SKU: A0.534661

Over the years 1908–16, Debussy had produced a viable scenario for Usher on his third attempt. But
when he came to making a complete draft of the music, he seems to have lost interest during Roderick
Usher’s long monologue, even though he was setting his own text. As in No-ja-li he jumped to the next
passage that interested him, in this case the exciting final melodrama and the collapse of the Usher house itself.

In the process of completing the missing half of the score, I discovered that by reusing Debussy’s material for similar psychological situations across the opera, and by metamorphosing existing ideas (as Debussy does with Mélisande’s theme in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande), the only things I really needed to add were linking material and any passages where fast music was required. So the ‘nightmare scherzo’, and Lady Madeline’s escape from her coffin and her final bloody revenge on her brother are all mine, but most of the rest is existing Debussy in changing contexts (in which the Russian technique of ‘changing backgrounds’, both harmonic and textural, proved extremely useful, as it did to Debussy in his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune). Eventually, both my completed ballet No-ja-li and the House of Usher were successfully premiered in 2006 and the latter soon began to find its way into the established repertoire in Europe and the US. To further support this, I transcribed some of the highlights of Debussy’s score as A Night in the House of Usher for organ, and subsequently piano—with a focus on Scene 2 and the final, horrific and maca-bre melodrama. This climaxes in the double deaths of Roderick Usher and his Sister Madeline, together with the disintegration of the ill-fated House of Usher into the stagnant lake-all beneath a blood-red moon.In this form it was first performed by Ian Buckle in the Howard Assembly Rooms, Leeds in 2010.