When ABT commissioned Elliot Goldenthal to write the music for Lar Lubovitch's Othello, the company got a composer used to the demands of specific action within precise time periods. Goldenthal, after all, has scored movies with remarkable flexibility of style (“Drugstore Cowboy”, “Interview with the Vampire”, “Michael Collins”). But he's no stranger to theater; his music for Juan Darien just won a Tony nomination, as did the direction and designs by his companion, Julie Taymor.
Talking by phone before and during sessions in Los Angeles devoted to scoring Batman & Robin, he zeroed in enthusiastically, with the pride of a composer in happy compliance with a choreographer, on Othello's structure and musical character. “The first act opens with a wedding pageant in Venice – Othello and Desdemona's wedding. It's a series of separate numbers, with lots of Renaissance Venetian musical flavor. But it's not pastiche; it's my music. Here and later, the old Italian reflections morph into a New Orleans jazz style. And the first act ends with a big pas de deux for lago and Amelia over Desdemona's handkerchief.” The score for that pas de deux begins with frenetic syncopations of nervous energy, continues into a slow, melodious section (Iago's seduction or a reference to Desdemona?), switches back to extreme orchestral violence (the percussion includes the rhythmically precise banging of trash cans), and finally a sudden, slow lyricism that gradually forsakes the full orchestra and focuses on undulating brass. Act I's buildup of Iago's machinations on Cyprus is musicalized, according to Goldenthal, in one unbroken trajectory, and the deadly denouement “suggests the murder of Desdemona as signaling her entrance into another world.” That sequence of murder and suicide “is a fast, brief series of actions, with no time to ponder each effect, as with Verdi's opera.”