Revisiting the arch-Romanticism of the great American poet Edgar Allan Poe, as seen through the sensibilities of a later French poet, this 16-minute work for tenor solo and orchestra is much more than a mere suite; it is no simple stringing together of orchestral moments from a popular opera. The composer, Dominick Argento (born in 1927 in York, PA), is well-known as the finest American composer of operas in the last half of the twentieth century. The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe has become one of the most popular American operas, receiving numerous productions in America and abroad. Argento wrote it as a bicentennial commission from the University of Minnesota for an opera. Its premiere was in St. Paul in April 1976. The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe is Argento's eighth opera (not counting a student effort that he has withdrawn). It shares with some of the others an interest in American cultural life and history. The opera tells in a Symbolist manner of Poe's marriage to his very young bride, Virginia, and her death to tuberculosis ten years later, a death that triggered his decline. It begins with a prologue in which a doctor explains Virginia's death, then flashes back to their wedding, thereafter blending in scenes from throughout Poe's life and mixing them with scenes and atmosphere drawn from his macabre stories and poems. Argento wrote the suite in 1986 for David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He expanded the orchestration of the music from an opera house pit orchestra proportion to that of a large symphony orchestra. His method in creating Le tombeau was to draw material from the opera, but recast and often recompose it into a chronological fantasy on Poe's life. Since the opera was haunted by Poe's tragic poem "Annabel Lee," the theme of that poem predominates in the suite and provides a thread of symphonic development. This element makes Le tombeau more like a tone poem with vocal part than an opera suite. The title comes from a poem by French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The Symbolists adored Poe and Mallarmé paid tribute to him in the old poetic form of a Tombeau, or a series of pieces to commemorate a noted person. The structure of the suite follows the four stanzas of Mallarmé's poem. The suite features interjections of verses of "Annabel Lee," sung in a ballad-fashion. The Introduction presents the song in a hazy setting with deep brass. The Valley of the Many Colored Grass begins in a pleasant, pastoral mood, but soon the passionate love theme brings turbulence. This theme becomes more fevered, twisting around itself in "The Maelstron," which also depicts Poe's emotional state as it describes Virginia's death. "The Sepulchre" is pure, dark, hopeless Poe as the tenor sings the lament at her tomb. Finally, "The Sea" uses a musical metaphor for Poe's disordered emotional state. The music then calms into icy stasis as Poe himself dies and the love theme ends it in hushed tones.

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