"I've discovered that I don't have that much talent, really," the composer Elliot Goldenthal confessed a decade ago. "If I work on something for 10 years or three weeks it's not going to make a difference. It's not going to get any better. No matter how many years I work on something I'm never going to get to Beethoven's level."
That last sentence is a truism for any modern composer. But the rest of the sentiment is surprisingly humble coming from someone who works regularly in Hollywood--and particularly odd coming from the man who scored one of the most ambitious new operas in recent memory.
Grendel, with a $2.8-million budget, was the cornerstone of the Los Angeles Opera's 20th-anniversary season. The joint production with Lincoln Center premiered in Los Angeles last year and was later staged in New York as the centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival. The bicoastal nature of the project was fitting: Grendel was, more than anything else, a high-minded partnership between Hollywood and Broadway. And as style often trumps substance in those arenas, so it was with Grendel. What came close to being a dramatic philosophical exploration of existence and evil ended up a striking show without the story and songs necessary for great opera.
Grendel was Goldenthal's first opera; he is best known as a film composer. He's scored almost two-dozen films, including Michael Collins, Batman Forever, and Alien 3, and won an Academy Award for the soundtrack to the Frida Kahlo biopic Frida. That film was directed by
his partner, both personal and professional, Julie Taymor. Taymor's work is varied--she directed the thrillingly vicious Shakespeare film Titus and the Disney smash Broadway musical The Lion King--but it usually involves spectacle. Grendel, which she directed and for which she co-wrote the libretto, is no exception.
Its lofty ambitions on that score--countless monstrous, moving puppets; scenes of fire and ice; a towering set with the white snow-covered peaks of Denmark on one side and the dark and brutal underworld on the other--threatened to destroy the opera before it even opened. The Los Angeles Opera sent critics an email just two days before the scheduled opening informing us that it was cancelled due to "technical and mechanical problems." The company later announced the opening would be moved back almost two weeks. Reports indicated that the computer controlling George Tsypin's rotating set failed, then the mechanics of the set itself. The postponement cost the company $300,000.
For all the pyrotechnics, this was spectacle that was meant to be serious. Taymor wrote the libretto with poet J.D. McClatchy, the editor of Yale Review and sometime librettist--of Ned Rorem's Our Town, for example--based on John Gardner's 1971 novel. That philosophical fiction was a retelling of the Beowulf epic from the ogre Grendel's point of view. The triumphant Geatish warrior Beowulf hardly makes an appearance in this version of the 9th-century epic. Instead, we are asked to understand what might have made a man a monster.
Grendel is subtitled Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. It's not clear what definition of that first word Taymor and McClatchy had in mind. It seems unlikely to have been "a state of being above and independent of the material universe," as Grendel is very much affected by his surroundings. So that leaves the monster "beyond the limits of experience and hence unknowable," or "surpassing others; preeminent or supreme." Either is, in terms of a premise regarding evil, equally intriguing.
|
