Does anyone know of any good audio tapes of his poems or stories set to music?

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2002

Answers

Dear Charlotte, There exist many audio-tapes of Poe's poems and tales (texts!) performed by various actors (e.g. Basil Rathbone...), currently proposed on line by "ebay" auctions. It could give you something like a catalogue. For songs, there are many, too, some of them even from the second half of the eighteenth century. I remember a nearer one for "Annabel Lee", very impressively recorded by Joan Baez amid the 1960's. You can find, too, some classical compositors, like Claude Debussy (with his surprising unfinished "Fall of the House of Usher", recorded for the first time, I believe, within a "pop"-like session called the "Alan Parson Project", but not avowedly!) and a few more ones I cannot tell you now, here, from this noisy public cyber-café! Try "google". I am sure you will get a lot of informations far more precise than my chetive ones on this matter. Good luck. Yours sincerely, Raven's Shade (Belgium).

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2002

Here some other classical music componists inspired by Poe: Serguei Rachmaninov (his choral symphony from "The Bells"); Florent Schmitt ("The Haunted Palace"); André Caplet ("The Masque of the Red Death"). In my previous answer, you have surely made the necessary conversion of "eighteenth" into "nineteenth"... Sorry! Yours, Raven's Shade (Belgium).

-- Anonymous, November 10, 2002

Try Lou Reed's The Raven and POEtry.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2004