| Lyrics: | THE CHORUS The chorus has often an unenviable role to play,
often a distasteful task to
perform;
summoned as witness to uncounted crime,
she's the silent accomplice of
all,
then she turns and comments on the action.
She hears... observes, but
must never betray her emotions
She moves, unseen, the characters oblivion of her
presence;
a simple stage device.
She cannot hide, cannot take sides.
It his curse that she must stay and comment on the action...
A young man named
Montresor lately received an urgent
letter from a dear friend of childhood,
Roderick Usher by name,
In which his friend begged him to come
with all speed to
the family seat.
So, during the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day
in
the autumn of the year,
when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens,
he
had been passing through
a singularly dreary tract of country
'till he found
himself,
as the shades of night drew on,
within view of the melancholy house of
Usher
MONTRESOR: That must be the house.
There is no other within many
miles.
But surely not... It's just an empty shell,
devoid of life;
a
sterile outcrop of stone amid the mire.
But there can be no doubt, this is the
house!
And yet it looks so dark, so forbidding , so dead.
That great
crumbling facade,
windows just like vacant eyes
that peer upon the stagnant,
glistening blackness of the lake...
I have never seen anything like
it!
The gloom, the rotting dankness of the place...
It must be my
imagination,
the darkness and the cold...
Yet still, far beneath the plane
of thought
and quite against my will,
my heart begins to tremble
in
mad anticipation of the House
and I am forced to recognise
a consciousness of
fear;
a cold and senseless fear,
nameless, formless, chilling to the
bone...
No, it's just the leaden air that makes me
forget myself, the
weather and the dusk.
This must be all that sets my teeth on edge
and the hairs
at the nape of my neck to attention.
And what of his sister?
This does not
speak of her
but I understand she, too, lives with him
here in the House of
Usher,
home of the family for five hundred years or more.
It's a strange place,
a strange house,
an even stranger clan;
all either saints or mad,
not
an ordinary man among them;
geniuses all...
But, all time-honoured as it
is,
the Usher race has put forth no enduring branch.
And so from sire to son,
from sire to son
the patrimony and the name have been passed.
Through all their
ancestry no cousins,
aunts of bastards
disturb the singular symmetry
of the family tree.
Well then, so I am here; I have come;
and it is too
late, to dark to run.
But what a chilling sight,
this palace crouching in the
night...
Ah, there! A light!
I am awaited; I am expected;
I
shall not disappoint my friend.
End of Act One |
