Music: Tunes From the Darker Side

Like children listening to a favorite bedtime story, classical audiences love to hear the same works over and over, and most of the time the record companies give them what they want: Bach Brandenburgs without end, Beethoven symphonies without number. Occasionally, however, a darker side surfaces, and . something different is unearthed: arcana by a famous composer, perhaps, or a new piece by a living artist that seeks to reveal the skull beneath the skin. A trio of recent releases for the adventurous shows the eerie attractions of mood music:

Debussy: The Fall of the House of Usher; Andre Caplet: Conte Fantastique (for harp and strings); Florent Schmitt: Etude pour "Le Palais Hante." (Georges Pretre conducting the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra; Angel.) Thanks to the translations of Baudelaire and Mallarme, the works of Edgar Allan Poe became popular in France during the late 19th century. Inevitably, they cast their spell on the imaginations of the country's leading composers; Debussy, for example, long considered writing a pair of one-act operas based on Poe's fantasies. He made a start on The Fall of the House of Usher, preparing the libretto himself, but at his death he had composed only the first scene and fragments of the second.

In 1976 Chilean Composer and Musicologist Juan Allende-Blin reconstructed and orchestrated about 400 bars of the opera. Debussy's brooding music is spheres apart from the pastoral beauties of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun or the nautical tone painting of La Mer. Indeed, in its consummate wedding of text to music, the work Usher most closely resembles is Debussy's only completed opera, the shadowy symbolist drama Pelleas et Melisande. The tormented Roderick Usher, Poe's unhappy protagonist, is depicted in agonized music that is drenched by the misery in the man's soul. Debussy intended Usher to last about an hour; Allende-Blin's realization runs a little more than 22 tantalizing minutes. What a pity that there is not more.

The other two works on the album also evoke Poe's haunted world. Conte Fantastique, a piquant harp concerto by Debussy's acolyte Andre Caplet, is based on the short story The Masque of the Red Death, and Schmitt's orchestral tone poem draws its inspiration from the poem "The Haunted Palace." Pretre gives each work a suitably atmospheric reading, emphasizing Debussy's gloom, Caplet's lightness and Schmitt's vigor.