I have always loved Poe’s prose fiction, and it has been a major influence, both informing the macabre tone of my writing and inspiring my plot twists and surprise endings. But I was a poet and songwriter before I was a novelist, and his lyrical works attracted me first. I believe that, in writing, less is more and that poetry, when well crafted, is the most emotionally direct form of written communication. Richard Wilbur, the former poet laureate of America, offered this metaphor about poetry (I’m paraphrasing): the confinement of the bottle is what gives the genie his strength. His meaning is that conciseness and controlled rhythm, rhyme, and figure of speech create a more powerful expression than unleashed outpourings.
In Poe’s work the combination of this control and his preferred themes-crime, passion, death, the dark side of the mind-make pure magic.
Blend those two ingredients with music… well, culture don’t get any better than that.
Phil Ochs was moved to adapt a poem, but Poe's prose works too have found second lives as musical compositions. Indeed, there aren’t many authors-Shakespeare aside-whose body of work has provided seeds for so much melodic inspiration.
Claude Debussy, composer of Clair de Lune and Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, cited Poe as one of his major influences. He began two Poe-inspired operas, one based on “The Fall of the House of Usher” and one on “The Devil in the Belfry.” Neither was completed by the composer, though a version of “Usher” was reconstructed in the 1970s and performed. Philip Glass, the minimalist composer, also wrote a successful opera based on “Usher,” as did Peter Hammill, the British singer-songwriter.
Presently the British theater company Punchdrunk is staging its version of “The Masque of Red Death” at the Battersea Arts Center in London. The show-a “site-specific,” interactive piece (the latest trend in theater, I hear)-features otherworldly choreography, classical music, and masked audience members roaming the elaborate, candle-lit performing space, mingling with the actors. Though not praised by all critics, the play is one of the hottest tickets in English theater, and the buzz is that it’s headed for New York.
Sergei Rachmaninoff turned a Russian translation of “The Bells” into a choral symphony. The twentieth-century British composer and conductor Joseph Holbrooke wrote several Poe adaptations, including the symphonic works The Raven and The Bells, and he composed the music for a ballet based on “Masque.” New York City choreographer David Fernandez wrote a short ballet based on “The Raven.”
Lou Reed, a longtime admirer of Poe, produced a two-CD set entitled The Raven-his first release in some years-featuring exclusively work influenced by Poe. The material was performed by Reed and, among others, David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Steve Buscemi, and Willem Dafoe.
Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Stevie Nicks have all performed folk versions of “Annabel Lee,” and the brilliant British art-rock group the Alan Parsons Project released Tales of Mystery and Imagination, an album filled entirely with Poe-inspired material. At least one track, I believe, actually made it into the Top 40. There have been many other performers, from Dylan to Marilyn Manson to Iron Maiden, who claimed inspiration by Poe or worked references from his work into theirs.
Oh, okay, I’ll mention one other adaptation: my own musical version of Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream,” which I composed when I was in my twenties and determined to slap the wrist of a selfdelusional society. (Inexplicably, my adaptation did not make any Top 40 lists, so don’t bother searching for downloads on iTunes-or even LimeWire.)
Looking at this recitation of adaptations, you can’t help but wonder why Poe appeals to so many musicians, and ones of such vastly differing styles and forms (I mean, Debussy and Lou Reed?).
I think the answer is that Poe’s work is inherently musical.
His storytelling is the stuff of opera, which has classic beginning, middle, and end structures, revels in crime, violence, the gothic, passion, and death, and is often over the top and borders on melodrama, sure, but, hey, we don’t go to the opera for subtlety.
As for his poems-they uniformly display a lyricism and craft that the best, most emotionally engaging songs possess. Whether or not it’s been set to music, Poe’s writing is hummable.
After all, name another popular writer who could, with such intoxicating meter and imagery, write a poem embracing nothing less than love, tragedy, and death, that would find its way into concert halls and recording studios one hundred years later… and that coins and seamlessly fits in a six-syllable jawbreaker like “tintinnabulation.”
Got you beat there, Will Shakespeare.
About Jeffrey Deaver
EXCERPT FROM
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Preface
Upon my return to the United States a few months ago, after the extraordinary series of adventures in the South Seas and elsewhere, of which an account is given in the following pages, accident threw me into the society of several gentlemen in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited, and who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public. I had several reasons, however, for declining to do so, some of which were of a nature altogether private, and concern no person but myself; others not so much so. One consideration which deterred me was, that, having kept no journal during a greater portion of the time in which I was absent, I feared I should not be able to write, from mere memory, a statement so minute and connected as to have the appearance of that truth it would really possess, barring only the natural and unavoidable exaggeration to which all of us are prone when detailing events which have had a powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties. Another reason was, that the incidents to be narrated were of a nature so positively marvellous, that, unsupported as my assertions must necessarily be (except by the evidence of a single individual, and he a half-breed Indian), I could only hope for belief among my family, and those of my friends who have had reason, through life, to put faith in my veracity-the probability being that the public at large would regard what I should put forth as merely an impudent and ingenious fiction. A distrust in my own abilities as a writer was, nevertheless, one of the principal causes which prevented me from complying with the suggestion of my advisers.