After discovering a few weeks ago that in 2013 an opera was made of “The Masque of the Read Death” I looked for any online interviews about the work. Cecilia Livingston, on being asked “Please talk about the challenges in creating your adaptation of the story” answered: “The principal challenge in adapting Poe’s Masque to the requirements of drama, and opera specifically, is that Poe’s work typically has very little dialogue or ready-made mise en scene.”
(taken from https://barczablog.com/2013/10/14/10for_cecilialivingston/ accessed on 15/05/23)

She is also asked “What do you love about Poe and especially his story The Masque of the Red Death?” to which she answers: “I have mixed feelings about Poe as a writer, but as a provider of dramatic material with operatic potential, he has left a great legacy.”

These two quotes from this interview have been the difficulty I have found in the process of adapting Poe. It is dramatic and therefore suited to being staged, but finding text you can extract from the source material into something suitable for a libretto I have found very difficult. Since Poe returns often to the same themes it was quite easy finding poems of his which were suitable for adapting into the libretto.

Below is a video clip of Livingston's opera where The Red Death appears. The libretto seems more narrative and there seems to be space in the sung material for mime and choreography.

In the Edgar Allan Poe poem "Alone" Poe writes in iambic tetrameter meaning there is an even pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables which I always find a problem since the style of the music for the rest of the opera is striving to changing meters in the music. I'm looking to break up the evenness of the stresses in the poem with changing time signatures, while still making sure to keep the stresses of the original poem in the "correct" place. Here are the first few lines of text set to music and focusing only on the role of the singer.