The Vietnam War was the defining world event of a decade, and in the years since it ended the conflict has resonated through all of the arts – fiction, poetry, film, dance, popular music, concert music.
None of the concert music has entered the permanent repertory yet, though the three war symphonies of Roger Sessions deserve to. This week, the Boston Symphony Orchestra presents the East Coast premiere of a recent Vietnam oratorio, ‘Fire Water Paper’, by Elliot Goldenthal, a work composed to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of the war, April 30, 1975. A recording of the work has also just been released on a Sony Classical CD, featuring the Pacific Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Carl St. Clair, with Yo-Yo Ma playing the prominent cello solos.
BSO music director Seiji Ozawa has become deeply committed to the Goldenthal oratorio. He revised this season's programs in order to include it. Later Ozawa and the orchestra will tour the work to New York and Washington, D.C. A cultural delegation from Hanoi will attend the Washington performance; Ozawa fervently hopes to present the oratorio in Vietnam as well.
(This week's concerts were sold out in advance because Kathleen Battle appears in the first part of the program. The BSO has worked through Sen. John Kerry's office to arrange for Vietnam veterans and members of the Vietnamese community to attend Thursday morning's dress rehearsal without charge.)
Goldenthal met Ozawa a few years ago through his wife, Julie Taymor, who created the visual dimension of a famous production of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex that Ozawa led at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan and put onto video. Goldenthal played Ozawa the first 20 minutes of his opera-in-progress, Grendel, which is based on the novel by John Gardner, and Ozawa remains interested in conducting the premiere.
The commission for ‘Fire Water Paper’ came not from Ozawa but from one of his protégés, Carl St. Clair (a former BSO assistant conductor), and from St. Clair's orchestra, the Pacific Symphony. That orchestra performs in Orange County, Calif., where the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam lives – as do a substantial number of American veterans of the Vietnam War.
In a note to the recording, St. Clair writes, “I read an article interviewing the author Art Buchwald, who said the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was ‘crying out for music.’” That comment gave impetus to St. Clair's desire to commission just such music. He found his composer, Goldenthal, through an interview he heard on National Public Radio. Goldenthal was talking about two of his works: a collaboration with Taymor, Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass, and the score he had written for the film “Alien 3”.
“Carl heard these interviews in his car,” Goldenthal said in a recent telephone call from his home in New York. “He liked the experimental nature of the film score, and the way the choral work was crafted. When he came to New York, we began a long series of meetings where we talked about many different options – at one point we thought about ending with a popular singer, someone like Tom Waits, who would represent the voice of the homeless. The one thing all of us agreed upon from the start was that children should be involved. Although I did not serve in the war myself, I didn't take this commission lightly: I felt the only way I could do this is to find innocence within myself through the voices of children. This was the first metaphor I found for approaching the work.”
The result is a three-movement, 65-minute oratorio for chorus, children's chorus, soprano and baritone soloists (Jayne West and James Maddalena, in this week's performances) and orchestra. The texts come from the Bible and the Roman Catholic liturgy (the Mass and the Stabat Mater); from old Vietnamese poems and folk songs and a declaration by a self-immolating Vietnamese student, Naht Chi Mai; from classical Roman and French poets; from the Pentagon Papers; and from poems by an African-American Vietnam veteran, Yusef Komunyakaa.
Goldenthal said the most difficult part of creating the oratorio was “researching the text and getting this thing going. The breakthrough was the statement by the woman who burned herself, with a picture of the Virgin Mary on one side and the Buddhist goddess of mercy on the other side, Kuan Yin. She wrote that she wanted to use her body as a torch to illuminate the darkness, to bring peace to Vietnam. This opened the door to medieval and early Renaissance liturgical poetry, like the Stabat Mater. The feminine icons of suffering, compassion and mercy became one of the principal tributaries of the work: We don't hear the male voice until nearly 20 minutes into the piece. And then the baritone soloist sings a poem by a contemporary African-American poet – which is, again, a poem about the immolation of a woman.”
The second movement is a scherzo, fast music of a sort one doesn't associate with works commemorating tragic events. “The one thing we notice with people in adverse situations is that humor becomes the most essential thing. That came across in the forums we had in California with the veterans of Vietnam. The war just kept on going; it became a form of perpetual motion. This was the feeling I wanted to get in the music, which is an almost continuous barrage of eighth notes. There are quotes from many philosophers and poets, all cast in an ironic tone; finally it gets reduced to this list of military operations. I was tempted to put Dean Rusk in, but I had to stop somewhere! Threading through all of this, in slow note values, is the Kyrie from the Mass, as if to say, ‘Yes, yes, but there is lamentation at the heart of this chaos and folly...’”
The third movement posed the largest problem. “I wanted to find something that wouldn't alienate either the Vietnamese or the veterans. I wanted a text that would be inclusive, and I found it in the biblical prophet Jeremiah, and the reference there to water inevitably led me to the boat people, so I bring in another poem by Yusef Komunyakaa where the orchestra comes down to chamber-music proportions, even a string quartet. Then the piece builds again to an anthemic conclusion: You have to leave with a sense that there is a way out of this madness.”
The musical style of ‘Fire Water Paper’ is unashamedly eclectic, a word that doesn't alarm Goldenthal. “I have this library of scores and miniscores, and often when I was confronting a problem I would look up at the names of different composers I admired; looking at those names brought me closer to a solution. I felt as if I were looking back at my favorite composers and asking them for answers. I deliberately wanted to look to the whole range of the past, all the way back to the Middle Ages, because I didn't want to make the music sound like something deliberately locked in the ’60s and ’70s, or locked in the ’90s.”
Goldenthal, who was born in Brooklyn in 1954, studied at the Manhattan School of Music. But he says his most important lessons came in non-academic settings. For seven years he took private lessons every Wednesday with John Corigliano, composer of the opera The Ghosts of Versailles, along with concert music and the score for the film “Altered States”.
And from 1972 on, Goldenthal grew very close to Aaron Copland. “Leonard Bernstein was familiar with my work and very supportive, and he introduced me to Aaron. I would stay at his guesthouse, and although I was not the greatest sight reader, and he was getting on in years, we would read through his orchestral music, playing four-hands at a snail's pace on the piano, and I would ask him ‘How did you do this?' or ‘Why did you do that?' I would never say that Aaron was a formal teacher of mine, but this was one of the most important associations of my life.”
The other has been his collaborative work with Taymor, whom he met in 1981 in connection with an Andy Warhol movie. “The producer was dating Julie, and he introduced us, saying, ‘Here is someone whose work is just as grotesque as yours.' I was a quasi-academic at the time, but when I met Julie, I joined the circus! She put me on the path of theater, which has been an amazing and liberating experience.”
Goldenthal's work with Taymor also led him into the movies. Gus Van Sant, the director of “Drugstore Cowboy,” heard a tape of Juan Darien and used it for the temporary score of the film before inviting Goldenthal to write the official soundtrack. Since then Goldenthal has written the music for “Interview with the Vampire,” “Batman Forever”, “Heat” and other films. “I love working in the movies because you can make a mistake and then correct it – this takes you straight back to the world of Prince Esterhazy and Haydn, where you have the luxury of trying something out and seeing what you can come up with. Few composers have this luxury. Plus, I am a film buff – when I did ‘Batman Forever’, Joel Schumacher said, ‘This is a comic-book opera; just have fun.’ So that's what I did.”
Because Taymor comes from the Boston area, Goldenthal has many local associations. With her, he did “an irreverent musical,” Liberty’s Taken, at the Castle Hill Festival in Ipswich, and he has composed several scores for productions at the American Repertory Theatre (King Stag, The Serpent Woman, The Love for Three Oranges). “The people at the ART are like family. And I love seafood, so naturally I love Boston too.”