You may know of Elliot Goldenthal as the man who makes music for “Batman” these days, or the composer of ‘Fire Paper Water’, an oratorio in memory of the Vietnam War, or even as a Tony Award-nominated Broadway guy for Juan Darien, A Carnival Mass.
But this week, he's the composer of Othello, which is that rarity in the 20th century – a full-length ballet to a newly commissioned score.
Othello is best known in the dance world as “The Moor's Pavane,” a 20-minute distillation of the tragedy that many consider Jose Limon's masterpiece. It uses the music of Henry Purcell, the great 17th-century English composer. Goldenthal’s is “really the first full-length Othello ever composed,” he said over the telephone before leaving New York. (He's been in San Francisco working with the ballet company since midweek.) “I was amazed to hear that – that a perfect subject for dance and classical ballet was never exploited.”
Goldenthal, 43, has worked in dance before, “but never classical ballet. There's a big difference…,” he says. “Where you're telling a story, where Iago walks into a room and then Emilia follows him and they plot something against Othello, etc., etc., I mean, that sort of thing, I've never done. Never anything narrative.” (He has composed incidental music for “six or eight” Shakespeare plays, but that kind of music is generally “transitional,” he says, not narrative.)
For a composer, “There are some requirements, some limitations, that are naturally inherent in dance,” says Goldenthal. “For example, you can't have a solo that lasts 20 minutes, or you can't really sustain a corps de ballet scene for long, long periods of time, because of the body's limitations.”
“Othello” may be the talkiest of the major tragedies – a play in which nothing actually happens until the murder in the last act. How do you make music – dance music – out of that?
All in Interpretation
“Well,” he replies, “the talking is expressing states of being, anyway -- suggesting characters in their extreme. So, for example, you really have to choose an interpretation of the Shakespeare. And so, for example, we chose Cassio as being a very warm, decent man, and not a person that you might suspect of some sort of wrongdoing to Othello; and we chose Iago as being an extremely complex character, who's capable of wild personality changes at the drop of a dime.
“You know, his music [that] ends Act I, it's definitely the most harmonically, rhythmically complex music.”
Like the “Credo” that Iago sings in Verdi's “Otello”?
“Yes. In the Verdi, and especially in 'Othello,' you have a long way to go. You have a long way to go. Everyone knows what's going to happen. And you're just watching the deterioration of this person, that brings him to his heinous act, killing his wife.
“You know, you have to have some lyricism,” says Goldenthal, “and some moments of fun.”
Shakespeare's Othello, of course, is set in Venice and on Cyprus. Choreographer Lar Lubovitch and Goldenthal are thinking more in terms of New Orleans, “our Venice... the masked productions and the public display of theatricality.
“The set suggests courts, church, throne,” he says. “But the overriding metaphor is that of glass – the fragility of glass, how glass can turn into shards, how glass lets you view into a person, how glass can turn into space.”
The first act of the ballet, “of course, there's a lot of exposition,” he says, “so you'll have a lot of disparate sections of music. [It] ends with one long duet [between] Iago and Emilia.”
For Act 2, “We've tried to spin a very, very long tarantella – like, a half-hour-long tarantella... one continuous piece of developed music” (which is going to make the creation of an Othello suite, should anyone want one, kind of tricky).
“The third act, the elements of the first act are developed – and warped, so to speak – and what's very important is [that] a lyrical section from the first act, which suggests kind of a basic purity of the love that they had, comes back during the death scene at the end. It's not an ugly death – or an ugly murder.”
Little Second-Guessing
Goldenthal has a reputation for being a quick worker, based partly on his “Interview with the Vampire” score, created in less than a month after writer/director Neil Jordan found himself dissatisfied with the film music George Fenton had given him.
Actually, though, “It's not that I write quickly,” he says. “It's just that I found that it's very difficult to improve on stuff, so I just leave the first couple of tries alone, you know? Once I start beating it into the ground, it loses something. I might give the impression of working quickly, but it's just that I realize that working harder and harder and harder, for me, doesn't mean that it's gonna be better.
“But it did take me about a year.”
Since Lubovitch needed chunks of music to work with, “it made it very disciplined for me to get the work done way in advance... Sometimes Lar was only three minutes behind me. He'd rush in the house and he'd hear three minutes of music that he'd have to choreograph two days later... The first performance was the first [full] run-through.”
How'd it go?
“Excellent! Oh, boy! Any moment,” remembers Goldenthal, “there could have been so many disasters. Well, there were mistakes. But unless you're sitting there with the score or some kind of Labanotation, you wouldn't know.”
Next for Goldenthal: The new Neil Jordan movie, “Butcher Boy,” which is coming soon to a theater near you, and another Jordan work, “In Dreams,” which is in the can. He has to finish a concerto for trumpet and piano that Sony Classical commissioned for Wynton Marsalis and Yefim Bronfman, “about a 20-minute piece.”
And he and Julie Taymor, his wife and sometime collaborator (she is the now-celebrated director of “The Lion King” on Broadway) are working on an opera based both on Beowulf and on John Gardner's short novel, Grendel. “Actually the novella is extremely adaptable,” he says, “because it's almost like a libretto... All the characters sing in Old English except Beowulf, who sings in, sort of, Gardner's 1960s tongue.”
Is this for Broadway? “Well, Menotti got operas on Broadway, but I don't think so,” he says. Although “I think it's just as difficult – frustrating – in terms of opera companies and their long, long schedules and the complexity of putting on anything that's that visual. We're going to set it on the ice, you know? Fake ice, like Teflon.”