‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘Fidelio’ Reviews: Operas Updated for Our Times

Boston Lyric Opera fuses Philip Glass’s 1987 work with the story of a migrant child in detention; Washington National Opera releases a graphic novel version of Beethoven’s only opera.

By Heidi Waleson‘

Feb. 2, 2021 2:32 pm ET

James Darrah’s new film of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” available on Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv, represents an intriguing take, both in medium and interpretation, on Philip Glass’s 1987 work. However, be warned that you may be perplexed about what’s going on.

Raúl Santos’s screenplay layers the contemporary story of Luna, a Guatemalan migrant child who is interned alone at the U.S. border, over Arthur Yorinks’s original libretto based on Edgar Allan Poe’s horror tale about the twins Roderick and Madeline festering in their decaying Gothic mansion. Luna’s story is depicted in animated charcoal drawings; the Usher tale uses dolls in stop-motion filmmaking. A third visual stream comprises archival television footage, much of it from the 1960s. What do these narratives have to do with one another? Apparently, Luna, mute and traumatized, imagines the Poe story, as if acted out with dolls in an abandoned dollhouse that she finds. The connection is not obvious, but if you can get past a need for literal coherence, the storytelling resonates on more abstract and emotional levels.

Mr. Glass’s 90-minute opera works well as a film score. There is plenty of space for Luna’s tale in its long stretches of purely instrumental music, and the repeating arpeggios, growing in pulsating intensity, push the narratives along. (Conductor David Angus supervised the music recording remotely; the players worked from a click track.) The disembodied voices of the singers— Jesse Darden (Roderick), Chelsea Basler (Madeline) and Daniel Belcher (William, their visitor)—float as nondominant elements in the texture. Adding to the creepiness, Madeline’s part is a wordless vocalise.

The striking visual components, supervised by production designers Yuki Izumihara and Yee Eun Nam and director of photography Pablo Santiago, embrace the opera’s ambiguity and nightmarish ambiance. William has been summoned by Roderick, but for what purpose? Are the twins lovers? Does Madeline actually get buried alive? What happens at the end? Take your best guess. The stop-motion technique makes the doll characters appear alternately helpless and menacing.

The animated drawings of Luna’s nonchronological story convey a different kind of darkness (especially since they are in charcoal) with their depictions of flight, incarceration, looming guards, a near-drowning and a gravedigger. Early in the film, the television footage depicts a happy, sanitized American Dream landscape, with children on school buses, suburban barbecues and birthday parties. Later, it shifts to animal experimentation, Black people being chased off public beaches, and finally modern-day news clips of migrant children in cages at the border.

This complex tapestry of alternating visual and narrative worlds, though swept along by the music, is deliberately unsettling, pushing the viewer to dig for connections. The horror-movie motif established by the spoken prologue— featuring an actress in a badly fitting man’s suit who brandishes scary instruments from an old-fashioned medical bag and turns on a 1960s-era television—offers a clue. Nothing is benign; perhaps the poisonous house is intended as a metaphor for the corruption of that American Dream. However, the strong erotic undertones of the Usher story—glimpsed especially through the fervor of Mr. Darden’s singing—don’t really mesh with Luna’s ordeal, and finally the film feels as though Mr. Glass’s opera has been repurposed for a different story altogether.

Some of Mr. Darrah’s recent film projects with other performing-arts groups are clearer. “Lumee’s Dream,” co-directed with Adam Larsen, now available as part of LA Opera’s “Digital Shorts” project, presents an aria from Ellen Reid’s opera “p r i s m,” sung by mezzo Rebecca Jo Loeb, as a serenely elegant array of kaleidoscope images of dancer Sasha Rivero and singer Anna Schubert. (A video of the staged production of the complete opera, which Mr. Darrah helmed, is available on the LA Opera website through Feb. 8.) For the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Mr. Darrah serves as the creative director of “Close Quarters,” online videos that accompany orchestral performances. For Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” the camera follows Mr. Darrah as he bicycles through a Los Angeles neighborhood, spinning along busy commercial arteries and residential streets. This steady journey, its scenery so remote from the nonurban inspiration for the Copland piece, seen in split screen with the musicians playing, creates an unexpectedly contemplative atmosphere even as it offers a contemporary gloss on a piece of American nostalgia.

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As Boston Lyric Opera did with its “Usher” project, Washington National Opera produced a planned 2020-21 season piece in a different medium: The company commissioned a graphic novel, aimed at young readers, based on Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” Created by Kelley Rourke (author) and Erik Teague (co-author and illustrator), the book highlights female heroism. It opens with the opera’s back story, casting Leonore and Florestan as co-leaders of the Resistance to the wicked Governor Pizarro, and then proceeds with the opera’s rescue plot, minus the family comedy and the Prisoners’ Chorus.

The vivid illustrations keep the story in its late 18th-century period, but the text is sprinkled with quotes about feminism and justice from Martin Luther King Jr. , John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, emphasizing the opera’s timelessness. And there’s music: A 20-minute digital version of the book, available on the Kennedy Center’s website, features members and alumni of WNO’s Cafritz Young Artists program reading the text (I particularly liked bass-baritone Samuel Weiser’s thuggish Rocco) and singing snippets from the opera with piano accompaniment. It all provides a tidy, focused introduction, with a girl-power spin, to a classic work.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).