long been fascinated by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, familiar to French readers through the translations by Charles Baude...
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La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher) is an unfinished opera in one act (divided into two scenes) by Claude Debussy to his own libretto, based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher. The composer worked on the score between 1908 and 1917 but it was never completed.
Debussy had long been fascinated by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, familiar to French readers through the translations by Charles Baudelaire. As early as 1890, André Suarès wrote in a letter to Romain Rolland that "Monsieur Claude Debussy... is working on a symphony that will unfold psychological ideas based on the stories of Poe, in particular, The Fall of the House of Usher." Nothing came of this plan but in the wake of the success of his only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, Debussy turned to Poe for material for a potential successor. He worked on his first attempt at a Poe-inspired opera, the comedy Le diable dans le beffroi, for several years before...
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