Usher

Alongside his single completed opera »Pelléas et Mélisande«, Claude Debussy pursued numerous other musical theatre projects, none of which were realised. By 1908 at the latest, he was captivated by the short story »The Fall of the House of Usher« by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe’s story, a nameless friend of his youth witnesses the internal and external collapse of the last scion of a noble family in decline. In atmospheric illustrations, the moods of Roderick Usher, vacillating between fear, delirium and ecstasy, are connected to the surroundings of the mysterious familial estate: eerie marshland, a crypt in which Roderick’s supposedly dead twin sister, Lady Madeline, is buried, and not least the house itself, which comes eerily alive.