Anglo-Saxon Opera

That last sentence is a truism for any modern composer. But the rest of the sentiment is surprisingly humble coming from someone who works regularly in Hollywood–and particularly odd coming from the man who scored one of the most ambitious new operas in recent memory.

Grendel, with a $2.8-million budget, was the cornerstone of the Los Angeles Opera’s 20th-anniversary season. The joint production with Lincoln Center premiered in Los Angeles last year and was later staged in New York as the centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival. The bicoastal nature of the project was fitting: Grendel was, more than anything else, a high-minded partnership between Hollywood and Broadway. And as style often trumps substance in those arenas, so it was with Grendel. What came close to being a dramatic philosophical exploration of existence and evil ended up a striking show without the story and songs necessary for great opera.

Grendel was Goldenthal’s first opera; he is best known as a film composer. He’s scored almost two-dozen films, including Michael Collins, Batman Forever, and Alien 3, and won an Academy Award for the soundtrack to the Frida Kahlo biopic Frida. That film was directed by his partner, both personal and professional, Julie Taymor. Taymor’s work is varied–she directed the thrillingly vicious Shakespeare film Titus and the Disney smash Broadway musical The Lion King–but it usually involves spectacle. Grendel, which she directed and for which she co-wrote the libretto, is no exception.

Its lofty ambitions on that score–countless monstrous, moving puppets; scenes of fire and ice; a towering set with the white snow-covered peaks of Denmark on one side and the dark and brutal underworld on the other–threatened to destroy the opera before it even opened. The Los Angeles Opera sent critics an email just two days before the scheduled opening informing us that it was cancelled due to “technical and mechanical problems.” The company later announced the opening would be moved back almost two weeks. Reports indicated that the computer controlling George Tsypin’s rotating set failed, then the mechanics of the set itself. The postponement cost the company $300,000.

For all the pyrotechnics, this was spectacle that was meant to be serious. Taymor wrote the libretto with poet J.D. McClatchy, the editor of Yale Review and sometime librettist–of Ned Rorem’s Our Town, for example–based on John Gardner’s 1971 novel. That philosophical fiction was a retelling of the Beowulf epic from the ogre Grendel’s point of view. The triumphant Geatish warrior Beowulf hardly makes an appearance in this version of the 9th-century epic. Instead, we are asked to understand what might have made a man a monster.

Grendel is subtitled Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. It’s not clear what definition of that first word Taymor and McClatchy had in mind. It seems unlikely to have been “a state of being above and independent of the material universe,” as Grendel is very much affected by his surroundings. So that leaves the monster “beyond the limits of experience and hence unknowable,” or “surpassing others; preeminent or supreme.” Either is, in terms of a premise regarding evil, equally intriguing.

My bet is on the latter, though. Grendel is the most knowable character in this opera. Not only do we hear more from this descendent of Cain than from any other character, he’s also the only one who speaks in a language we can readily understand. Just about everyone else sings in the Old English in which Beowulf was written; Grendel is made the most accessible by singing in contemporary English.

No fumbling, mumbling monster is he. In fact, Grendel comes across here as a barbarian with a brain, an environmentalist having an existential crisis. Though he kills capriciously, he’s at least conflicted about it from the very beginning–of the opera, anyway: “The season is once again upon us,” the American bass Eric Owens as Grendel sings by way of introduction, “and so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war.”

The results have a terrible beauty. Early on, there’s a moving scene of mourning for a dead warrior. Bereft women dance their grief to Angelin Preljocaj’s graceful choreography. Constance Hoffman’s simple costumes somehow add to the feeling of sadness: “Fire cleanses, life is cheap,” we’re told of this medieval world. “Old men shiver, women weep.”

But our sympathies aren’t long with Hrothgar’s kingdom. Grendel tells us that these heartbroken men and women may have brought their problems on themselves. Grendel watched his father die at their hands; then the boy was bullied for being a strange sort of creature. “This whole s–t-ass scene was his idea, not mine,” a defensive Grendel says of Unferth, in the poem Beowulf’s foil, whose own attempts to slay the monster have been unsuccessful.

It’s not merely a personal vendetta, however. Grendel, a Tolkienesque environmentalist, is horrified by King Hrothgar’s plans to conquer the area: “There was nothing to stop the advance of man,” he says, as if in explanation for trying to stop it himself.

Grendel comes off as a kind of victim-hero in this telling, rather than the killer of would-be heroes he was known to be for centuries. He has some sympathy for his nemeses: “I thought heroes were lines in a poem. Such a burden now, being a hero,” he says, in one of the opera’s many meta moments. But he manages to take away the heroism of the hero. Beowulf isn’t even a real character in this opera. He’s voiced by a chorus and played by a dancer (Desmond Richardson, in a thankless role).

The Old English epic gave Beowulf immortality by making him the dragon-slayer. But Grendel implies that its title character became suicidal, tired of that “idiotic war.” “I will fall. I want to fall. I will my fall. So may you all,” Grendel declares before dying.

He has little humility. But perhaps that of his musical creator was in the right place: The ambition of Goldenthal and Taymor’s Grendel–opera for the people, perhaps–might have been misplaced. Opera tends to be plot-driven, not character-driven. The broad brush of the genre isn’t particularly suited to the fine-tuning of psychology and motivation. Just as it’s difficult to make a three-hour monologue compelling, it’s difficult to make a three-hour aria involving. There simply isn’t enough interplay between the characters in Grendel, which is composed mostly of solos.

Grendel doesn’t fail for lack of talent. The titular monster is rarely offstage, and even less rarely heard. Eric Owens must carry the opera on his own and he proves himself capable: His bass is strong and clear, and with his excellent enunciation, he must now be the go-to bass for English-language opera. Owens was very funny in a smaller role as General Groves in the San Francisco Opera’s premiere of Doctor Atomic; in Grendel he reminds us of his great sense of comedy.

Not everyone has his strong voice, which I suppose is why some of the singers were amplified. At least Taymor got creative about this unfortunate decision. When King Hrothgar is discussing his plans for domination, a page comes in with a megaphone to amplify his voice as he makes his announcement. (This play on the staging was actually quite effective, though no excuse for the rest of the mikes.)

One other vocalist did stand out. The singing of soprano Laura Claycomb as Queen Wealtheow was absolutely beautiful. This lyric coloratura, who got her start at the San Francisco Opera, is as comfortable in the Baroque repertoire as she is in the modern. Unfortunately, her character inspires some of the opera’s worst lines. Grendel falls in love with this beauty–it’s an ambivalent love, of course, as the venomous monster talks about the “ugliness between her legs”–and it seems to have muddled his normally thoughtful head, leading him to utter such howlingly bad lines as: “She glistened like the dawn on the silver hills.”

Two characters did the most to explicate Grendel‘s dark themes. The Shaper, a wise, blind storyteller voiced by tenor Richard Croft, was the most sympathetic character after Grendel himself. The harp player’s goodness almost brings Grendel over from the dark side.

The American mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves had a big cameo as the sage-like Dragon. She had fun with the slightly campy role, getting more than a few laughs with knowing lines like, “It’s damned hard, you understand, confining myself to concepts understood during the dark ages.” Unfortunately, the addition of a character meant to stand out didn’t do much to allay the problem of a lack of interaction. Her work was more of a set piece that actually made the action lag, and the legendary singer wasn’t much more than serviceable in the position. At times, she was washed out by the orchestra.

The Dragon did serve to reinforce the theme of monster as hero. She told Grendel that he actually inspires man: “Scare him to glory!” she urges him. (Never mind that, as a mourner at the deathbed of the Shaper remarks, “Death empties the world of all its glory.”) And if he gives up on that “idiotic” massacre? Someone else will take his place. The war between good and evil–and man’s need for inspiration in some form to goad him on–will always continue. These are some of the most interesting thoughts in the libretto, and they help bring on Grendel’s existential crisis. Sadly, their potential is wasted on a few short scenes.

If the structure set the stage for a less-than-engaging opera, the music did nothing to alleviate the feeling, filled as it was with melodramatic moments. As in the genre of film scores in which Goldenthal made his name, Grendel‘s music hits us over the head with what we’re supposed to think and feel. There’s not enough subtlety to give the score staying power. That’s not to say there were no memorable moments. Seeing the troll dancing to jazz as we return from intermission was a surprising and delightful moment, made possible by the talents of composer, choreographer, and vocalist. And Goldenthal manages to summon some power toward the end: As Grendel sings his defiant “I will my fall,” Goldenthal’s music grows expansive enough to capture the climactic moment.

Grendel‘s failings didn’t go unnoticed by the audience. “I’ve never seen an abstract opera before,” one attendee remarked at intermission. “I wonder how many people will come back?” asked another.

But Grendel was actually a triumph–in terms of sales. It exceeded box office projections, selling out its final three performances, and the company considered reviving the opera for its 2007-08 season. It wasn’t Taymor’s first operatic success: Her 2005-06 Metropolitan Opera production of The Magic Flute was revised and restaged this season. It was also cut down to a 100-minute version aimed at families, to be shown over the holidays, and as the first of the live Met high-definition satellite feeds shown in movie theaters across North America and in parts of Europe.

But should we expect anything less from a collaboration between Hollywood and Broadway? The one really successful element of Grendel was its spectacle. Besides a cast of 30 singers, 30 dancers, and 60 members of the chorus, imaginative creatures of all stripes populated the stage, in between the funeral pyres and projections. Taymor is known for her puppet wizardry and it was on full display in Grendel, with the incredible denizens of the underworld that puppet master Michael Curry helped her create. Taymor also did a good job of integrating the disparate elements of singing, dancing, action, and set. Her staging may be remembered, even if the opera won’t be.

A premiere’s production values aren’t enough to give an opera a place in the repertoire. You have to wonder if all that time and energy–work that almost kept the show from being staged at all–might have been better spent creating a compelling story with compelling music. In fact, one of the most memorable scenes in the opera was fashioned with pretty low-tech effects: As Grendel grandly repeats “I am invulnerable,” his shadow gets larger and larger, adding to the sense of dread mixed with hubris. And in Grendel, the story and the opera, there was plenty of hubris. Elliot Goldenthal may be modest about his musical talent. But Julie Taymor has much larger dreams.

Kelly Jane Torrance, arts and entertainment writer at the Washington Times, is fiction editor of Doublethink. She writes on culture at kellyjanetorrance.com.