Anglo-Saxon Opera

"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.