The melancholic house of Usher is the backdrop to a world in decay. The peculiar feeling of desolation, loneliness, melancholy and purposelessness, that ‘abject dreariness’ that Edgar Allen Poe knew so well, takes on a strangely beautiful, mesmerising quality in Glass’ operatic version. Here Poe meets the present in a kind of ‘Industrial Gothic’, his moody minimalism charting Roderick Usher’s enigmatic demise.