Like Dickens's fat boy, Georges Pretre is out to make our flesh creep. Thanks to brilliant translations by Baudelaire and Mallarme, the prose and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe made a sensational impact on French writers and musicians; and the present record contains first recordings of three works from the start of this century which illustrate this fascination. Debussy toyed for some 15 years with plans for two Poe operas, The devil in the belfry (which came to nothing) and The fall of the house of Usher, of which he completed 21 pages in vocal score and left another 25 scattered pages of sketches. About ten years ago these were all collated and scored in perceptively Debussyan style by the Chilean musicologist Juan Allende-Blin: the results (amounting to just under half the projected opera) were first performed in 1977 and are now devotedly re-created on record by four admirable singers—their enunciation in particular is exemplary—and the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic. The work, though inevitably weakened by the fragmentary nature of the music after the substantial first section, exudes a sombre dread: advanced harmonically and extremely free in prosody, it is largely athematic save for Lady Madeline's offstage song and for the very opening of the Prelude, which, as Harry Halbreich points out in his informative sleeve-note, is an echo from Debussy's string quartet, written at almost the start of his career.
The song referred to, incidentally, is a setting of The haunted palace, the poem on which Schmitt's early (1905) study—one of his Prix de Rome envois—is based. Its language is more conventional, but its rich dark colouring, nervy rhythms and final brute strength make it worth reviving in this context. Very striking and inventive is the Symphonic study based on The Masque of the Red Death by Debussy's great friend and helper Andre Caplet: this is the 1908 first version of the work, for chromatic harp and strings (though it is not divulged whether Frederique Cambreling actually employs that more awkward instrument), not its slightly better-known 1923 revision as Conte fantastique for the normal pedal harp. The virtuoso solo part is handled with assurance and sensitivity (and is very cleanly recorded), and the strings, though not always at ease in the very high register, successfully evoke the work's mysterious and febrile atmosphere: there is a heart-stopping moment when terrifying rappings precede the striking of midnight, enveloped in a haze of ghostly harmonics.'