From War Wounds to Words : O.C. Music: Elliot Goldenthal says his oratorio, ‘Fire Water Paper,’ does not take sides but comes ‘from the heart.’

The two-year wait ends tonight.

“Fire Water Paper,” Elliot Goldenthal’s oratorio commemorating the suffering inflicted by the Vietnam War, will premiere at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, played by the Pacific Symphony under Carl St.Clair.

The orchestra commissioned the piece in June, 1993, after St.Clair read an interview in which humor columnist Art Buchwald said the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., “was just waiting for music.”

Goldenthal recalls his reaction to the commission: “My God, how can I ever write anything like that?” But now the former student of John Corigliano hopes his work “would inspire many other organizations and composers” to write about the war experience.

More widely known for his film scores (“Drugstore Cowboy,” “Alien III,” “Interview With the Vampire”) than his classical works (“Juan Darien--A Carnival Mass”), Goldenthal, 40, is the first to say his hourlong piece is not definitive.

“In no way do I feel I have encapsulated the whole thing. If I had 50 years, I could write a different piece (about the war) every year that has a completely different take because the subject is so vast.”

He stressed that he doesn’t take sides in the piece. “I stayed away from politics--even though that is a political act--but there’s been so much soapboxing and stuff. I just stuck to things that come from the heart.”

Goldenthal, who lives in New York, assembled his own text for his oratorio by coming to Orange County to meet with former veterans and with Vietnamese musicians.

He also “read so much poetry of the Vietnamese vets and from the North Vietnamese, from people who ran orphanages, amateur poets, published poets, vets at hospitals, letters from home.

“It went on and on and on. . . . (I was) deluged with text, and the decision what to use came rather late.”

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In fact, Goldenthal said, he caught some flak for taking so long to write the piece.

“So many people felt that I was coming in late with this, that I was procrastinating. But the truth is that choosing the text was so difficult. The text was the most difficult thing to try to navigate.”

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He says the turning point came when he read the note that Nyaht Chi Mai, a Buddhist nun and social worker, left before setting herself ablaze in Saigon in 1967.

“She held up a picture of the Virgin Mary and a picture of Quan Yin, a Buddhist goddess of mercy, and wrote, ‘I want to use my body as a torch to dissipate the darkness, to waken love among men and to bring peace to Vietnam.’ She was very vocal that she was not political. She wasn’t Communist. She wasn’t this; she wasn’t that.”

Goldenthal said he also drew from the Bible, the Requiem Mass, the Stabat Mater and Vietnamese classical texts and traditional materials.

The material “forces you to be honest,” he said. “If you’re writing an abstract chamber work, you can be truthful to yourself in an Aristotelian way. When you’re working on a film score, you’re truthful to the material and you try to achieve the objectives that your collaborators have.

“But something like this, you stare at the empty page and look at the text and know there’s another kind of honesty that has to take place because of the wounds that haven’t healed, the people still being affected, the boat people who are still out there, the veterans who have been wounded, the families that have been destroyed. You just can’t be cavalier about it.

“I’m not trying to shake the world. I’m not trying to heal the wounds. I’m just trying to stay within myself. If I stay within myself and have been honest with what I’ve been doing, that was my challenge.”

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The oratorio falls into three major sections. The first is “a very large 30 minutes built around two or three very, very small motives that continually grow. The motives can be two notes to five. They tend to be in modal groupings. Some things can have the feeling of being in E major, C major and B-flat at the same time. That way I can shift from one key to another.”

The second section is a Scherzo that is “almost a fugue of folly, as if it was a Tower of Babel, looking down objectively at the human folly of war.”

The last section uses a text from Jeremiah (31:9) and a poem, “The Boat People,” by American GI Yusef Komuyakaa, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1994.

Textures “go from extremely delicate and serene to very, very disturbing, cataclysmic, to very formal to, I would say, church-like, to chaotic.”

The work begins “very serenely with offstage singers singing ancient Vietnamese Buddhist aphorisms. You hear some ghostly sounds, like it’s coming through smoke and haze, with the cello playing an obbligato over it. It begins rather gently and stays that way for about 15 minutes.”

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As late as Monday morning, Goldenthal said, he hadn’t decided on the ending.

“I still have the option whether I should end on a soft note or a loud one. I have to hear it in rehearsal (to find out) what my body really wants to do. I’ve allowed myself the option to make that decision.

“But it doesn’t feel like the type of subject matter that you really want a razzmatazz ending for.”

* Carl St.Clair will lead the Pacific Symphony in the world premiere of Elliot Goldenthal’s “Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio” tonight at 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Cetner Drive, Costa Mesa. Repeats Thursday at 8 p.m. $14 to $41. (714) 755-5799.