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Doctor Atomic
Click here to hear Gerry singing "Batter my heart" courtesy of the Lyric Opera of Chicago
Excerpt from production of De Nederlandse Opera. 2007 Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra Lawrence Renes, conductor
Click below to hear a podcast interview with GF and Eric Owens, courtesy of Lyric Opera: http://stream.lyricopera.org/Finley_Owens_Podcast.wax
Click here to see a video clip of Doctor Atomic courtesy of the Chicago Tribune
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Composer |
John Adams |
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Librettist |
Peter Sellars |
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Venue and Dates |
Lyric Opera of Chicago 14, 17, 19 December 2007 and 5, 9, 12, 15, 19 January 2008 |
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Conductor |
Robert Spano |
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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: Jessica Rivera General Leslie Groves: Eric Owens Edward Teller: Richard Paul Fink Jack Hubbard: James Maddalena Robert Wilson: Thomas Glenn Captain James Nolan: Roger Honeywell Pasqualita: Meredith Arwady |
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Notes |
Co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Nederlandse Oper |
Click here to read some articles on this production of Doctor Atomic
What the critics say
Excerpt from the blog of Brian Dickie, General Director of the Chicago Opera Theater, 11 December 2007
http://briandickie.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/12/atomic-day.html
“The Dr Atomic dress rehearsal was at Lyric this afternoon, dominated by the extraordinary charismatic performance of Oppenheimer by Gerald Finley. He was a new talent once - and so joined the Glyndebourne Chorus and served his time with Glyndebourne's touring arm in the 80s. His is a performance not to be missed - wonderful!”
By Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, 17 December 2007
Tweaking a Definitive Moment in History
John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic” enjoyed a major success during its premiere production two years ago at the San Francisco Opera. Yet even among the work’s champions, the consensus was that this ambitious opera — about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who presided over the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs — needed some tweaking.
Mr. Adams wrote the opera with his longtime colleague Peter Sellars — who directed the production and assembled the unconventional yet surprisingly fluid libretto from interviews with project participants, history books, transcripts of conversations, declassified documents and poetry, notably “The Holy Sonnets” of John Donne. The creators made some significant changes, though, as the opera found its way to the two companies that have co-produced it with the San Francisco Opera: first De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam in June, and now Lyric Opera of Chicago, where the production opened to a packed house on Friday.
Once again “Doctor Atomic” came across as the most complex and inventive of Mr. Adams’s works, an engrossing operatic drama, even though very little happens. Yet by the end the entire world has changed forever.
The opera begins in June 1945, as the scientists and military personnel working on the project in Los Alamos, N.M., are poised to test the first atomic bomb. Most of the story takes place on the night before and the morning of July 16, the day of the first test. For the two and three-quarter hours everyone just waits for the inevitable. The characters adjust last-minute details and fret about the gusty winds and lightning storms. The physicist Enrico Fermi (who does not appear) has been taking bets on whether the detonation might set the Earth’s atmosphere on fire. But the internal dramas are excruciating as the participants grapple with their consciences.
Gerald Finley, the Canadian baritone who created the title role, was back as Oppenheimer, and his portrayal is even stronger. He sings with melting richness yet lucid diction. Puffing away on cigarettes, his suit forever rumpled, full of bravado yet plagued with doubts, Mr. Finley’s Oppenheimer is a tragically flawed and Faustian figure who dares to push science into unknown and potentially catastrophic realms.
Questioned about the moral implications of the project work by his pugnacious colleague Edward Teller (portrayed, as at the premiere, with chilling authority by the husky-voiced baritone Richard Paul Fink), Oppenheimer deflects the matter. “The nation’s fate should be left in the hands of the best men in Washington,” he says.
The role of Kitty, Oppenheimer’s wife, originally for mezzo-soprano, has been rewritten for soprano, here the radiant lyric soprano Jessica Rivera in a vulnerable and intense portrayal. A crucial early scene takes place in the Oppenheimers’ bedroom, where Kitty, full of fears about her moody, brilliant and distant husband, cozies up to him in bed and voices her feelings in lines by the poet Muriel Rukeyser: “A world is to be fought for, sung, and built/Love must imagine the world.”
More music has been added to Kitty’s part. Still, some of her scenes seem too languid and drawn out. For one, an episode in Act II when Kitty, shaken with fear, sits in a lawn chair drinking whiskey as her American Indian maid, the all-knowing Pasqualita, a kind of Erda of the American Southwest (the earthy contralto Meredith Arwady), watches the Oppenheimer children.
Three notable singers also recreate roles from the premiere. The fresh-voiced lyric tenor Thomas Glenn gives a disarming portrayal of the earnest, idealistic young physicist Robert Wilson. The robust bass-baritone Eric Owens is the blustery Gen. Leslie Groves, who ferociously commands a bedraggled meteorologist, Jack Hubbard (the veteran baritone James Maddalena), to assure him that the weather will be suitable for the big test of “the gadget,” as people keep calling the bomb.
The choristers are costumed mostly as support staff at Los Alamos: cafeteria workers, custodians, technicians, clerical aides. Mr. Sellars has devised some highly stylized and effective ensemble movements for the chorus members, as when they shuffle en masse across the stage, filled with anxiety. I still do not find that the dance elements by the choreographer Lucinda Childs add much. When the dramatic tension threatens to lag, eight dancers in T-shirts and khakis dash on to the stage and twirl around in the background.
Mr. Adams conceived the opera for an orchestra that included electronic instruments and recorded sounds. To make sure the singers could perform subtly and still be heard, they wear body microphones. In San Francisco on opening night the balances were not right; here they were. The amplification was minimal and unobtrusive, though those who think of opera as an art form for natural sound will have to adjust.
In this revival Mr. Adams’s score seemed even more ingenious. The tremulous surface of the orchestra music is deceptively calm, allowing the vocal lines to dominate. Just below, though, the orchestra teems with fractured meters, intertwining contrapuntal elements, fitful bursts and Mr. Adams’s most tartly dissonant, boldly unmoored harmonies. The conductor, Robert Spano, was the master of this score, ably guiding every metric shift and fractured meter, conducting with inexorable sweep yet telling detail.
Perhaps there will be more changes before “Doctor Atomic” arrives at the Metropolitan Opera in its own production, details to be finalized. It will surely be just as grimly relevant
Mike Silverman, Associated Press Writer, 17 December 2007 (appearing in various newspapers and websites)
Lyric Opera premieres an uneven 'Atomic'
History hovers nearby at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where John Adams' ambitious but uneven work about the creation of the atom bomb is being staged just a few miles from the site of the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction.
"Doctor Atomic," which had its local premiere Friday night, is a worthy successor to "Nixon in China" and Adams' other operatic treatments of touchstone historical events — but it's not a complete triumph. Exciting, deeply moving and intensely lyrical throughout its first act, the opera sputters in Act 2 as a series of prolonged, static scenes drain tension just as it should be building through the countdown toward the first test explosion.
But it would be a major mistake to understate what Adams and his librettist, Peter Sellars, have accomplished in bringing to life 1945's world-changing events in the New Mexico desert. They have succeeded in dramatizing the internal doubts and conflicts that beset the participants, principally J. Robert Oppenheimer, the guiding genius of the project, but also such real historical figures as Edward Teller, Gen. Leslie Groves, and Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty.
Sellars' libretto is adapted partly from original documents of the period — memoirs, scientific journals, government documents — and partly from poetry known to have special meaning to the characters. Thus the Oppenheimers' fondness for the French poet Charles Baudelaire inspires a passionate love scene; his admiration for John Donne gives rise to a haunting aria that closes Act 1, set to one of the English poet's sonnets, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God."
If Act 1 moves briskly toward the night of the countdown, Act 2 stalls there. Kitty and her Tewa Indian nursemaid, Pasqualita, keep watch at home 200 miles from the test site, while Oppenheimer and the others fret about the weather and the unfounded fear that the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere. Kitty drinks herself into oblivion singing verses by Muriel Rukeyser as Pasqualita croons a lullaby about the cloudflower that warns of the disruption of the natural order. But the women's scenes are needlessly drawn out and the symbolism becomes heavy-handed, slowing the forward momentum of the score.
Adams and Sellars have already revised the piece since its world premiere two years ago in San Francisco and again last summer in the Netherlands, so there's reason to hope it will emerge tighter and more dramatic when the Metropolitan Opera stages it next season. The Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, has ordered up a new production directed by Penny Woolcock, after finding that the current version doesn't do justice to the work.
One aspect that could scarcely be improved is the singing. Gerald Finley performs eloquently, perfectly capturing the intellect and spiritual torment of Oppenheimer. Richard Paul Fink matches Edward Teller's droll and sinister humor with vocal wit, with a couple of phrases that brush the bottom of the baritone's range. Eric Owens makes a surprisingly sympathetic figure as the blustery Gen. Leslie Groves, the military man in charge of the project who finds time to bemoan his dieting failures. (All three are repeating roles they sang at the premiere.) Soprano Jessica Rivera brings a silvery tone reminiscent of Dawn Upshaw to the role of Kitty; contralto Meredith Arwady displays impressive power as Pasqualita.
Robert Spano leads the orchestra in a stirring performance of the score, a rich and varied amalgam that incorporates electronic effects, majestic orchestral interludes, full-scale choruses and many quiet, conversational passages.
"Doctor Atomic" is a fitting project for the Lyric given Chicago's role in the history of the atom bomb. Three years before the first test explosion, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi had set off the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction underneath the stands of an old athletic field at the University of Chicago.
Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 18 December 2007
Splitting the operatic atom in Chicago
'Doctor Atomic' is paired with 'Die Frau Ohne Schatten' at Lyric Opera.
A day may come when John Adams' "Doctor Atomic" -- the operatic saga of Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb that premiered in San Francisco two years ago -- will seem quaint. Maybe even as quaint as "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" (The Woman Without a Shadow), Richard Strauss' alarming fairy tale about defective gods and bickering people and the nature of light and shadow.
Strauss wrote his most elaborate opera in the first years after World War I, when it became clear that after such destruction the 20th century could not possibly be as cozy as the 19th. Adams and director Peter Sellars, who assembled a libretto from historical documents and excerpts of poetry, took the next step, reminding us of what politicians don't like to address: that the bombs built in the New Mexico desert and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, to end World War II changed the world again, and in ways with which we have not adequately coped.
These two ambitious, massive operas were on display at Lyric Opera of Chicago over the weekend. Friday night, "Doctor Atomic" was given in a slightly revised version, brilliantly performed. Sellars' San Francisco production was also touched up a bit, all the better to demonstrate the opera's profound examination of vital issues. "Die Frau," seen Sunday afternoon, boasted some stunning singing in a cute new production by Paul Curran that was equally stunning in its superficiality.
That "Doctor Atomic" is a masterpiece of modern opera was not, I thought, in doubt at its first San Francisco performance. But the performance was troubled. Adams wrote the role of Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, for the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who was too ill to perform it and died the next year. The cast included many fine singers, but only one, Adams veteran James Maddalena as the weatherman Jack Hubbard, was fully convincing. Everyone else seemed cowed by the musical challenge of an ever-shifting rhythmic landscape.
That's all changed. The revised score and production were given in June by Netherlands Opera, and by the time the cast took the stage in Chicago on Friday, they had come to inhabit their roles. And with conductor Robert Spano in the pit, the opera felt in sure, expansive hands.
Gerald Finley's twitchy Oppenheimer is one of opera's most fascinatingly complex figures. Oppenheimer was husband and father, scientist and humanist, with a bent for classical poetry, and -- as leader of the Manhattan Project -- inventor and maker of the first weapon of mass destruction. Chain-smoking, Finley now captures him inside and out, nervously confronting the bullying Gen. Leslie Groves (Eric Owens) and Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink), and bursting into dark, ecstatic song, whether to express existential turmoil or the delusional elation of a Hindu god.
But Jessica Rivera is the big news in Chicago. Adams has rewritten Kitty's part for soprano, and this former resident artist of Los Angeles Opera, who got her start in Sellars' productions of Osvaldo Golijov's "Ainadamar" and Adams' "A Flowering Tree," here flowers into a major singer. Kitty is also complex. Adams has added new music for her at the end, and with Sellars keeping her on stage throughout the second act, for the buildup to the test of the bomb, she has become, more than ever, the conscious of the opera. Rivetingly dramatic, Rivera made her the literal voice of doom.
Another young singer announced herself. Meredith Arwady as Kitty's Native American maid, Pasqualita, firmly planted herself and delivered low notes that seemed to come from the center of the Earth.
The changes in Adams' score include adjustments to vocal lines and newly enriched harmonies. Sellars' staging is now less busy, which allows Lucinda Childs' dancers to fit in more tightly. With more left to the audience's imagination, James F. Ingalls' lighting all the better captures the desert colors, and Dunya Ramicova's khaki costumes, each a subtly different desert shade, seem more interesting than ever.
But Adams, unfortunately, caved in when literal-minded scientists objected to his opening chorus, which proclaimed, "Matter can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form." Over three hours, and with time slowed down with excruciating meaningfulness for the final countdown to the test, "Doctor Atomic" presents the proof of Einstein's prediction that extraordinary energy can be released from matter and that time is relative. Now the opera begins with the wussy qualification "We believed that. . . . "
Andrew Patner, Chicago Sun Times, 17 December 2007
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/music/classical/700109,CST-FTR-lyric17.article
Creative passion fuels Lyric's 'Doctor Atomic'
It's a brilliant attempt, even if second act drags
RECOMMENDED
"Doctor Atomic," the 2005 John Adams-Peter Sellars opera on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the first atom bomb in the summer of 1945 at Los Alamos, is one of the most brilliant attempts at serious music theater since, well, "Nixon in China," the 1987 John Adams-Peter Sellars opera on Richard M. Nixon's historic visit to Beijing in 1972.
Breathtaking in its ambition, psychologically acute in its characterizations, emotionally wrenching on several occasions, politically balanced and astute, "Atomic" is a rare example of a contemporary opera written not to fulfill a commission or by picking a classic novel or play at random for adaptation.
Rather, this is a work created because its authors had a passion for their subject and their artistic experiment, a passion not unlike that of the scientists of the Manhattan Project depicted here in song and staging.
And starting with Friday's opening, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the last of three co-producers of the work to present it (following the opera companies of San Francisco and Amsterdam), is giving what surely must be the definitive production of a three-city round of premieres. Most of the spectacular young cast has lived with this work for years, their performances becoming deeper through experience and ongoing research into the real individuals they portray.
As Alexander Platt did with Chicago Opera Theater's "Nixon," Robert Spano shows the power and tight craftsmanship a real conductor can bring out in Adams' scores. The orchestra shines. And Adams and Sellars have made cuts, changes and additions, particularly in the opera's second half, that bring the work to where they want it.
A part of the concept's ingeniousness is the way Sellars' libretto follows the actual history and science closely but also consists almost entirely of actual quotations and other found material. Parallel to the successful experiments of Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, Oppenheimer, just 38, was lured in 1942 from the University of California at Berkeley by Gen. Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army to be the scientific director of the secret nuclear project in the New Mexico desert. "Atomic" follows the brilliant, high-strung and highly cultured physicist, his colleagues and family over the last days before the explosion of "the Gadget" at the Trinity testing site on July 16, 1945.
It might seem surprising, but opera proves to be one of the best means for revisiting a period and a cast of characters so charged with philosophical, moral, political and personal complexity. Think of Wagner's "Ring" cycle but with real lives at stake and the actual planet as a whole perhaps facing its twilight. With his pulsing rhythms and surging choruses, Adams' music characterizes and parallels both the astonishing scientific discoveries and procedures and the dramatic context of these real and world-changing events.
And for the first of "Atomic's" two 85-minute acts, the team pulls everything off. From choruses that succinctly explain Einstein to dialogue between Oppenheimer (the masterful Canadian baritone Gerald Finley) and his later nemesis Edward Teller (the perceptive American baritone Richard Paul Fink) and his doubtful and idealistic younger colleague Robert Wilson (the riveting Canadian tenor Thomas Glenn) to a strangely moving bit of comic relief with General Groves (superb bass-baritone Eric Owens) and a heart-rending Brittenesque setting for Oppenheimer of a piercing John Donne sonnet, it all works. There is not a moment where everything does not grab you by the collar and hold you.
And Adrianne Lobel's both abstracted and realistic setting (the latter side including a very genuine-looking bomb), Dunya Ramicova's perfect period costumes and James F. Ingalls' expressionistic lighting make the Lyric stage a living theater of the mind.
But things become diffuse and needlessly stretched out in the second half, just when the tension should build to its peak. Scenes involving Oppenheimer's wife Kitty (soprano Jessica Rivera) and her Native American maid Pasqualita (tremendous work by Lyric training program contralto Meredith Arwady) go on way too long and seem to serve little more than P.C. gender-balance purposes.
Sellars' decision to make the 20-minute Trinity countdown period last 40 minutes in performance makes us think less about the real-time pressures being examined rather than more. Lucinda Childs' predictable choreography becomes tiresome. And the dependence on surround-sound-style electronic recordings in the auditorium becomes gimmicky.
One wonders what any of this would sound like to someone hearing rather than seeing the work. But while it can be seen, it deserves to be. It will get you thinking and talking, and that is something that happens too rarely, and not only in opera houses.
John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 17 December 2007 http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-mxa1217_atomicdec17,0,385507.story
'Atomic' no bomb
At the Lyric, 'Doctor Atomic' discovers its heart and soul
The Bomb. It pecks at our collective consciousness like the eagle that torments Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods.
"The Gadget," as the bomb was code-named before that fateful July 1945 morning when the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert, literally hangs over the action of the Lyric Opera of Chicago's "Doctor Atomic." No one onstage can escape this huge, weird, wire-encrusted globe. And neither can we, even from the usual safety of our seats.
Taking the Manhattan Project and A-bomb explosion as its mythic center, the important, powerful, stirring and ultimately beautiful opera by John Adams and Peter Sellars arrived Friday night at the Civic Opera House. Its Chicago premiere is a major event for both the Lyric and the city, given the key role the University of Chicago played in the development of atomic science up to and during World War II.
At the end, the attentive audience sat in awed silence before breaking into applause that lasted nearly 10 minutes, with composer Adams garnering the loudest ovations. They were richly deserved.
Lyric is only the second American company to produce the opera after its troubled 2005 premiere in San Francisco, and is the first to present it in the revised version unveiled last June in Amsterdam. What felt muddled and dramatically inert in San Francisco has been replaced by a much more coherent artistic vision and a superior performance in general, with five of the original cast members from San Francisco returning to their roles.
Sellars, who compiled the libretto from actual period sources, has thoroughly revamped his staging of the second act, tightening the dramatic focus and setting the inner lives of the characters much more vividly against the vast moral, ethical and social issues that inform "Doctor Atomic." Adams has recast the role of Kitty Oppenheimer, the Cassandra-like wife of the work's protagonist, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, for soprano voice, radiantly taken here by Jessica Rivera. He has also tweaked some of the vocal lines and adjusted text. Small as they are, these changes, combined with Sellars' much more humanized staging, make a world of difference. The opera has found its beating heart.
It also has found its true sound. Subtle amplification enables the singers to project their music and words over Adams' sometimes thick orchestration without ever having to force it. Mark Grey's sound design opens and closes the opera in an electronic haze that suggests a post-nuclear landscape (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). The final sound we hear is the voice of a Hiroshima survivor calmly describing the cries of irradiated children begging for water.
With its jagged discords, unstable harmonic activity and restless metrical shifts, the score is the most musically complex and sophisticated, yet accessible, one from the composer to date. But while its twitchy rhythms and pulsating patterns owe much to the wartime Stravinsky and to Adams' own early minimalist manner, the luminous floods of lyricism and the imposing choral writing represent Adams at his mature best.
Listen to Gerald Finley's Oppenheimer deliver his John Donne-inspired showpiece that ends Act 1, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," a twisty and dense aria of fear and anguish Bach might have inserted in one of his sacred cantatas were he alive today. The Canadian baritone inhabits his role as the high-strung, chain-smoking hero, torn between scientific duty and moral responsibility, with fierce understanding and commitment.
The opera's two female figures, Rivera as the prescient Kitty and contralto Meredith Arwady as the Oppenheimers' Native American maid, Pasqualita, pour out sad, singable lines that speak of a world defiled and bereft of peace. "Love must imagine the world," laments Kitty, in heartbreaking phrases that drift over disconsolate strings. Both Rivera and Arwady are tremendous.
So, too, is the Lyric Orchestra, riding the nervous multiple meters and roiling crests of Adams' scoring under Robert Spano's vigorous yet precise baton. So, too, is Donald Nally's chorus, sounding the elemental terror of the Bhagavad-Gita's evocation of the Hindu god Vishnu while scientists and military personnel count off the minutes before the bomb is set off.
Sellars, working with his usual set designer, Adrianne Lobel, imagines the "Trinity" test site as an open, metaphoric space bathed in the primary colors of James F. Ingalls' lighting and filled with constant activity that winds down in slow degrees as our anticipation of the blast grows. (Don't worry; the effect works.) Lucinda Childs' choreography has dancers encircling ground zero like a children's game; supernumeraries mime the building of the bomb; poles and scaffolding and domestic set pieces move in and out.
The opera certainly invites other perspectives and will get an entirely different staging when it travels to the Metropolitan Opera next year. But because the Sellars production represents the current thoughts of its creators, it demands we take it seriously.
There is not a weak link in the cast. Although their roles are not fleshed out very much, bass Richard Paul Fink as the hawkish physicist Edward Teller, bass Eric Owens as the blustery Gen. Leslie Groves, and tenor Thomas Glenn (Robert Wilson), baritone James Maddalena (Jack Hubbard) and tenor Roger Honeywell (Capt. James Nolan) -- as the voices of conscience among the project's scientists and military personnel -- are all excellent.
Don't go to "Doctor Atomic" expecting a comforting night at the opera. It's not that kind of work. It's not that kind of world. The opera allows you to make up your own mind as to what the issues it raises mean for the future of life on this planet. Be prepared to be moved to tears, not by easy operatic sentiment but by tough artistic truth.
"Doctor Atomic" is real, it is us and it is now.
Marc Geelhoed, Financial Times, 20 December 2007
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c38d7880-ae9c-11dc-97aa-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
Birth of the nuclear world
The American operatic landscape is littered with recent adaptations of classic American novels that are little more than nostalgia trips telling audiences where they've been. John Adams and his librettist and director Peter Sellars stuck to their guns with Doctor Atomic, which depicts the final day before the Manhattan Project's first test of an atomic bomb in 1945. No folksy Americana here: with a score using electronic noise and blistering sonic explosions, it shows how we arrived in today's nuclear world.
Since its 2005 premiere at the San Francisco Opera, Adams has nipped and tucked some scenes, expanded others, and turned the role of Kitty Oppenheimer, originally for a mezzo-soprano, into one for a soprano. The revised version was first heard last summer at De Nederlanse Opera and has now moved to Chicago's Lyric Opera. The work was co-commissioned by the three companies, and a new production opens at New York's Metropolitan Opera in late 2008.
Those familiar with Adams' Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer will miss the poet Alice Goodman's gracious librettos. Sellars compiled some of the text from dry historical documents, and they sometimes land on the ear with a thud. Other passages set high-flown poetry from the Bhagavad Vita and by John Donne, Muriel Rukeyser and Baudelaire. The changes in tone can grate, but it does hang together, tenuously. Most important, its cumulative impact is devastating.
Sellars' direction, which puts the characters into disjointed, mechanical shapes as they muse in abstraction, will be condemned as unrealistic in some quarters. To me, it captured the psychological anguish and gave visual impact to the gripping music.
The main cast excels, led by the noble Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who created the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer. For emotive force, it's difficult to imagine a more soul-searing delivery of his aria "Batter My Heart/Three Person'd God". Jessica Rivera, as the long-suffering alcoholic Kitty Oppenheimer, courageously takes on the role's demands of angular, quasi-Schoenberg writing balanced by florid coloratura, and is an affecting actor as well.
Bass-baritone Eric Owens prowls the stage with stentorian voice and much finger-pointing as the put-upon general in charge of Los Alamos, Leslie Groves. Canadian tenor Thomas Glenn has a strong future with his clear, bright voice, and brought a needed youthful look to the production. (The scientists' average age was 29.) James Maddalena, the original Nixon of Nixon in China , made a welcome return to Adams country as meteorologist Jack Hubbard.
Also notable is Lucinda Childs' fluid and understated choreography, which gives concrete form to the singers' feelings. The Lyric Opera Orchestra got through the tricky music dutifully under Robert Spano, and will no doubt become more comfortable as the production continues.
Mark Thomas Ketterson, Opera News, March 2008 , vol 72 , no.9
John Adams's Doctor Atomic has enjoyed uncommon success since its 2005 world premiere at San Francisco Opera. The original Peter Sellars production has now traveled to Netherlands Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago (seen Dec. 14), and a new staging by Penny Woolcock is slated for coproduction by the Met (in October 2008) and ENO. Atomic's appeal is unsurprising, given the stinging contemporary relevance of its central conflict — the ability to wage sophisticated warfare versus the ethics of doing so — and its presentation of a modern Frankenstein fable involving a man obsessed with and ultimately destroyed by his creation.
In Doctor Atomic,
Adams reconfirms himself a theatrically astute composer. His score has abundant emotional power and often arresting beauty, particularly evocative in the references to light and luminescence glittering throughout the piece. Purists may object to the use of amplified ambient effects, but at Lyric, these were tremendously effective, as tastefully executed by sound designer Mark Grey. Sellars's libretto, cobbled from poetic wisdom as well as scientific analysis of the A-bomb's creation, provides a cogent narrative initiated by a basic lesson in nuclear physics — conversion of matter into energy — before exploring the moral consequences of such endeavor.
The opera has a powerfully multifaceted protagonist in J. Robert Oppenheimer, a quintessentially conflicted man who is scientifically preoccupied yet responds to the poetry of Baudelaire and the Bhagavad Gita. Gerald Finley, who created the role of Oppenheimer at San Francisco Opera, repeated the assignment in Chicago, revealing the wealth of lyricism in Adams's music and proving himself a subtle yet theatrically potent actor. Finley's "Batter my heart, three person'd God" — prophetically delivered as the silhouette of his terrifying creation ominously dominated the stage above him — was shattering.
Oppenheimer's agony and doubt are countered in Doctor Atomic (as they were in life) by the heart and conscience of his humanitarian wife, Kitty. Soprano Jessica Rivera's intrinsically sympathetic timbre traced her vocal line plangently, and she has the considerable technical control required by the writing.
Richard Paul Fink, Eric Owens and James Maddalena — all veterans of the SFO premiere — lent solid support as Edward Teller, Leslie Groves and Jack Hubbard, respectively, as did Thomas Glenn, in his original role of the tortured scientist Robert Wilson, and Roger Honeywell as James Nolan. Meredith Arwady's contralto was gratefully employed in the melismatic writing for the Native American Pasqualita's keening vision of impending doom.
Adrianne Lobel's stark platform setting, grounded by a suggestion of the Los Alamos Mountains, intriguingly framed this interplay of scientific sterility with human frailty. Choreography by Lucinda Childs was illuminating when dancers were discovered in goal-directed action — a trio of scientists fluidly miming frenzied laboratory creation proved telling — though her work was less effective when merely adding kinetic interest.
Robert Spano vigorously conducted a score that has had some revisions since its first hearing in 2005. These involve minor revisions to vocal lines and choral material, as well as a Fach-shift to lyric soprano for Kitty, a role conceived for mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and sung at the world premiere by mezzo Kristine Jepson. Some judicious trimming would intensify the opera's potency, and its final moments may divide listeners: an extended build-up of almost unbearable tension underlying the countdown to the bomb's detonation goes musically unresolved. For some this might feel like a frustrated orgasm; for others it provided a searing moment of epiphany engendered by a satisfying evening of perceptive musical expression.
Wes Blomster, Opera Today, 3 Jan 2008
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2008/01/oppenheimer_ope.php
Oppenheimer opera charts new course in music
In this country art and politics are rarely bedfellows — strange or otherwise; indeed, it’s seldom that the two meet under the same roof.
Above: Gerald Finley stars as Robert Oppenheimer in the Peter Sellars-directed Doctor Atomic, part of Lyric Opera of Chicago's 2007-08 season. Photo by Dan Rest/Lyric Opera of Chicago.
That is one thing that makes John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic” unique among recent American operas. At the same time, the success of the work gives hope that the national ear is not totally deaf to the urgency that speaks so strongly from this account of the anxious hours leading up to the first explosion of a nuclear bomb in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. “Doctor Atomic,” directed by sometimes enfant terrible Peter Sellars, who also wrote the libretto, was premiered by the San Francisco Opera in 2005. Following performances in Amsterdam last summer, the Chicago Lyric Opera has revived the SFO staging as a major event of its current season.
Adams first tried his hand at contemporary history in 1987 with “Nixon in China.” And Sellars — as Edward Said commented on his work with Hindemith’s “Mathis der Mahler” in London in 1986 — is one of the few in this country “who connect opera to an ongoing social political debate” in an effort to combat “the prevailing belief that operas are essentially harmless, if not completely antiseptic.” There is obviously nothing either harmless or antiseptic about “Doctor Atomic,” defined by Adams as “an unflinching drama of contemporary humanity in crisis.” And the acute sense of crisis in today’s world, where leaders threaten the use of nuclear weapons with the ease that their forefathers played with tin soldiers, underscores the sense of urgency felt in the audiences that pack the city’s Lyric Theatre for eight performances beginning in December and continuing on into January.
The 1945 detonation of “the Gadget,” as those involved in the Manhattan Project called that first bomb, stands as the major turning point in all of human history, for with it mankind unleashed a power capable not only of heretofore unknown destruction, but able even to destroy the earth itself. The fear shared of igniting the atmosphere that haunted Robert J. Oppenheimer, father of the first bomb, informs “Doctor Atomic” from beginning to end, and Adams has done an incredible job of expressing it — in part through electronically generated sounds woven seamlessly into the score — to create what he has called “a post-nuclear holocaust landscape.” The opera ends openly at “zero minus one,” leaving the audience to deal with the consequences of the scientists’ “success” in the desert. It is thus an intentionally discomforting work about events, the relevance of which has grown immensely over the past half century.
Sellars, drawing deftly upon documentary material — much of it only recently made public — and poetry to which deeply intellectual Oppenheimer and his troubled wife Kitty were attached — stresses that the physicist in his challenge of the unknown was the Faust of the 20th century, and he pairs him tellingly with Mephistophelean Edward Teller, later famous as the mastermind of the hydrogen bomb. It is the confrontation of Oppenheimer’s intellectual honesty with Teller’s lust for power that elevates “Doctor Atomic” beyond “mere” art in its concert for moral and ethical issues.
The Lyric is fortunate in having five of the SFO principles in its cast, and Canadian baritone Gerald Finley is even more of a dead ringer for nervous, chain-smoking Oppenheimer than he was at the premiere. And Richard Paul Fink, the reigning Alberich in today’s “Ring” cycles, makes Teller more threatening that he was two years ago. Highlight of the Chicago staging, seen on December 18, was Finley’s delivery of the haunting “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” that concludes Act One. (The text is by John Donne.)
Jessica Rivera stars as Kitty Oppenheimer in the Peter Sellars-directed Doctor Atomic, a Lyric Opera of Chicago premiere for the 2007-08 season. Photo by Dan Rest/Lyric Opera of Chicago.
In extensive revisions of the score Kitty Oppenheimer is now a soprano, warmly sung by Jessica Rivera, who has made her mark as both as both Nuria and Margarita in Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar.” One critic called “Am I in your light?,” her Act-One “serenade” of her husband “a bundled Mahlerian adagietto of emotion,” and in Act Two she brings Cassandra-like insight into her exchange with Native-American nursemaid, sung with earthy sensuousness by Lyric studio artist Meredith Arwady.
Despite revisions since the premiere, however, the tension that has the audience writhing in Act One is lost in Act Two, in which the score loses its impulse. It will be interesting to see what further revisions are made when Penny Woolcock directs a totally new production of “Doctor Atomic” at the Met next season.
Conductor Robert Spano, enviously at home with contemporary scores, brings a sharp focus to Adams’ score. Questionable, however, are the largely aimless gyrations of an octet of dancers choreographed by Lucinda Childs.
Peter Sellars sums up “Doctor Atomic” as “a reality that we’re living with every minute,” and the overall excellence of the Chicago staging left no doubt about. Indeed, as Thomas Mann once wrote in another context, the opera focuses attention on a time in which “so much began that has not yet left off beginning.”
The positive response of the Chicago audience is encouraging, for it indicates a willingness — indeed, perhaps a need — for opera that is unafraid to engage itself in compelling and complex issue. True, “Doctor Atomic” will never replace “Carmen” and “Butterfly” in public favor, but its success indicates the existence of a vast number of opera-goers who seek more than mere entertainment. It is a work that demands a critical response from all who see it. And the opera is of particular relevance to Chicago, for it was beneath the football field at the University of Chicago that Enrico Fermi set off the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in history.
A film to watch for
It is sad indeed that a major companion piece to “Doctor Atomic” is largely unavailable to the current audience of the opera. Although “Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic” has been shown at several film festivals, it is not yet available through regular DVD channels.
Made for public television, word is that the film will not be distributed until it has been seen on PBS, and at present no date has been set for its showing there. An engaging counterpoint of details from Oppenheimer’s life and career and the creation of “Doctor Atomic,” the film reflects the same anxiety that accounts for the on-stage apprehension so compellingly portrayed by Sellars and Adams. It is the work of filmmaker Jon Else, whose credits include award-winning documentary on Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project “The Day After Trinity” Those who see “Doctor Atomic” should watch PBS schedules.
Gregory Peebles, Opera Today, 20 Jan 2008
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2008/01/john_adams_doct.php
John Adams' Doctor Atomic in Chicago
John Adams, whose opera Nixon in China set the bar for post-minimalism in the lyric theatre, has once again scored a success with his latest work.
Doctor Atomic, now making its second appearance in North America at Lyric Opera of Chicago after a successful premier in San Francisco, has at its core the sound that we have come to expect from a work bearing Adams’ autograph, but the composer has expanded his sonic language, embracing an approach that straddles a very delicate compositional line: Adams, unlike many of his contemporaries, is able to be at once harmonically complex and accessible. The dense score is simultaneously engaging and tuneful.
The drama of the opera concerns itself with the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team at the test site of the first atomic bomb outside Los Alamos, New Mexico during the days leading up to the first detonation. Tensions build as the test approaches and conditions become less and less favorable. Oppenheimer and his staff consider the implications of their work and the strong possibility that their labor and calculations could end in folly.
The role of Oppenheimer, sung exquisitely by Gerald Finley, begs the ethical scientific questions of the first half of the 20th century. First, is a mastery of science reason enough to employ the laws of nature to destructive ends? And, additionally, if we respect the dignity of life, what are the criteria we use to decide when the time has arrived to employ devastation on such a large scale? Adams paints with broad strokes well suited to operatic characters. Acquiescing to the commands of those more powerful than he and arguing that morality has no place in a lab, Oppenheimer struggles to convince himself that he is not responsible for the global annihilation of which his “gadget” is capable. Conflicted but moving ever forward, Finley’s Oppenheimer is representative of humanity itself. Finley’s end of act one tour-de-force soliloquy “Batter my Heart” is a crystallization of this dramatic idea.
On opposite sides of the allegorical spectrum, Robert Wilson and Richard Teller respectively oppose and condone the experiment. Thomas Glenn handles the vocally demanding role of Robert Wilson securely in spite of its relentlessly high tessitura. Glenn’s characterization is appropriately urgent, as he eloquently implores Oppenheimer and the rest of the team to petition Washington to stand down on the attack until the Japanese have been given clear terms of peace. Richard Paul Fink’s characterization of Teller is chillingly laissez-faire, his matter-of-fact delivery as frightening as the bomb itself, which hangs overhead throughout the entire performance.
As Kitty Oppenheimer, Jessica Rivera provides an attractive foil to a mostly male cast. Her warm tones bring true beauty to “Am I in your light”, and her mastery of the angular, cross-registral lines show the singer off to great success. If Meredith Arwady’s vocal line is not as smooth as one might have hoped, her portrayal of Pasquelita is characterized by a rich and booming contralto. A member of Lyric Opera’s Ryan Center, Ms. Arwady’s career is definitely one to watch.
Under the leadership of Donald Nally, the ensemble gives an effective, moody opening chorus and provides commentary throughout. The sense of ensemble is sure, and the musicianship unfaltering and clear. The corps de ballet, however, does not fare as well. Lucinda Childs’ choreography was abstract and moving, and it provided a great deal of much appreciated spectacle, but it is, unfortunately, executed somewhat weakly by the dancers, who seemed on several occasions dangerously off-balance. Peter Sellars’ compiled libretto is serviceable but suffers under comparison to the brilliant work of Alice Goodman, who prepared the incomparable text for Nixon in China. Sellars’ choice of texts for arioso moments, which range from the metaphysical and symbolist poets to the Bhagavad-Gita is wise, saving the director-librettist from foisting upon the composer the unhappy task of setting less lyrical texts for critical emotional moments. Sets by Adrianne Lobel were industrial and functional, helping the drama to continue along at an exciting pace.
Highest praise, however, must be extended to conductor Robert Spano, who finds the logic of the fascinatingly overwhelming score. Under his baton, Lyric’s orchestra makes sense of the polyrhythmic undulations and pan-tonal implications of the work.
Doctor Atomic is an important addition to the operatic canon. The evening continues the Adams-Sellars collaborative tradition of socio-political examination of definitive moments of modern history, and as such, is perhaps not as narratively satisfying as traditional nineteenth century opera to less experienced theatre-goers. Though it is not overwrought, this evening of theatre is operatic, and this sentiment can be found in the cardinal expression of the human heart in ethical conflict with itself. This anxiety is not particular to modernism, but its application in Doctor Atomic is extremely timely and makes for a thoroughly entertaining evening. Those who attend hoping for stage pyrotechnics and a “big bang” will be disappointed, but those who attend looking for distilled ethical conflict will leave more than satisfied.
James L. Zychowicz, Seen and Heard.com
http://www.musicweb.uk.net/SandH/2007/Jul-Dec07/atomic1412.htm
On Friday, 14th December 2007 Lyric Opera of Chicago gave the premiere of the revised version of John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic, a powerful new work that deserves attention because of its timely and provocative content, as well as the strength of its musical and dramatic structure. In using opera to revisit the Trinity experiment in summer 1945 - which preceded the completion and deployment of the atomic bombs in