How long have you been working on Grendel?
I haven’t been working on Grendel that long; it’s just that from time to time there have been offers from opera or theater companies that would make Grendel a reality. So I’ve just kept it on the shelf until someone is really serious about it. I already have a half hour, or a lot of the first act, written. After I get the green light I’ll have to spend a year on it exclusively. I’m not going to work on this opera unless I know there’s going to be a commission. What I want to accomplish in this opera is too complicated and I have to be alive to do it.
I understand this is another project with Julie. What is her role here?
She co-wrote the libretto with me. John Gardner wrote the novella which we’re culling and extracting from the Beowulf legend, which is the first old English book written probably around 700 A.D. in old English; that’s sort of halfway between English and German. Julie is directing and designing the costumes and any kind of puppetry involved. George Tsipyn, a former Soviet genius, will design the stage sets.
What is your unique twist in creating Grendel?
There were some advances in the American musical in the world of opera, in terms of jazz dancing, jazz music, and rock music, so that somehow the world of opera was deflated and brought into a more popularist mode in the American musical. But yet someone can’t deny that something like West Side Story is an art. The colliding of serious operatic singing with forms of rock, jazz, and tap dance, for example – if it works out that way, those forms might seem like a collision, but completely natural as American – might create something really fresh.
Is there any particular place you’d like Grendel to be performed?
I think I’d like it to be performed in a festival setting as opposed to being in an opera repertoire setting or on a Broadway stage. In a festival setting when you have something that might run ten or twelve times, people have different expectations; they’re looking for something like the New York Theater Festival in Vienna, something that’s a little bit more challenging because you have a different audience. A regular opera audience would probably walk out of a work like this because it doesn’t sound like their usual fare and that’s not why they paid their money to be there.
Any estimate at all when Grendel will be ready?
It’s a year from whenever. There’s talk now of it happening at Lincoln Center, New York, and in Vienna. Vienna in 2001 and in Lincoln Center later that summer. But that’s too fast for me, so I’d rather it happens in the spring in Vienna in 2002 and the summer of 2002 in New York.