Grendel retells the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view. Reading the novella in high school, I remember thinking that Gardner had found a terrific way to describe the agonies of adolescence.
Yeah, Grendel hears the party going on, but he isn't invited. And when he finds out what is going on at the party, it's a disappointment. Twentieth-century thought is that you have so many choices – technology, religion, free love, all of these choices that haven't been working out so well. Religion is synonymous with war and intolerance. Technology drives us further into loneliness. The humans in the opera see Grendel only as a monster, but he has this complete awareness of everything, the hypocrisy and vanity, and he sees that these approaches to philosophy, to life really, will all fail them. So the beast is the one crying at us, “Wake up, wake up!”
What is he looking for in this philosophical quest?
Well, simple things. Grendel wants love, probably a family, a peaceful life and death. But he's constantly confounded...
...by his dealings with the outside world...
...until Beowulf arrives and smashes his head against a rock. At the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, death forces Grendel into poetry. He says, “Grendel had an accident.” And then he turns to the audience and says, “May you all...,” and you think, “May you all perish – may you all suffer by having your arm torn off!” But no, he was saying that Beowulf pushed him towards poetry.
“May you all have an accident that opens you up to the world.”
Grendel dies fulfilled, because he finally has this insight.
When did you first begin to hear the “sound” of this monster/seeker?
Julie and I were talking about all sorts of ideas for Grendel, even a rock opera, but the character Grendel [sung in Los Angeles by Eric Owens] was always going to be a bass-baritone. Then we decided to combine Gardner's story with elements of the original Beowulf legend. I also became interested in Schoenberg's Erwartung, where nothing much dramatic happens, and time is both a kind of lens and a kind of fog. So our opera is really a two-act monologue for Grendel.
There are many other characters, though – King Hrothgar, Queen Weltheow, the Shaper, who is a court poet, and of course Beowulf himself.
Grendel encounters these characters, but they all reject him, and he never really interacts with them. So there aren't duets and trios in the traditional fashion. What happens is, Grendel has ‘shadows’ – a tenor Grendel, a baritone Grendel, a bass Grendel – and he sings with them, which allows for an ensemble sonority that would be missing otherwise. And finally, I had this idea that Grendel was a character without a perfect fifth in his melodic or harmonic repertory.... Grendel has a kind of self-deprecating gallows humor, so his music ends up flying away from tonality.
The chorus sings in Old English, which adds to their strangeness, both for Grendel and for the audience.
All of the humans sing in Old English. It's meant to be strange, but it is also a chance to be immersed in a new and beautiful language-soundscape. I think of it as an aural treat.
Grendel also has an encounter with a dragon. You've cast Denyce Graves as this crusty, cynical, sarcastic old miser!
She's like Arachne, spinning a web around Grendel, which comes out as a kind of onslaught of language. It's very dense music, and it isn't meant to be grasped at that moment by the audience, because Grendel just can't understand her. The challenge for me was to keep away from Denyce's beautiful soprano range for as long as possible. She sings like a contralto for a good six minutes, before slowly working up into Klytamnestra territory. When you finally hear these soprano notes that you've been denied, hopefully it will have an impact.
Are there other aural guideposts?
Well, Grendel thinks of his mother as a character in a sideshow, so there is a bit of circus music, with a small bass drum and cheap cymbals. There are two electric guitars in the orchestra. But really, that's just the way composers work. We all have these references, from the circus, from Carpathian folk music, from jazz, from Jimi Hendrix, that we've picked up, and they're all mixed together.