A words-and-music program exploring the life and legacy of the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe.

What could possibly bring Frankie Laine and Sergei Rachmaninov together? What do Burl Ives and Claude Debussy have in common? Or Lou Reed and Django Reinhardt?  All of these musicians and composers wrote music based on this astonishing man. He never lived in their world; his writings got them to live in his.  This program shows the audience the world he lived in, as well as the world he made. It includes  his words set to music; his words spoken to music, as in the melodramas he loved. It includes songs from that world of the half-seen shadow that he loved so much – so much that he made it his own.

Join Madeleine Gray and pianist, presenter and historian Bill Scanlan Murphy on a musical journey into the world of that mystic and master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe.  Program includes music by Balfe, Duparc, Schubert, Schumann, Gershwin, Severac, Sondheim.