Three years ago, Carl St. Clair, the director of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra in Orange County, Calif., came up with a daunting project for his ensemble. Inspired by a remark by the political columnist Art Buchwald, who said that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was “crying out for music”, and with the 20th anniversary of the end of the war coming up in April 1995, he was determined to commission a work that would be both monumental and moving. He also sought to address a local need. Orange County has the largest Vietnamese population outside Vietnam, as well as thousands of American veterans. He wanted a work that would reach out to both groups, and, for that matter, to those who had protested the war.
There was a certain logic to his choice of Elliot Goldenthal to compose the piece, which will be performed tonight and tomorrow night at Carnegie Hall. Like Mr. St. Clair, Mr. Goldenthal, 41, came of age during the Vietnam War, and has vivid memories of the divisions it caused in American society. And although he has composed many concert works, he is best known for his film music, a medium that puts a premium on grand gesture, vivid orchestral color, emotional directness, and immediate accessibility. The sober oratorio that Mr. Goldenthal produced, ‘Fire Water Paper’, has many of the qualities one hears in his dark, often wrenching scores for “Heat” and “Interview with the Vampire”, as well as the power and eclecticism of his music for “Batman Forever”.
Immediately after the premiere last April, Mr. St. Clair, his orchestra, and a handful of local choruses recorded it for Sony Classical, with Yo-Yo Ma playing its prominent cello solo and Ann Panagulias and James Maddalena as the vocal soloists. The disk has just been released. Seiji Ozawa will conduct the Boston Symphony in the Carnegie Hall concerts. Mr. Ozawa conducted it in Boston last week and is to present it at the Kennedy Center on Saturday.
“When I began composing this work, about two years ago,” Mr. Goldenthal said the other night, “I had not a shred of inspiration in terms of musical ideas. So instead of approaching it from the musical end, I began with the text. And it was kind of spooky, because on May 16, 1994, I was looking through a compendium of Vietnamese poetry by Nhat Chi Mai, who was a young Buddhist woman who immolated herself one exactly that date – May 16 – in 1967. She went up to a pagoda, holding pictures of the Virgin Mary and a Vietnamese goddess, and a sign that said, ‘I wish to use my body as a torch to dissipate the darkness, to waken love among men and to bring peace to Vietnam.’ So that text is the first thing the solo soprano sings.”
Mr. Goldenthal said he began thinking “that Vietnam is both a Buddhist country and a Roman Catholic country, and that I could draw on both traditions.”
“So in the first movement, ‘Offertorium’, I use the Stabat Mater, which is about sharing the pain that Mary must have felt, as well as Buddhist aphorisms and Vietnamese poetry,” he said. “As an act of negation, I left the male voice out of the work for the first 15 minutes and I began with a chamber sound that gradually becomes the sound of a full Romantic orchestra. The first time you hear the baritone singing, he is singing a text by Yusef Komunyakaa, about seeing a child burning on a hill. It’s a very arresting poem that suggests horror and transfigured beauty at the same time.” The composer maintained his juxtaposition of Catholic liturgy, Buddhist writings, and contemporary Vietnamese poetry throughout the work. In ‘Giang Co’ (‘Tug of War’ in Vietnamese), quotations about war from Horace, Tacitus, Virgil, and other ancient writers are set between fragments of Vietnamese folk song and lists of code names for military operations, drawn from the Pentagon Papers. The finale, ‘Hymn’, draws on a Komunyakaa poem ‘Boat People’, as well as one of the more consoling sections of the Book of Jeremiah.
There are more subtle touches. A doleful setting of the Kyrie, from the Mass, is sung in French rather than Latin to suggest the French colonial presence in Vietnam before the American involvement. There is also an electronically sampled and manipulated fragment of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The solo cello line, Mr. Goldenthal said, is meant to “express the things that I didn’t feel could be expressed in language – that feeling of a raw nerve of flayed skin.” But although Mr. Goldenthal attended workshops on Vietnamese poetry and folk music while he was composing, he did not quote Vietnamese music directly.
“Vietnamese music is a very highly developed classical musical language,” he said, “and I didn’t want to try to reproduce it. I also didn’t want to continue the tradition of imperialism, certainly not in music. So I interpreted the music through the texts.”
Like many composers who write for film, Mr. Goldenthal uses an eclectic language that refers at least obliquely to works in the standard repertory. But he denies some of the influences critics have spotted in ‘Fire Water Paper’. In the Scherzo, for example, an explosively rhythmic chord sequence, sung by the choir, calls to mind Carl Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’. And the entire concept of the work seems to owe at least a conceptual debt to Benjamin Britten’s pacifist ‘War Requiem’.
“Actually, the section that has been compared to Orff,” Mr. Goldenthal says, “is just a big-band jazz configuration. If you give that kind of rhythmic punctuation to a chorus, it will sound like Orff, I guess. But no one thought of Orff when I used that same kind of figuration, scored for orchestral and jazz instruments, in ‘Batman Forever’. As for Britten, I love his music and I know that the ‘War Requiem’ is a towering work, but I’ve never heard it. And when I was composing this, I very consciously decided not to hear it, so that I wouldn’t be influenced.
“So, on Orff, I plead not guilty. On Britten, I plead not guilty. But if someone says Mahler, I’m guilty. There’s a section in the finale that alludes to the kind of harmony you hear in the Mahler 10th, and that’s a reference to the spookiness I felt the first time I heard that piece. It was as if Mahler were offering a premonition of all the horrors of the 20th century. Yet there isn’t a single note of Mahler that I’ve actually borrowed. It’s just a stylistic reference.”
Mr. Goldenthal was born in Brooklyn in 1954, and grew up there. As a child, he studied the piano, but his interests included jazz and rock. As a teen-ager, he played trumpet and piano and sang in a touring blues band, and was at Woodstock in 1969 to hear Hendrix’s famous performance of the national anthem.
But he also composed a ballet, Variations on Early Glimpses, which was given a fully choreographed performance at his high school in Coney Island when he was 14. It was a performance of Stravinsky’s spiky, rhythmically driven ‘Concerto for Piano and Winds’ that pushed him decisively toward classical composition. Through the 1970s, he studied with John Corigliano, and in the 1980s he worked informally with Aaron Copland. His first works were for classical ensembles, including an early brass quintet that was published and reviewed enthusiastically after its first performance, but that was never played again.
With the director and designer Julie Taymor, who is also his longtime companion, he began writing theater works, including Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass, Transposed Heads, and, most recently, The Green Bird. They also collaborated on an opera, Grendel, based partly on Beowulf (the choral parts are in Old English) and partly on John Gardner’s writings.
Mr. Goldenthal’s first taste of film work was in the late 1970s when he scored Andy Warhol’s “Blank Generation”.
“This was something I’d always wanted to do,” he said. “But that film got me nowhere in terms of getting another movie. The more direct route was through the theater. Gus Van Sant had used my score for Juan Darién as the temporary score for ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ in 1988, and he asked me to replace it with a new score. That was a breakthrough for me.”
Mr. Goldenthal’s film credits also include “Cobb”, “Alien 3”, “Pet Sematary”, “Demolition Man”, and “Golden Gate”. He has recently completed film scores for “Michael Collins”, “A Time to Kill”, based on the John Grisham novel, and “Voices from a Locked Room”, about the British composer Peter Warlock.
In the offing are several non-film projects, including a Concerto for Trumpet and Piano, which he is composing for Wynton Marsalis, Yefim Bronfman, and the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who are to record it for Sony Classical in December. And it may be that the attention ‘Fire Water Paper’ brings to Mr. Goldenthal will lead to a revival of some of his earlier concert works.
“I hope so,” he said, “but I don’t think a lot about it. I feel more strongly that I should just keep moving on. It takes so long to eke out an orchestral voice. Now I feel I’m coming closer to it. But at a snail’s pace.”