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Doctor Atomic
World Premiere
“Finley manages to make nuclear physics sound incredibly sensual.” The Weekly standard
“…a brilliantly nuanced performance by baritone Gerald Finley”: San Francisco Chronicle
“…vividly portrayed by the charismatic Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who sings with burnished tone and makes every word count”: New York Times
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Composer |
John Adams |
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Librettist |
Peter Sellars |
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Venue and Dates |
War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco 1 - 22 October 2005 |
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Conductor |
Donald Runnicles |
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Production |
Director: Peter Sellars Sets: Adrienne Lobel Costumes: Dunya Ramicova Lighting: James F Ingalls Choreography: Lucinda Childs |
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Performers |
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Gerald Finley Kitty Oppenheimer: Kristine Jepson General Leslie Groves: Eric Owens Edward Teller: Richard Paul Fink Jack Hubbard: James Maddalena Robert Wilson: Thomas Glenn Captain James Nolan: Jay hunter Morris Pasqualita: Beth Clayton |
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Notes |
See the official Doctor atomic site for details of the opera
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What the critics say
Allan Ulrich for The Observer, October 9, 2005
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/observer/story/0,,1587938,00.html
A for effort
The Manhattan Project has inspired a John Adams masterpiece
Six years after the commission from San Fransisco Opera's incoming general director, Pamela Rosenberg, John Adams's Doctor Atomic - a docudramatic meditation on the invention of the thermonuclear bomb - arrived last week.
Adams is considered by many the leading American composer of his generation. This is his first full-blown opera since the The Death of Klinghoffer, but its theme - that in learning how to annihilate itself, mankind struck a devil's bargain - should generate far less controversy. The result is a distinctive triumph for composer and producer-librettist Peter Sellars.
Doctor Atomic is J Robert Oppenheimer, whose stewardship of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s aroused tremendous soul-searching about unleashing destructive power inconceivable to earlier generations. In assembling his libretto, confined to the few weeks before the New Mexico nuclear test, Sellars drew upon contemporary accounts and declassified documents.
Adams has transcended his minimalist roots. The chugging ostinatos so prominent in Nixon in China have yielded to a vocabulary that encompasses Varese's dissonant effusions, Wagner's brooding harmonies and Debussy's filigree instrumentations. Adding to the dense orchestral textures, clarified valiantly by conductor Donald Runnicles, are the computerised sounds ringing around the auditorium.
The production proposes a semi-realistic, semi-mythic world only dimly conscious that, in unlocking the secrets of the universe, it is also upsetting the balance. It is Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, and her Tewa Indian maid who foresee a monstrous era.
Baritone Gerald Finley projected Oppenheimer's torments with enormous passion and musicality, and tenor Thomas Glenn stood out as the scientist alarmed by the approaching apocalypse. Less convincing was Kristine Jepson as Kitty (recruited after the withdrawal of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson). But Adams's ecstatically lyrical writing and the music's visionary eloquence make this a modern masterpiece.
Andrew Clements for The Guardian, October 4, 2005
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/review/0,,1584430,00.html
Doctor Atomic is John Adams's fifth work for the stage, though whether it's really an opera is a difficult question to answer. Certainly, the premiere - presented by the San Francisco Opera, which commissioned it - is fully staged, and involves a large chorus and a troupe of dancers as well as a cast of soloists and full orchestra. But in making a musical treatment of the events leading up to the detonation of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in June 1945, Adams and his librettist - Peter Sellars, who also directs the staging - seem to blur the distinction between opera and oratorio, between something designed for a theatre and a score intended for the concert hall.
Some scenes are authentically operatic: the exchanges between Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, and his colleagues about the likely consequences of the test; the insistence of the military that the test should go ahead despite warnings of bad weather; the depictions of Oppenheimer's home life. But they are intercut with sections in which characters step outside the action to meditate upon the morality of the whole project. In those, the dramatic thread is sometimes lost altogether.
Sellars has based his text on a range of sources - contemporary memoirs and histories, plus extracts from poems by Baudelaire and Donne, and from the Bhagavad Gita - but in doing so he makes the work less immediate and dramatically involving. Characters speak in metaphor and high-flown imagery, so the key relationships on which the piece depends are sketchily defined. Crucially, the character of Oppenheimer remains enigmatic. In Gerald Finley's superbly sung performance, he emerges as edgy and morally ambivalent, but never assertive enough to lead the project successfully. In his arguments with Richard Paul Fink's equally impressive Edward Teller - a man without doubts but possessing all the ruthlessness that Oppenheimer lacks - he comes out second best, and with his wife Kitty (Kristine Jepson), his lack of a moral dimension is quickly apparent.
Adams's music cannot supply everything that is missing, but it certainly tries. It lacks the long-range architecture of his earlier works, and sustains a high level of dissonance that suggests a constant sense of unease. But it contains some glorious set pieces, none better than the aria with which the first of the two acts ends, a setting of a Donne sonnet as fine as anything Adams has written in the past decade. However, the end of the opera - the moment of the bomb's detonation - is dramatically unconvincing. And the point of the work is uncertain, too: is it a protest against nuclear weapons, a more balanced weighing of the issues involved, or a dry documentary presentation of what actually happened?
Sellars's production lacks that certainty; it fills the stage with historically accurate detail, but never creates clinching imagery. Only the excellence of the musical performance remains, conducted with superb incisiveness by Donald Runnicles. Even that, however, can't cut through the verbal flabbiness that weighs the drama down.
Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, October 3, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/arts/music/03atom.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
Countdown to the Eve of Destruction
San Francisco, Oct. 2
…"Doctor Atomic" is the ultimate waiting game. It begins in June 1945 as the physicists, scientists and military personnel who are working at Los Alamos, N.M., are poised to test the first atomic bomb. The rest of the two-and-a-half-hour opera takes place on the night before and the morning of July 16, the day the first bomb was tested at the site that Oppenheimer, inspired by a John Donne poem, called Trinity. In a sense, not much happens: only that Oppenheimer and the other participants grapple with their consciences as the countdown to detonation, quite literally, commences.
The Oppenheimer of "Doctor Atomic" is a true Faustian figure, a questing, cultured, brilliant and arrogant man, vividly portrayed by the charismatic Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who sings with burnished tone and makes every word count. As Mr. Sellars explained in a preperformance talk, Oppenheimer understood that by pushing science to new limits he would unleash barely imaginable forces in the world and even more fearsome forces within mankind. But he willed himself to turn off the part of his brain that processes ethical qualms about his work. The "best people" in Washington will make these decisions for us scientists, he argues.
In his talk, Mr. Sellars bemoaned today's culture, in which the government and the news media simplify everything with "ridiculous crudeness." Welcome to opera, he said, where we do not shy from ambiguity and complexity.
Still, it takes great music to achieve this. "Doctor Atomic," Mr. Adams's third full-fledged opera, may be his most inventive and emotional score to date, and the conductor Donald Runnicles drew a keen, compelling and assured performance from the orchestra.
In his days as a fledgling composer, Mr. Adams rejected the academic atonality he was steeped in as a student and embraced Minimalism, jazz, electronics and experimental styles. But once over his rebellion, he increasingly allowed himself to incorporate elements of the more complex techniques he had been exposed to. In "Doctor Atomic," Mr. Adams, 58, breaks new ground in that sphere.
Whole spans of the orchestral and choral music tremble with textural density. Stacked-up clusters and polytonal harmonies have stunning bite and pungency. Skittish instrumental lines come close to sounding like riffs from a serialist score. The vocal writing is wondrously varied, sometimes jittery and naturalistic, sometimes melismatic and elegiac. You hear evocations of sci-fi film scores and bursts of Varèsian frenzy.
When he needs to propel the music forward, Mr. Adams, true to form, creates a din of pummeling rhythms, fractured meters and jolting repeated figures: call it atomic Minimalism. Yet tension runs even through the long, ruminative, wistful episodes, like the poignant bedtime scene between Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty.
A sensitive and long-suffering alcoholic, Kitty was portrayed with touching vulnerability by the mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson, though her diction was frustratingly mushy. Like Wagner's Erda, Kitty sees all too well the implications of the work that consumes her dazzling but remote husband. It seems right that the couple sometimes converse in a private language of quotations from sensual Baudelaire poems, for they cannot face each other with unblinking honesty.
There are Wagnerian touches to the music beyond its orchestral lushness and bigness, in, for example, Mr. Adams's way of using the orchestra to comment on the story and the characters.
One telling instance comes in a short scene with Gen. Leslie Groves, the blustery Army commander on the project. For a moment Groves forgets the mission and is drawn by Oppenheimer into a conversation about his weight problem. Dynamically portrayed by the husky bass Eric Owens, Groves shows Oppenheimer his calorie counter and talks about his diet regimen, which is not going well. Groves's chatter is enshrouded in luminous harmonies and pleading melodic lines, as if the orchestra sees the one person with the power to postpone the test in a fleeting moment of human frailty and tries to talk sense to him.
Act I closes with a transfixing scene for Oppenheimer, when he recites that Donne sonnet, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," an abject surrender to God. Mr. Adams's setting is like some contemporary evocation of an intricately contrapuntal Renaissance song with a tortured melodic line and unstable modal harmonies.
Other standouts in the cast include the baritone Richard Paul Fink, who uses his stentorian singing to mask the manipulative ways of the physicist Edward Teller, who would become Oppenheimer's nemesis during the McCarthy years. The elegant baritone James Maddalena (who created the title role in Mr. Adams's "Nixon in China") portrays the meteorologist Jack Hubbard, who must suffer the tirades of General Groves.
The mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton made an impact in two mysterious scenes as the Oppenheimers' maid, who sings totemic songs to the couple's children. The tenor Thomas Glenn brought his sweet voice and boyish innocence to the role of Robert Wilson, a young idealistic physicist plagued with guilt about the test.
Alas, the musical performance was troubled by balance problems, which were not helped by the use of amplification. Electronic elements have long been part of the Adams style. Since the large orchestra was electronically enhanced, the solo singers had to wear wireless microphones. Introducing amplification into opera is Mr. Adams's prerogative. But if you are going to abandon 400 years of tradition and amplify singers to get the balances right, then get the balances right.
All other aspects of Mr. Sellars's production are remarkable. Adrianne Lobel's striking sets use movable columns and sliding lab tables filled with plutonium cores and other gadgets, set against a silhouette of New Mexico mountains. The costume designer Dunya Ramicova dresses the chorus as 1940's scientists, technicians and workers, who remind us that the Manhattan Project employed thousands of workers. The choreographer Lucinda Childs uses dancers to "physicalize the anxiety of waiting," in Mr. Sellars's words, and lend a quality of abstraction to the affecting and graceful staging.
The waiting, of course, culminates in the detonation. Before he composed a note Mr. Adams knew that any attempt to depict an atomic explosion in music would be clichéd on arrival. His solution is ingenious. As the moment approaches and the battering-ram orchestra seems to be sounding inside your head, suddenly all goes quiet and we experience the detonation as if we were 200 miles away in Los Alamos. The music is delicate, strange, melodically dispersed, harmonically tentative. You sense the atmosphere crackling, the world changing. The calm voice of a Japanese woman is heard. We know what comes next.
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, October 3, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/03/DDGKPF0UUE1.DTL&hw=atomic&sn=001&sc=1000
Using a trinity of unconventional drama, haunting score and poetry, S.F. Opera confronts our age's most terrifying topic
At the end of Act 1 of John Adams' "Doctor Atomic," the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer stands alone onstage with the murderous bomb he helped create. It hovers in midair, suspended behind a shroudlike canvas, with the aura of power and death all around it.
And Oppenheimer begins to sing, pouring out his soul in stark, anguished, cantorial phrases. The words -- "Batter my heart, three-person'd God" -- are John Donne's, the music is the creation of America's greatest living composer, and the scene compresses all the terror and fascination of the opera's subject into eight minutes of wrenching, sinewy musical genius.
That scene is the fissile core of Adams and director-librettist Peter Sellars' compellingly slantwise new work about the creation of the nuclear bomb, which had its world premiere Saturday night at the War Memorial Opera House.
It was Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV that inspired the deeply cultured Oppenheimer to name the nuclear test site in Alamogordo, N.M., Trinity, and everything else in the three-hour opera -- from the talky debates about nuclear physics and geopolitics to the fuzzy poetic reveries of Oppenheimer's wife Kitty to the choral outbursts of fear and sickness unto death -- derives its energy from Adams' compact setting of the poem.
Some of the evening sputters, most of it is a forceful blend of tenderness and urgency leavened with occasional touches of graveyard wit. But any piece crowned by a stretch of writing as visionary and as stubbornly unforgettable as that Act 1 finale is already some kind of masterpiece.
"Doctor Atomic," commissioned by Pamela Rosenberg and the San Francisco Opera, extends the collaboration that Adams and Sellars began with the operas "Nixon in China" and "The Death of Klinghoffer" and the Nativity oratorio "El Niño," and it continues the musical and dramatic trajectory that those works established.
As Adams' music has become more intricate and unpredictable -- more Wagnerian in texture, subtler and more multifarious in its rhythmic layering -- Sellars' theatrical vision has shed any attempt at linear structure. The result, in "Doctor Atomic," is an opera that is not conventionally dramatic in any way.
Instead, it unfolds in a series of flashes, like moments revealed in the nerve-jarring lightning storm that hit the New Mexico desert on the night of the first test blast in July 1945. It begins by setting the stage in the Los Alamos lab a month before the test, and it ends (more weakly than one might have hoped) with the test blast itself; but in between, the opera's course is as zigzaggy and unchartable as that of a subatomic particle.
The libretto, which Sellars assembled, is a pastiche of historical documents, letters, poetry and memoirs, and as in a Baroque opera, there is a sharp division between action and emotional reflection.
In "Doctor Atomic," though, the split is along gender lines. In the lab and at the test site, where women are banned, the men chatter and argue in lithe, somewhat bland melodic phrases whose expressive content is scarce.
Edward Teller -- portrayed here not as the Iago figure most would expect but as the voice of unvarnished, amoral scientific reasoning -- tries to predict the size of the blast and pooh-poohs any commingling of science and politics. Gen. Groves, the military head of the project, bullies a hapless meteorologist and frets about his diet.
Kitty Oppenheimer, in contrast, expresses herself through the fragrant effusions of the midcentury American poet Muriel Rukeyser. Half the time there's no telling exactly what she's going on about (and the alcoholic Kitty is largely in the bag in any case). But Adams' exquisitely lyrical settings -- which have all the lush sensitivity of a pop ballad without the simplicity -- conjure up the angst that only Kitty and her maid Pasqualita can fully feel at the approach of the atomic age.
The only one who straddles this divide is Oppenheimer himself, a dazzlingly protean figure who can talk nuclei and warheads with the men, then turn around and intone the intoxicated love poetry of Baudelaire in a scene with Kitty. As incarnated in a brilliantly nuanced performance by baritone Gerald Finley, Oppenheimer is the absent center of the entire proceedings -- always there, always elusive. In his baggy suit and floppy porkpie hat, Finley holds his body at a perpetual angle, the better to dance away from the implications of whatever he has just said; his vocal lines dart and spin with the same quicksilvery mutability.
Adams' score moves with the omnivorous assurance of an artist who now seems to feel that he has every imaginable musical resource at his disposal. The work is punctuated by sharply conceived electronic soundscapes -- the piece opens with a brief dispatch from the interior of one of Ernest Lawrence's cyclotrons -- and the range of mood and allusion is staggering.
In the opening scene, as the scientists and lab technicians bustle about the stage in Lucinda Childs' crystalline choreography, Adams sends the music hurtling though a torrent of Stravinskian eighth notes. The scene plays like an old Broadway backstage musical along the lines of "42nd Street," with flats and backdrops flying up and down, and you can hear the nervous, excited energy that propelled this project toward its big opening -- as well as how impossible it was for anyone to pause and reflect on the implications of what they were doing.
Wagner is also a frequent reference point, particularly in the depths of Adams' darkest orchestral writing. "Götterdämmerung" is the obvious precedent for an operatic treatment of the end of the world, and the bomb is sometimes accompanied by an ominous brass motif that is a radioactive cousin to the music for Fafner the dragon in "Siegfried."
But even the borrowings bear Adams' distinctive thumbprint, and most of the score proclaims his presence unmistakably: in the shimmery beauty of the orchestral textures, in the haunting lyricism of Kitty's solos and in the rounded edges of even the most disjunct and angular recitatives.
The cast, singing under the vigorous leadership of Music Director Donald Runnicles, is uniformly magnificent. As Kitty, mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson takes on the unenviable task of stepping into a role written for the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and makes it her own, singing with vulnerability and plush directness.
Richard Paul Fink is a wonderfully saturnine Teller, and makes a good foil for the gorgeously clear-toned tenor of Adler Fellow Thomas Glenn as the idealistic young physicist Robert Wilson. Eric Owens is a brawny, vocally robust Groves, and there are fine contributions by Beth Clayton as Pasqualita, James Maddalena as the beleaguered weatherman and Jay Hunter Morris as the camp medico. Ian Robertson's Opera Chorus sings with busy intensity.
Sellars' staging, as well as the visual design by Adrianne Lobel (sets), Dunya Ramicova (costumes) and James F. Ingalls (lighting), includes some gripping visual inventions -- most notably the vision of the bomb hanging like a thermonuclear sword of Damocles over the crib of the Oppenheimers' infant daughter -- as well as some odd miscalculations.
In one late scene, the chorus sings about Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, in music lifted unapologetically from Orff's "Carmina Burana," while Sellars assigns them a series of Simon Says gestures that look peculiarly out of place. And after three hours of waiting for the bomb to drop, the audience is surely entitled to a more emphatic rendering than a quiet rumble and a few desultory lighting cues.
But these are quibbles. "Doctor Atomic," whatever its faults, stands as a major addition to the operatic repertory of this new century, the first to be inaugurated with the specter of instant death very much around us.
Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 6 October 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/06/DDGP7F2IJC1.DTL&type=performance
The Bomb may be too big for even art to grasp
When the curtain goes up on the second act of "Doctor Atomic," the ultra-high-profile world premiere that has made San Francisco the capital of the opera world this month, an enormous, silvery gray bomb hangs suspended over a baby's cradle.
We get it, instantly. It's a snapshot of the modern nightmare, this infant atomic bomb dangled like some grotesquely inflated toy over an innocent sleeping child.
But when that bomb-and-baby image lingers and lingers and lingers, in librettist and director Peter Sellars' deliberately static staging of the new John Adams opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb, a curious thing happens through the second act: The potency of the image begins to blur and leach away. We grow accustomed to it, almost comfortable with the picture. It becomes a piece of social history, a faded period photograph or anti-nukes poster tucked into the enormous blocks of documentary prose, poetry and congested narrative in Sellars' weighty collage libretto.
We find ourselves fitfully wondering what it was, exactly, that we were meant to "get" about this scene after all?
"Doctor Atomic" is a very carefully deployed piece of work. It's quite possible that a certain alienation effect was intended in the way Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and the other scientists and military officials at Los Alamos and the Trinity bomb test site repeatedly congregate downstage, in punishing white light, near the lip of the stage. They're like human particles, seen close up as they bounce from ethics to physics, Washington politics to the weather that may delay or complicate the 1945 detonation test. Adams' orchestral prologues create a kind of eerie filmic detachment at the beginning of both acts, with gnawing metallic sound effects, scratchy fragments of period ballads and other aural detritus panned through speakers around the Opera House.
But in all its calculation, solemnity and analytical rigor, "Doctor Atomic" bends back on itself over its three-hour running time. It makes us think about itself as much as about its themes and characters. It gets us wondering about the fit of grand opera to epochal real events -- questions raised by the previous Adams-Sellars collaborations of "Nixon in China" and "The Death of Klinghoffer" -- and the limitations of art in the face of the ultimate doomsday scenario.
Could any opera -- any piece of theater, music, film or writing, for that matter -- possibly fill the enormous cave of desolation and twisted dreams that opened up in human history in 1945? "Doctor Atomic" may aspire to be a " 'Götterdämmerung' for our time," as Sellars says. But unlike Wagner's mythical universe of gods, giants, dwarves and heroes, the subject here must deal with the inescapable contours of historical fact.
The problem here may be a kind of distorted scale of ambition, a determination to make "Doctor Atomic" definitively, capital-I Important. When Alice Goodman, the librettist for "Nixon in China" and "Klinghoffer," withdrew from this project, Sellars stepped in and assembled a script from government documents, interviews, a John Donne devotional sonnet, a prosaic discussion of diets, the heaving love poetry of Baudelaire and more. What got left behind are fully fleshed characters and a dramatic spine.
In both its ambition to address the science, politics, morality and mythopoetic implications of the bomb and a kind of austere distillation of its narrative and theatrical methods, "Atomic" makes its own Faustian deal with its subject. It tries to do so much that you may come away more struck by the scale of the undertaking and stirred by the musical range of Adams' score than immersed in the human dimension of the opera.
The bomb is vividly present, not only as the production's dominant scenic artifact but also as a kind of ghostly presence that launches Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley) into the opera's widely celebrated aria at the end of Act 1. There, facing down the chastely shrouded bomb, he sings the opera's wrenching meditation on his creation and himself, set to Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV ("Batter my heart, three person'd God").
But elsewhere in the opera, Oppenheimer and the other characters get lost in the clouds of verbiage that Sellars' libretto unleashes upon them. The spasmodic, back-and-forth debate of the first act is full of fascinating implications but never generates a compelling dramatic throughline. Oppenheimer's first scene with his wife, Kitty, which begins with a suggestively intimate question -- "Am I in your light?" Kitty (Kristine Jepson) asks her husband in their bedroom -- becomes a grandiose set piece of distancing poetic diction. In the opera's longer second act, the weather becomes an all-consuming subject. "Doctor Atomic" poses a ripe, penultimate irony here. The earth, which is about to be thunderstruck by the bomb, storms back in response one last time.
Maybe, in the end, that lengthily sustained image of the bomb and the baby is an apt visual cul de sac after all. Perhaps, when it comes to the uniquely modern apocalypse that the atomic bomb made manifest, we are all mute, semi-paralyzed witnesses, now as much as we were 60 years ago. "Doctor Atomic" may be a self-canceling concept, an Icarus-like flight into the heat of its own subject. It's no wonder the opera's strangely diffident climax has left so many people quizzical.
In that hushed final scene, as Adams' music wrenches through a percussive, time-stretching countdown to the detonation of the bomb, the cast lies facedown on the stage. The chorus of workers on the bomb test site gets down first, then the other scientists and finally Oppenheimer himself, a humbled spectator of what he has made. They are, like us, silent observers, washed in waves of luridly colored light.
Tim Page, Washington Post Staff Writer, 3 October 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/02/AR2005100201285.html
'Doctor Atomic': Unleashing Powerful Forces
There is much to admire in "Doctor Atomic," a new opera by John Adams that received its world premiere here Saturday night in a production by the San Francisco Opera.
The subject is a potent one, even though the opera seems less a portrait of the complicated and controversial physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and more of an examination -- part factual "nuts and bolts," part abstracted meditation -- of the collective process of testing the world's first nuclear weapon in the New Mexico desert on the morning of July 16, 1945.
The libretto, assembled by director Peter Sellars from a variety of sources -- textbooks, petitions, letters, poetry by John Donne and Muriel Rukeyser, the Bhagavad-Gita and Native American lullabies, among others -- is protean and dramatically vital for most of the evening. And the casting, across the board, is almost unbelievably strong -- the San Francisco Opera has assembled an amazing troupe of American singers, all of them at the peak of their abilities, giving everything they have to conjure up our once and present collective nightmare.
I have rarely been able to share in the rapturous admiration that has been generally accorded to Adams's music by many critics and musicians. (He is best known for his operas "Nixon in China," in 1987, and "The Death of Klinghoffer" in 1991.) For me, his delighted appropriation of the styles of other composers has usually seemed the pastime of an ever-more-virtuosic pasticheur. Even here, in what is far and away the best score he has ever given us, it is difficult to identify any half-minute of music and say, "Oh yes, that could only be by John Adams."
And yet, this time around, for most of the first act and much of the second, Adams takes his eclecticism so far that it becomes a convincing personal style in itself. If the finale of Act 1, for example, sounds like a mixture of Handel opera, Mendelssohn oratorio and Philip Glass minimalism, it is also genuinely beautiful in its own hybrid manner. One senses that Adams has begun to absorb the spectrum of musical history, the way past composers absorbed theory, counterpoint and harmony, and, by force of will, made it distinctly his. To adapt a familiar but useful metaphor: The trees in "Doctor Atomic" may not be always recognizably "Adams," but he owns the forest.
The first act lasts 67 minutes, yet it is surprisingly taut, with a lyrical duet (between Oppenheimer and his wife) that manages to convey lovers who are both crushed by circumstances and weightlessly ecstatic. Unless your name is Richard Wagner, however, it is never a good idea to write a 90-minute act, and "Doctor Atomic" flounders badly in Act 2, especially in the last few minutes leading up to the detonation, which are bizarrely anticlimactic. To Sellars's credit, he doesn't attempt to give us one of those showstopper cosmetic thrills a la the descending helicopter in "Miss Saigon" or the plummeting chandelier in "Phantom." There is no cosmic kaboom!
But his alternative -- a stageful of hopping, skipping, writhing people bathed in red -- called to mind a generic representation of the underworld in "Faust." Moreover, the sustained image of the bomb hovering over an empty cradle was simply trite, calling to mind an old cover of Psychology Today or the platitudes of a protest poster (Motherhood = good; nuclear weapons = bad. Hey, thanks, man!) At the same time, many of Sellars's images were eerie and visually arresting: I shall not soon forget the flashes of heat lightning that accompany some of the grimmest discussions in the history of humankind, as an infinitely larger "light" is planned for the following morning.
Recognizing some of the complications of the situation, Adams and Sellars have wisely avoided casting much individual blame on the central characters (even the deeply weird Edward Teller maintains a certain humanity). The sole exception is Eric Owens, who plays Gen. Leslie Groves as a mixture of Idi Amin and King Canute, demanding that the notoriously volatile New Mexico weather bend to his will in much the same manner that the Viking ruler once ordered the tides to turn back.
Gerald Finley, who played Oppenheimer, is a high, lyrical tenor [sic] of the first order, gifted with a fluent, expressive voice, welling theatrical gifts, and diction that is nothing short of immaculate (one never needed to follow the supertitles to find out what he was singing). Still, it was Kristine Jepson, as Kitty Oppenheimer, who seemed to carry the emotional drama, singing Rukeyser's words with melting tenderness and infinite sorrow.
Beth Clayton, as a Native American mother, did her songful, empathic best with what seemed a stock character. Richard Paul Fink made much of Teller's mixture of anguish and resignation, while Thomas Glenn, as the dissenting physicist Robert Wilson, easily negotiated crushingly difficult music in a high, boyish tenor. (An officially designated Rebel With a Cause, he wore an open shirt, as opposed to the dark suits of Oppenheimer and Teller -- such is symbolism.)
James Maddalena sang out the last pre-atomic New Mexico weather report with the intensity of an Old Testament prophet, while there was precise, urgent support from Jay Hunter Morris as Capt. James Nolan. Donald Runnicles conducted the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and Chorus with a deft mastery of Adams's stylistic twists and turns, seeming comfortable and fully engaged at all times. (Much of the orchestral playing -- and, indeed, the music itself -- was dazzling, especially a long, lowing passage for the deepest brass.) The choreography, by Lucinda Childs, was cast in her patented style, with dancers racing coolly yet furiously across the stage, stiffening and striking individual poses, then joining the mad rush again.
I am inclined to think of "Doctor Atomic" as a work in progress; some judicious trimming of Act 2 could make it a far more satisfying evening in the opera house. Still, it is a chilling evocation of a time and place where, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, "a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it."
Willaim R Braun Opera News,
December 2005 , vol 70 , no.6
Doctor Atomic, San Francisco Opera, 10/1/05
Life is in the expectancy. John Adams has already found music in Richard Nixon suspended in time in the doorway of Air Force One before the greatest adventure of his life, and for the long descent of Leon Klinghoffer’s body to the floor of the ocean. In El Niño, his version of the Christmas story, Adams’s Mary sings, “I could not die because I was waiting for you.” Now, in Doctor Atomic, which had its premiere at San Francisco Opera on October 1, Adams has managed to make an entire opera out of the unprecedentedly tense moments leading up to the first test of the atomic bomb. Peter Sellars, who also directed, fashioned a libretto from primary sources such as the memoirs of physicist Edward Teller (who is a character in the work) and some very dense histories of the Manhattan Project. Since J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the project, was a literary man, Sellars also has him quoting from his favorite poets. Act I ends with Oppenheimer’s incantation of a sonnet by John Donne, “Batter my heart,” that was also set by Britten. In bed with his wife Kitty, Oppenheimer ravishes her with Baudelaire. (Kitty mostly sings poetry by Muriel Rukeyser.) And before the explosion, the chorus sings a pounding version of a hymn from the Bhagavad Gita.
Doctor Atomic is recognizably a score by Adams. Vocal lines tend to make elaborate but shapely spirals before suddenly ending with an emphatic downward leap, neatly delineating the sentences. The sense of when and why to repeat words is Handelian, as is the setting of a word such as “unstability.” But the style has evolved. The singers often touch on Debussy’s whole-tone scale, but the orchestra rarely does. Thus the suspended, unresolved quality of what is essentially a plotless text is maintained perfectly by the music. And Adams’s orchestration has come into its own. This time he makes his effects without electric keyboards, relying on only the standard orchestra of triple winds, plus extensive percussion.
Sellars, for an opera that leads to a blinding flash, has made much of the imagery of brightness. Kitty, reading in bed with Oppenheimer, asks, “Am I in your light?” Later, Adams gives Kitty a glittering cascade of nineteen notes on the word “shining.” As a director, Sellars of course never does the obvious. For the Donne setting, Adams has given Oppenheimer a spare, Dowlandesque song in D minor, but Sellars has given him diagonal lines of staggering, jerking motions. Kitty’s music and words are erotic, but Sellars plays her as a petulant woman. Yet his directorial choices do make a heavy imprint that sets off the music, and they seem to elicit an extra intensity from the performers; it was Sellars’s overuse of Lucinda Childs’s standard-issue choreography that was the real distraction.
As Oppenheimer, Gerald Finley retained his position as the finest singer of English before the public; his tone is as golden as ever, and his acting technique is now invisible. Kristine Jepson rose to the challenge of Kitty’s long Act II aria, a setting of Rukeyser’s “Easter Eve, 1945.” James Maddalena’s warm presence as chief meteorologist Hubbard completed a trifecta of Adams opera premieres, his Doctor Atomic performance following his Richard Nixon and his Captain in The Death of Klinghoffer. Young Thomas Glenn, still a San Francisco Opera Adler Fellow, gave a beautiful account of doubting physicist Robert Wilson’s recurrent nightmares. (Adams has finally made his peace with the tenor voice.) There’s also a buffo role, a U.S. Army general who wants to control the weather and obsesses about his calorie intake; Eric Owens kept him from caricature. Richard Paul Fink, the Teller, made his mark in some ambivalent, musing music in Act II. Adrianne Lobel provided set designs as spare and unexpectedly colorful as the New Mexico desert.
Many people have an opera they can’t listen to very often. The emotions are too real, too deep to go through the ritual regularly. For some it’s Madama Butterfly, for me it’s El Niño. If Doctor Atomic didn’t seem to be that sort of piece, perhaps it’s because the structure of the libretto adds an extra layer of distance. Or perhaps it’s because Adams lacked the confidence to write much music for the ending, leaving it up to a sound design by Mark Grey that also incorporated and amplified all of the performers onstage and in the pit. Or perhaps it’s because Doctor Atomic, an opera in English, sung by an entirely English-speaking cast for an English-speaking audience, was performed with English supertitles. One hopes that these will be abandoned when the work travels to Lyric Opera of Chicago and other theaters. But it will be difficult to top the San Francisco Chorus, prepared by Ian Robertson, and orchestra, under Donald Runnicles.
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 12 October 2005
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/10/12/btatom12.xml
Learning to love the bomb
John Adams's new opera about the Manhattan Project captures the awesome strength - and destructiveness - of atomic power, says Rupert Christiansen
Since Britten's death some 30 years ago, the American composer John Adams has emerged as the most powerful voice in the creation of opera. Avoiding the easy path of adapting existing texts, he has focused on subjects with modern historical resonance (Nixon in China) as well as stretching opera's formal conventions to include musical comedy (I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky) and oratorio (The Death of Klinghoffer and El Niño).
Throughout his theatrical oeuvre, his constant collaborator has been his fellow American, the director Peter Sellars. Next year they plan to make a tribute to Mozart on his 250th birthday, but meanwhile they have unveiled Doctor Atomic, a complex exploration of the last days of the Manhattan Project, which culminated, in July 1945, in the first test explosion of a nuclear bomb and was soon followed by the destruction of Hiroshima.
The central figure is J Robert Oppenheimer, the sensitive and brilliant physicist with Left-wing sympathies who eventually fell foul of the McCarthy era. As the clock ticks away, he is assailed by disagreeable colleagues, bad weather, the military and the government, as well as his own torments.
Sellars's libretto is almost entirely drawn from documentary sources, with the addition of verse from Baudelaire, Donne, the Bhagavad Gita and the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, whose words become those of Oppenheimer's emotionally unbalanced wife, Kitty. There is no vulgar agitprop or weighting of the political scales: everyone's viewpoint is given its due, and one is left with a sense of the terrible magnificence of atomic fission as well as its unimaginable destructiveness.
The score rises to the epic theme. Framing the action with episodes of recorded musique concrète (vague whispers, fragments of jazz standards, sounds evocative of quarks and neutrons colliding and imploding), Adams has produced much music of rapturous intensity, with extended arias for Kitty and Oppenheimer (notably a heart-rending setting of Donne's sonnet Batter My Heart), some taut, purposeful recitative and rhythmically vibrant choruses that appear to owe much to Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms.
Throughout the opera, Adams's use of the orchestra is wonderfully inventive, and the descriptive interludes in Act 2 have a Wagnerian scale and quality. There are episodes of tremendous drama, too, and the final countdown before the explosion ratchets up the tension with a skill that borders on the sadistic.
What the opera lacks is a clearly defined conflict. Oppenheimer confronts many irritations and last-minute glitches, but try as it may, Sellars's libretto never convinces us he is a tragic hero, fundamentally torn between scientific ambition and humanitarian remorse.
For that to take hold, we would need to see what happened to Oppenheimer after 1945 - I believe this was part of the original conception, discarded when Alice Goodman resigned from writing the libretto. But here one never doubts that his primary motive is to ensure his experiment is a success and that he thought it was up to others to assess and deal with the consequences.
Sellars's production is fluent, abetted by Adrianne Lobel's spare designs but somewhat hindered by Lucinda Childs's banal choreography. Gerald Finley sings immaculately as Oppenheimer, with Kristine Jepson, Richard Paul Fink and Thomas Glenn outstanding among a fine supporting cast. Donald Runnicles made an authoritative conductor, but an acoustic warmer than that of San Francisco's chilly opera house would have helped the chorus.
Despite its flaws, Doctor Atomic is a moving and compelling work of moral, as well as musical, grandeur. I long to see and hear it again: which British opera company will do the honours?
Kelly Jane Torrance, The Weekly Standard , 20 March 2006
'Doctor Atomic'; John Adams and the quest for American opera.
John Adams has made a career of creating art from recent events. One of the country's most important composers, he specializes in turning the messiness of American politics into grand myth.
Sometimes it works to great effect. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2002 work On the Transmigration of Souls. It was commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Nixon in China, his first opera, was about just that. Critics seemed astounded that Adams had managed to put the president's 1972 meeting with Mao into the grand, primarily European, tradition of opera.
The Death of Klinghoffer, his next opera, followed in 1991. That work, about the hijacking six years earlier of the Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and their murder of a Jewish-American passenger, saw protests as soon as it had its premiere in Brussels, from both Jewish and Arab groups. The one saw the opera as anti-Semitic; the other saw it as pro-Israeli. Many companies that had planned to present the work demurred after the controversy.
The tough reception for Klinghoffer was hard on Adams; he said at the time that he would never write another opera. But artists have always made--and ignored--such pronouncements, and so Adams's latest work based on real events, Doctor Atomic, fittingly had its premiere this past fall at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House.
Adams's ambition has not waned. Doctor Atomic tackles one of the defining events of the 20th century, the creation of the atomic bomb. The action takes place in June and July 1945, as the Los Alamos scientists prepare for (and debate) the bomb's first test. The group had been racing to complete the multibillion-dollar project, convinced that the Germans were doing the same. But, by the summer of 1945, Germany had surrendered; the likely target is now Japan.
Everyone is on edge: "Our conflicts carry creation and its guilt," Kitty Oppenheimer deftly observes, while the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller wonders, "Could we have started the Atomic Age with clean hands?"
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory's director, is a bundle of nerves. Idealistic Robert Wilson wants him to urge the government not to drop the bomb on Japan. Edward Teller is a mass of angry resentment. Oppenheimer's alcoholic wife Kitty competes with the bomb for his attention. And the government wants a resounding success for the billions it's spent.
The real-life story certainly contains the elements of a good drama. So much that director Peter Sellars fashioned his libretto almost entirely out of historical documents--previously classified materials, letters, reports, and documented conversations. There is some poetry: Oppenheimer was a cultured man, fond of quoting verse. (He recited from the Bhagavad-Gita after the test bomb exploded, here set, perhaps predictably but surprisingly effectively, to Carmina Burana-like music.) Sellars gives Kitty Oppenheimer, for whom there wasn't much documentary material available, the words of Muriel Rukeyser, a contemporary poet who was a Communist sympathizer, like the Oppenheimers themselves.
This attention to detail might seem admirable, particularly to those who dislike their art filled with historical inaccuracy. But it has not helped the opera's success qua opera. Beauty, all-important to a work of art, here has been sacrificed to accuracy. The words actually spoken by the principals weren't always mellifluous, after all, and so Adams often has a hard time getting a melody around the speech. But it may not entirely be Sellars's fault; the composer has had this problem before.
Adams's gifts lie elsewhere. He has a way with choruses, for instance, which frequently serve as the moral center of his works, their beauty belying the ambiguity that is often his subject. In Doctor Atomic, chorus members are often dressed as the workers who sing about the bomb's possible consequences--"unimaginable devastation"--as they help to create it. Particularly moving is the rundown of possible targets for the bomb. The beautiful voices underscore that the name of each Japanese city stands for a multitude that would be destroyed.
But the central figure, of course, is Oppenheimer, and neither the composer nor the librettist disappoints here, either. Here is a man who quotes John Donne and Charles Baudelaire, but could be responsible for the destruction of the world. (In the case of Baudelaire, this might not be all that much of a paradox.) Of course, it helps that he is portrayed by Gerald Finley, a Canadian baritone whose star is swiftly (and deservedly) rising. Finley manages to make nuclear physics sound incredibly sensual.
"To what benevolent demon do I owe the joy of being thus surrounded?" he sings, looking longingly up at the bomb. And he can act.
The high point is Finley's wrenching D-minor aria set to a John Donne sonnet--the one that inspired Oppenheimer to name the test site "Trinity"--that begins, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." The words, which tell of a man in conflict with his God and himself, echo the theme of Doctor Atomic as Doctor Faustus, whose quest for knowledge brought forth the Devil.
In between Finley's dramatic reading of the words--That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new--Adams has written some bewitching music to represent the inevitably successful attraction of knowledge. Oppenheimer, like Teller and others, sees the creation of the bomb as a confirmation of the greatness of the human mind. Naive Robert Wilson doesn't stand a chance.
The "Batter my heart" aria actually sounds like something written during the time of Donne. It's not really like anything else in the opera. And therein lies the problem. John Adams has a great many influences. He learned from, rejected, and then went back and assimilated the serialist music he studied at Harvard. Then he became one the country's foremost minimalists, along with Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Much of Adams's vocal work draws on the oratorios of Bach. But he also integrates more recent forms, like jazz. He can channel Wagner, particularly in his use of the orchestra in passing judgment on events onstage.