On May 15, 1967, a 33-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist nun seated herself in the lotus position in front of Tu Nghiem Pagoda in Saigon, doused herself with Shell gasoline, and set herself on fire.
Just before her self-immolation, Nyaht Chi Mai placed two icons nearby: the Virgin Mary and Quan Yin, a female Buddhist figure of mercy.
On a piece of paper titled “My Intention”, she wrote a brief passage explaining her action:
“I wish to use my body as a torch,” she wrote, “to dissipate the darkness, to waken love among men and bring peace to Vietnam.”
But peace would come slowly, painfully; the darkness would not soon dissipate. The pall did not lift with the Vietnam War's official end on April 30, 1975.
Twenty years after that date, Nyaht's solitary act of sacrifice came to haunt the American composer Elliot Goldenthal.
“Something about a female burning herself would not leave my mind,” he says.
Goldenthal was contemplating a daunting task. He wished to compose a large-scale musical work to memorialize the Vietnam War.
“I saw Vietnam as a female, a country with both Catholics and Buddhists. And I saw fire as the ultimate transformation,” he says.
Nyaht's poignant words found their way into Goldenthal's hour-long piece, as did the poetry of American GIs, texts from the Requiem Mass, snippets of the Pentagon Papers, 11th-century Vietnamese aphorisms, and soothing words from the Book of Jeremiah.
After nearly two years of work, Goldenthal's ‘Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio’ finally is ready to be unveiled at its world premiere next week by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, which commissioned the project.
Whether a 40-year-old composer who never served in Vietnam can grapple successfully with the Vietnam conflict, its complicated impact on multiple constituencies, and its painful and politically charged aftermath will not be known until the work is performed Wednesday and Thursday at Costa Mesa's Performing Arts Center.
“This is a piece that will disappoint everyone a little,” Goldenthal concedes.
But it is the most sweeping and ambitious effort by any U.S. musical organization to come to terms with the 20th anniversary of the end of the war.
Easily the most important undertaking in the Pacific Symphony's 17-year history, the project is a daring gamble that could come apart in controversy or capture a nation's imagination, reaping prestige and media attention.
“It's an incredibly bold act for this orchestra. It would be enormous for any orchestra,” says Peter Gelb, the president of Sony Classical, the label that will produce a recording of the work. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is set to perform on the recording.
Clearly wary of the Vietnam War's emotion-laden history, Goldenthal seeks no political viewpoint in his new work. It will attempt to deal with human experience of the war, he says: its horrors, suffering, and individual moments of triumph and tragedy.
In a test of Goethe's claim that “architecture is frozen music,” Goldenthal's work for orchestra, chorus and soloists will endeavor to create a feeling roughly akin to that provoked by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
With violins, trumpets, bassoons and human voices, the Pacific Symphony Orchestra will do what the Wall does with black, polished granite and 58,196 etched names.
Yet there will be a difference. Goldenthal and the Pacific Symphony are attempting to include not only an American, but also a Vietnamese perspective.
In addition to the Vietnamese texts, the tangy pentatonicism of traditional Vietnamese music will inflect parts of the Western musical score. And the voices of Vietnamese children will join in the array of performers.
‘Fire Water Paper’ began when Carl St. Clair, the Pacific Symphony's music director, read a 1991 interview by Washington D.C.-based political columnist Art Buchwald in an airline flight magazine. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Buchwald said, “just seemed like it was crying out for music. I called (the late) Henry Mancini. He wasn't interested.”
But St. Clair was, and he set about making it happen.
After initial overtures to John Williams and John Corigliano, the search for a composer settled on Goldenthal, a New Yorker who has written for the concert hall but is best known for film scores to “Interview with the Vampire”, “Cobb” and “Alien 3”.
Goldenthal, who wrote the Oscar-nominated “Interview with the Vampire” in three weeks, admits he's “a procrastinator.”
“The closest thing I can equate it to is forging swords,” he says. “The important work happens quickly.”
Goldenthal is not a Vietnam veteran, but his father suffered injuries in World War II, so “I knew the inside of a veterans hospital,” he says. He also was deeply interested in the collision of Eastern and Western culture that occurred in Vietnam.
He delved into Vietnamese literature and consulted with local Vietnamese composers and musicians.
In one workshop last summer, Goldenthal presided over a jam session between PSO players and Vietnamese musicians who played traditional instruments.
“It was a very strange cross-fertilization,” Goldenthal says.
Though no actual traditional instruments will play in the orchestra, they will echo in the score, which Goldenthal promises will have “allusions to Vietnamese music.”
Clearly, any memorial to the Vietnam War invites controversy.
“When we first started going around to foundations with this concept, it wasn't met with a great deal of enthusiasm,” St. Clair says.
But like the Wall, if ‘Fire Water Paper’ endures its initial birth pains, it may become an important work.
Trying to go home, Goldenthal feels, is a common theme in the Vietnam conflict, experienced by both Americans and Vietnamese. And so the final movement of his new work deals with the implications of water.
“Water is purification,” Goldenthal says, “water extinguishes fire, and water is the ocean that separates Vietnam from the U.S.”
Water also is the way home.
Ai-Phuong Diane Truong, community fund-raiser, Huntington Beach
“Everything concerning art has no frontier or limit. This piece of music by Elliot Goldenthal and Carl St. Clair should be for remembering and soothing the bitterness. Why do we have to be bitter? We should look to the future rather than think about the past and criticize.”
Peter Gelb, president, Sony Classical
“We hope to get the premiere reviewed on an international basis, and promote it that way. You have a wonderful story here, rich material that is social, historical and ethnic in way that fits in Orange County. We have great expectations for it.”
Jan Allen Heath, Vietnam veteran, Norco
“People think they know about the Vietnam War because they saw it on TV. But that is way off. It was much more complex. For those of us there, we spend the rest of our lives trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, like an unresolved love affair. I think music is a productive way to go about this.”
Trang Nguyen, owner of Little Saigon TV & Radio, Anaheim
“A lot of American people have bad feelings toward Vietnamese people. It's time people should start to accept the Vietnamese people as another group in American culture. We've contributed a lot in the last 20 years.”
Bich-Lien Nguyen, oncologist, Irvine
“I don't really feel literally an American, though I'm a naturalized citizen. Part of me is still somewhere else. I guess this year we talk about a major milestone, because it took us that long to get somewhat established... I don't know how this piece will turn out, but the intention is good.”
Khoa Le, Vietnamese composer and television producer, Santa Ana
“Perhaps someone from the outside, someone who was not inside (Vietnam) to feel the emotions, the terror, the desperation, the hopes... Perhaps based on what that can evoke in him (Goldenthal), from that he can write something that creates those feelings.”
Louis Spisto, vice president and executive director, Pacific Symphony Orchestra
“It is our hope the work will have life beyond the Pacific Symphony and Orange County. It would be wonderful for the PSO to perform this piece again in Washington at some future date, and it would also be wonderful for it to be performed by other orchestras.”
Carl St. Clair, music director, Pacific Symphony Orchestra
“The audience should cry a little, think a lot, reflect a lot, laugh a little, smile some and feel a warm happiness. They should have the whole array of human emotions.”
Goldenthal concedes that the piece will "disappoint everyone a little." Khoa Le, who helped Goldenthal understand Vietnamese music, remarked that it was "too bad" that Oriental music was not much used in the final piece. L.A. Times