Olivier and Leigh, Davis and Dee, Lunt and Fontanne: Downtown New York’s answer to those legendary theatrical couples may be Elliot Goldenthal and Julie Taymor.
Goldenthal is a composer of concert, stage and film music who won an Oscar for his "Frida" score. Taymor is the first woman to win a Tony as best director (for "The Lion King"), a visionary designer and puppet artist who created a wondrous staging of Mozart’s "The Magic Flute" for the Metropolitan Opera in 2004. The two are partners in life and in art: Goldenthal wrote the music and Taymor directed and co-authored the text for the opera Grendel, which tells the "Beowulf" saga through the eyes of the frightful "earth-rim-roamer." Grendel receives its local premiere Tuesday at Lincoln Center, with additional performances Thursday, Saturday and next Sunday.
Still recovering from a head injury he suffered last year, Goldenthal lobbed his zingers deliberately but with a glint in his eye. The couple met with Newsday contributor Marion Lignana Rosenberg at their Ladies’ Mile aerie.
Maestro, how are you coming along after your accident?
EG: That was a publicity stunt. It was designed to have evil critics take pity on me. No, the truth is, I had an accident and it didn’t affect the work at all. It squashed my oratorical and stand-up careers.
Grendel is a joint project, correct?
JT: We came to the material individually, in the 1970s, before we knew each other. Then we did a musical together, Liberty’s Taken, and found that we were both interested in John Gardner’s novel Grendel. We decided to try and pit the ‘Beowulf’ epic poem against Gardner.
We first started working on Grendel in 1985. At the beginning, we had this big idea that everyone would sing but that Grendel would be an actor, to pin-spot his ‘outsiderness’. But a few years later, I decided to write the first scene, and we came to the conclusion that Grendel would indeed have a lot of power as a singing role.
What is it like finally to give birth to a project you’ve been working on for 20 years?
It’s great to give birth to an infant, but to give birth to a 20-year-old…
I think you do have a career in comedy, Elliot!
The fact of the matter is, we worked on it for a brief period, then we put it in the closet up until the last three years.
An opera on this scale has to be commissioned. By the time that happened, with Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Opera, Elliot started working on it again and we brought in J.D. McClatchy to co-write the libretto. Then, I remember feeling very nervous a month or two before when I hadn’t heard all the music. Can you keep that kind of enthusiasm for material where you had the inspiration 20 years ago? But Elliot’s music was fresh and new - and as a director, I got to respond to something that was current.
What does an opera about a monster have to say to audiences in 2006?
One person’s monster is another person’s hero. Grendel gets to see all of this very clearly - the hypocrisy of religion, philosophy, political positioning, even destroying the environment. Also, many of the characters speak in an arcane way, but in the Gardner novel and the opera, Grendel speaks in a very colloquial style.
The point of Grendel, also, is that he is us. So when we say ‘the monster’, it’s Gardner’s clever way for us to look at ourselves with outsiders’ eyes. Today, we have a need to do that. We’ve become so myopic and insular. We’re so quick to say: This is a religion of infidels...
Or someone else is quick to say...
Or someone else: Our religion is the best religion; our god is the right god. Whether it’s communists, homosexuals, Islamic terrorists, immigrants from south of the border – people have a need to create enemies.
Composers who write for film and theater are sometimes treated as second-class citizens in the concert-music establishment. Has this been your experience?
Every composer I’ve ever met loves these mediums: John Corigliano, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, Tan Dun... Shostakovich wrote over 40 film scores. If they are second-class citizens, I’ll go the second-class citizen route.
The press raised a kerfuffle when the Los Angeles Grendel premiere was postponed following set-related problems – almost as if opera’s theatrical dimensions were extraneous to the form.
I don’t understand that. To us, it was a technical difficulty – end of boring story.
The smart guys around Monteverdi’s time strongly believed in operas five-and-a-half hours long that included all the arts. Many critics – first-class citizens, I might add – have a reactionary reaction to operas in thinking that you have to strip away the theater art in order to duplicate the experience of listening to a recording.
What joys and challenges come with being partners in art and life?
Any collaborator is a life partner, so I don’t find it any different, really. However, when a person is around you, you have to make decisions. For me - and Julie was very kind about this - I didn’t want to reveal the opera until it was two-thirds written. That put a lot of pressure on her, because she had to figure out the blocking very quickly. I did this because Julie has a wonderful ear and opinions, and I would probably have been influenced the whole way.
JT: In other words, I’m too opinionated.