The song cycle was orchestrated in 1998 with a commission from Jack and Dawn Taylor of Des Moines, Iowa. The Usher Waltz has been recorded by John Williams and Elena Papandreou.Īmerican composer James Poulsen composed 'Five Poems of Edgar Allan Poe' for medium high voice and piano in 1986. Russian composer Nikita Koshkin wrote the 1984 piece Usher Valse (Usher Waltz) for solo guitar, depicting Usher's frenzied guitar performance in the short story 'The Fall of the House of Usher'. A lesser-known American composer, Edgar Stillman Kelley (1857–1944) wrote a piece for orchestra entitled 'The Pit and the Pendulum'. Leonard Bernstein set 'Israfel' as part of his song cycle for voices and orchestra, Songfest.Īmerican conductor/composer Leonard Slatkin has composed a setting of 'The Raven' for narrator and symphony orchestra. Daron Hagen included settings of 'A Dream Within a Dream' and 'Thou Wouldst Be Loved' in the 1983 song cycle 'Echo's Songs', published by E.C. These works were published by Hinshaw Music, Inc. Swedish composer Fredrik Klingwall released in 2009 nine piano pieces, each one inspired by one of Poe's poems in a collection called Works of Woe.Īmerican composer Emma Lou Diemer set 'A Dream Within A Dream' and 'Eldorado' for mixed chorus and piano. Poe Songs, consisting of Evening Star, Lenore and Annabel Lee. In 2001 Dutch composer Robert Weirauch composed a short song cycle for baritone and piano, E.

Greek composer Dionysis Boukouvalas has set Poe's poem To Zante for soprano and piano. A ballet based on a story by Poe is Hop-Frog, a 2009 ballet by Terry Brown. Other operas based on stories by Poe are Ligeia, a 1994 opera by Augusta Read Thomas, and The Tell-Tale Heart by Bruce Adolphe. Sergei Rachmaninoff's choral symphony The Bells set a Russian translation of Poe's poem to music. įinnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara based his 1997 choral fantasy 'On the Last Frontier' on the final two paragraphs of Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Īndré Caplet's Conte fantastique for harp and strings, published in 1924 but begun at least as early as 1909, is a musical retelling of ' The Masque of the Red Death'. Leon Botstein, conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra-which presented a program of 'Tales From Edgar Allan Poe' in 1999-noted that in the realm of classical music, as in literature, Poe's influence was felt more deeply in Europe than in America. Claude Debussy wrote an unfinished opera based on 'The Fall of the House of Usher.'

Music inspired by edgar allan poe