MUSIC REVIEW : A Symphonic Elegy to Vietnam in ‘Fire Water’

The road to mediocrity is paved with good intentions. That, for at least one observer, was the impression left Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center by the world premiere of Elliot Goldenthal’s “Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio.”

The opus was commissioned two years ago by the Pacific Symphony in the spirit of universal idealism. It was performed, 20 years after the end of the Vietnam War, with endless fanfare, ample zealotry, apparent devotion and reasonable skill by Carl St.Clair and a cast of thousands. Well, hundreds.

The score was so new, we are told, the ink wasn’t even dry on all the pages. Unfortunately, it didn’t sound very new.

Optimistic against the odds, we had hoped for a modern masterpiece. What we heard, alas, was an artful compendium of contrived cliches.

A little Gustav Mahler turned up here, a lot of Carl Orff droned on there. Cool Stravinsky snippets mingled uncomfortably with hot Bernstein gushes. Traces of another war requiem--Britten’s--flicked through the plaintive home-grown rhetoric. When the final cadence evaporated after 70 long and sentimental minutes, we wanted the real composer to stand up.

He did so, of course, in a literal sense, and a five-minute standing ovation greeted him. It was hard to tell, however, if the elegant first-nighters were responding to the hype that had preceded the premiere or to the emotions automatically engendered by any discussion of the Vietnam experience.

It was difficult, moreover, to ascertain if the audience was moved primarily by the music itself or by the libretto. Goldenthal had assembled a polyglot text that fused, among other elements, words by an 11th-Century Zen Buddhist, a valedictory message from a Vietnamese woman who set herself aflame in 1967, contemporary pacifist poetry by Yusef Komunyakaa, excerpts from Virgil, Cicero, Horace and Tacitus, snatches of Vietnamese folk songs, passages from Jeremiah and portions of the Latin Mass.

For better or worse--possibly worse--there was something here for everyone. Even if the words couldn’t be understood in the performance, they could be read in the program.

The less cynical among us would insist, no doubt, that the cheers were inspired by Goldenthal’s composition, impure and simple. For a subject as momentous as this, however, the writing seemed dangerously trivial. Much of the time, in fact, it sounded like background music.

There’s the rub. Goldenthal happens to be a celebrated specialist in background music. Most of his work, until now, has involved movies. He created the push-button-horrific soundtrack for “Pet Sematary” and the piquant tones that reinforced the brooding of Matt Dillon and in “Drugstore Cowboy,” not to mention the otherworldly sonic splashes of “Alien c,6 3.” Goldenthal’s music has adroitly decorated an “Interview With the Vampire,” and his latest venture, “Batman Forever,” is scheduled to jolt the silver screen in June.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with being a successful commercial composer. At 40, Goldenthal may be one of the better practitioners of his craft. A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, he has paid his educational dues as a student of John Corigliano--whose conservative aesthetic left an obvious mark--and he claims to have studied informally with Aaron Copland.

Still, nothing in his resume suggests the breadth of skill--we won’t even discuss inspiration--needed to validate a massive composition that purports to examine the universality of idealism, the torment of the human spirit and the crisis of faith confronting a chaotic society. Beethoven, it might be remembered, worked through eight mighty symphonies before he ventured the mightier Ninth. Mahler thought small for a long time before he dared to think big. Goldenthal blithely starts where the greatest geniuses finish.

One has to admire his guts, his goodwill, his earnestness and, above all, his vast ambition. Even in the fuzzy face of McNamara revisionism, one wants to applaud his political conscience.

At the same time, one has to deplore the paucity of original thought in “Fire Water Paper,” the turgidity of the orchestration and the awkwardness of vocal expression. One must regret the pervasive harmonic caution, the easy dynamic tricks, the odd juxtaposition of styles, the crashing climaxes piled on crashing climaxes and the kitschy unison-string resolutions. One must bemoan the apparent confusion between expansion and repetition.

Goldenthal does give us surface drama, and surface prettiness, too. In the process, he also gives us banality masquerading as profundity. His oratorio wants desperately to achieve pathos on its own terms, but it ends up sounding merely pretentious.

St.Clair, an obvious believer in the cause, did his agitated best to contain the massive sprawl. The Pacific Symphony responded bravely, if a bit tentatively. The choruses--adult and youth contingents from the Pacific Chorale plus the Ngan-Khoi Vietnamese Children’s chorus--performed valiantly.

Ann Panagulias negotiated her awkward, wide-ranging solos with more passion than verbal point. James Maddalena sang the monochromatic baritone solos with dark force and welcome clarity. Timothy Landauer played the incidental cello flourishes with muted bravura (for the promised Sony recording, not incidentally, he will be supplanted by a stellar force--Yo-Yo Ma--whose potentially profitable contribution is to be spliced in at a later date).

In lieu of a musical companion piece, St.Clair scheduled an open post-performance discussion with Goldenthal and the soloists. Frank Ticheli, the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, served as referee. The audience was invited to ask questions.

The exchanges evinced much politesse, much mutual congratulation and much vamping till unready. Illumination turned out to be scarce. So did profundity.

In context, that seemed sadly apt.