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Articles on Doctor Atomic, Chicago 2007-2008
Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times, 16 September 2007 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20070916/ai_n20504261
The topic is modern-day -- the top-secret test explosion of the world's first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945, near Los Alamos, N.M. But the issues raised in this compelling work by composer John Adams and librettist/director Peter Sellars -- life and death, right and wrong, guilt and righteousness -- have been the stuff of opera for centuries. Or as Sellars puts it, "Opera has always been very good about dealing with the end of the world. But this was the real thing; the world really could have ended right there."
"Doctor Atomic" had its premiere at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, and Sellars and Adams reworked parts of it for performances this past June at the Netherlands Opera. Lyric, which co-produced the opera with the San Francisco and Netherlands companies, is presenting the reworked version.
The opera focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic physicist who headed the team of several thousand scientists, engineers and others who worked on developing the bomb (known as The Gadget) in the wilds of New Mexico between 1943 and 1945.
Worried that the Germans also were developing an atomic bomb, the Los Alamos team worked around the clock at fever pitch. Set in the final hours before the test, when unseasonable thunderstorms threatened to set off The Gadget prematurely, "Doctor Atomic" is a study of human beings coping with unfathomable pressure.
Oppenheimer, a real-life renaissance man whose interests ranged from theoretical physics to poetry and music, eases the stress by reading poetry. One of the opera's high points is his shatteringly intense aria set to John Donne's metaphysical Holy Sonnet 14, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." (Oppenheimer chose the name Trinity for the test site outside Los Alamos in honor of the poem.)
Gerald Finley, the baritone who created the role of Oppenheimer, heads Lyric's cast, which also includes bass-baritone Eric Owens as General Groves, the team's top military man, and soprano Jessica Rivera as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty. Robert Spano will conduct.
It's fitting that Lyric is bringing "Doctor Atomic" to Chicago, the city where the first sustained nuclear reaction was achieved on Dec. 2, 1942. Working for months in secret in an abandoned squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, at 57th and Ellis, a team headed by Enrico Fermi created the technology that would move an atomic bomb from the realm of science fiction to reality.
Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times, 9 December 2007
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/weiss/688096,SHO-Sunday-atomic09.article
Beauty and the bomb
'The calmer you are, and the more firm but restrained, the better," said director Peter Sellars, as he recently coached members of the cast of "Doctor Atomic" -- the opera by composer John Adams and director-librettist Sellars that will receive its local debut Friday night at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
It would be an understatement to say Sellars was advising his performers to play against the grain. Because the story being told here is momentous and nerve-shattering -- nothing less than a fact-based fantasia on the events leading up to the detonation of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., the history-altering explosion that took place in the pre-dawn hours of July 16, 1945.
It was at Los Alamos, smack in the middle of the desert, that many of the greatest scientists of the period had come together as part of the U.S. government's top-secret Manhattan Project -- a high-stakes effort designed to pre-empt possible similar plans undertaken by scientists in Nazi Germany. Focused furiously on the work at hand, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues also were driven to ponder the fallout -- psychic, physical, political and moral -- that might result from their work.
"More than 60 years later, we are still dealing with these issues," Sellars said. "And we have yet to see the famous post-Cold War 'peace dividend.'"
Now 50, Sellars, who still looks like the thinking person's answer to Bart Simpson, is no stranger to interpreting volcanic moments through grandly theatrical means.
This was, after all, the prodigy who first attracted attention as a Harvard undergrad with his puppet version of Wagner's "Ring" cycle, who went on to forge a career with highly controversial stagings of a series of Mozart operas transposed to contemporary settings (from Cape Cod diner to Trump Tower apartment to Spanish Harlem) and who then collaborated with Adams on two operas lifted straight from the headlines -- "Nixon in China" (1987) and "The Death of Klinghoffer" (1991).
"'Doctor Atomic' is really one of those life works that is only still in its childhood," said Sellars, who staged the opera's world premiere at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 and a subsequent version at Netherlands Opera last summer. (Lyric's staging is a co-production with San Francisco and De Nederlandse Opera.)
'This opera is not fantasy'
Sellars' journey with "Doctor Atomic" began when he took over writing the English-language libretto from Alice Goodman, because she didn't have the time to work on the project.
"I had already collected piles of original documents, letters, poetry and all the rest of the material related to this period," he said. "And I saw we could shape the libretto from what was said by many of those who were directly involved in the Manhattan Project. So this opera is not fantasy; we are hearing real people. On the other hand, it also is art, so I incorporated the poetry so crucial to those involved -- from John Donne and Charles Baudelaire to Muriel Rukeyser and the Bhagavad Gita of Hindu mythology."
In addition, working with choreographer Lucinda Childs ("Einstein on the Beach") and a corps of dancers, Sellars has infused the opera with references beyond physics -- drawing on the ceremonies of the Tewa Pueblo people of New Mexico who worked as domestics for those involved in the Manhattan Project, on the Holocaust (photographs of the death camps were just beginning to be released in the United States at this time) and on the spirit of modernism in art that was part of Oppenheimer's New York existence.
The principal characters in "Doctor Atomic" range from widely-known to less familiar figures, including Oppenheimer (performed by baritone Gerald Finley), who led the project; Edward Teller, who would later become the model for "Dr. Strangelove"; Leslie Groves, the military head of the project; Robert Wilson, a younger physicist; Jack Hubbard, chief meteorologist for the Trinity test; Capt. James Nolan, the Army Medical Corps physician at Los Alamos, and Kitty Oppenheimer, wife of the physicist, who shared her husband's passion for poetry, and often used it as a form of secret code between them.
'Batter my heart'
The crucial idea was to "make this opera a work of beauty. It is not meant to be depressing, shattering, toxic," Sellars said, bursting into one of those wild, spasmodic laughs that tend to punctuate his thoughts. "The role of artists is to process the toxicity."
Asked if there were a catchphrase in the opera akin to the one in "Nixon in China" that excitedly trumpets the word "news, news, news, news, news," Sellars pointed to the closing aria of Act I that is sung by Oppenheimer and set to stanzas of a Donne sonnet:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
"The music John [Adams] has written for this aria is so beautiful," said Sellars. "It harks back to the English composer Henry Purcell and is different in texture from everything else in the opera. Oppie was a genuine aesthete, and he would have loved it. And John has a deep understanding of the way music is connected to the inner physics of the body and soul. For years he has hung out with scientists in the Berkeley area, where he lives, and they have vetted everything in this work."
As for Sellars, he confesses the only reason he passed his math and science classes at Harvard was that his professor liked the performances he staged.
John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 9 December 2007
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/stage/chi-1209_atomic_maindec09,1,2973566.story?page=1
Oppenheimer comes to the opera
In a rehearsal room backstage at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the singers and dancers spread across a bare stage, Peter Sellars is orchestrating his vision of the dawn of the nuclear era.
"Keep the paranoia level very high," the director tells the performers playing the scientists and military personnel counting down the minutes to the first test explosion of an atomic bomb. A rehearsal pianist attacks the swirling chords of composer John Adams' score as Robert Spano conducts.
Sporty in his patterned polyester shirt, beaded necklace and scruffy jeans, Sellars watches intently as the dancers creep forward and backward in sync with the shifting meters. "Struggle through the air as if it's a toxic cloud," he shouts over the music.
It's a little more than two weeks before the Lyric Opera premiere of "Doctor Atomic" on Dec. 14 at the Civic Opera House. Whether the company will have a hit, a dud or something in between seems less important right now than getting the production onto the stage in a way that will do justice to Sellars' and Adams' high-minded intentions.
The opera takes us to that momentous summer morning in 1945 in the heat-blasted desert of Alamogordo, N.M., where a genie of apocalyptic power was set loose and humanity's fate hung in the balance.
The libretto for "Doctor Atomic" is the handiwork of Sellars, Adams' longtime collaborator. The former also is staging the show, as he did with Adams' earlier operas, "Nixon in China" (1987) and "The Death of Klinghoffer" (1991).
Sellars conceived the original production of "Doctor Atomic," with spare designs by Adrianne Lobel and abstract choreography by Lucinda Childs, for the San Francisco Opera, which gave the work its world premiere in 2005.
The creative team was not satisfied with the premiere, even though the performers and Adams' score received widespread critical praise. Sellars restaged the problematic second act, while Adams composed new music for one of the main characters and made various nips and tucks in the vocal lines.
The revised version was unveiled in June at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, where it was taped for DVD release next year. That is the production Lyric audiences will see.
During a rehearsal break, Sellars expressed his delight that the opera has returned home, in a sense, to Chicago, the birthplace of atomic science.
"The incredibly powerful texts the chorus sings in Act 1 were written by the University of Chicago scientists who said nuclear power should not be introduced to the world as a weapon," he said. "These were people of profound conscience and courage."
How can mankind cope with its newfound power to annihilate all life on Earth? That is the main question that torments the opera's J. Robert Oppenheimer (baritone Gerald Finley), the brilliant physicist who spearheaded the top-secret Manhattan Project to its successful conclusion in the New Mexico desert.
Apart from his scientific genius, the historical Oppenheimer had a keen sense of ethics, was deeply versed in the arts and humanities, read Sanskrit and John Donne, and had copies of Baudelaire and the Bhagavad-Gita in his pocket the night that the bomb developed by his team was detonated.
The code name Oppenheimer gave the project -- Trinity -- is in fact taken from a Donne sonnet, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," a poem bristling with images of warfare. The fictional Oppenheimer sings it in an intensely beautiful setting that closes the first act.
Besides Finley, the cast for Lyric's eight performances (through Jan. 19) includes baritone Eric Owens as Gen. Leslie Groves, the blustery military head of the project; tenor Thomas Glenn as Robert R. Wilson, the dissenting younger physicist; baritone Richard Paul Fink as the mordant scientist Edward Teller; and baritone James Maddalena as meteorologist Jack Hubbard.
Representing the women's point of view are soprano Jessica Rivera as Kitty Oppenheimer, the opera's Cassandra-like conscience, channeling human history in her long soliloquies; and contralto Meredith Arwady as Pasqualita, the Oppenheimers' Navajo maid, who sings poetry resonant with the rhythms of the ancient land of her people.
The opera's second half is laced with the almost unbearable tension felt by everyone before "The Gadget" (as the scientists call it) is exploded.
Teller warns that his calculations indicate the explosion could set the atmosphere afire, scorching the planet. The anxious, chain-smoking Oppenheimer can only lament, "Lord, these things are hard on the heart." The bomb goes off.
Rejected the Faust idea
In 1999, Pamela Rosenberg, the San Francisco Opera's former general director, approached Adams about composing an opera about "an American Faust." Her candidate was Oppenheimer, known to posterity as the father of the atomic bomb. Adams rejected the Faust idea as a contrivance, but in Oppenheimer he recognized a mythic modern Prometheus around whom an important opera could be constructed.
Sellars cobbled together his libretto entirely from authentic sources -- declassified government documents, memoirs, letters, poems by Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser.
At the time of the San Francisco premiere, some critics found Sellars' libretto opaque and his production concept unmoving.
In a recent New Yorker magazine profile, Metropolitan Opera general director Peter Gelb said he found the production "undramatic." Accordingly, when "Doctor Atomic" arrives at the Met in October 2008, it will be in a new and different production by the British director Penny Woolcock.
Sellars, who officially "withdrew" from participating in the Met version of "Doctor Atomic," said he has no hard feelings and welcomes the fact that the Met will open another perspective on Adams' masterpiece.
"For me, the more productions there are of this work, the more readily it becomes part of the repertory," he said. "There's no definitive version."
Even those who had reservations about the San Francisco premiere agreed on the merits of Adams' score, the most complex and powerful to date to come from the man many consider America's greatest living composer.
Playing with fire
The influences of Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varese meet and meld in a score that, like Oppenheimer himself, plays with fire. As with Wagner's operas, the principal carrier of the mythic message is the orchestra -- the main source of what Adams has called the score's "serpentine, churning inner activity."
"The music is a combination of lyricism and rhythmic instability," said conductor Spano. "Sometimes he has three to five different meters going on at a time, and not one of them is the one I'm beating!"
Beyond its merits as a work of art, "Doctor Atomic" will stand the test of time as an important work of social responsibility, in Sellars' view.
"I do think this opera will play its part in the resurgence of the call to eliminate all nuclear weapons," he said.
The moral and social impact of the atom bomb on modern life, he added, "is an issue that has not gone away, which is one reason why the opera has no ending. There hasn't been closure to what was introduced to the world on that July morning in 1945.
"The opera bleeds into our lifetime, just as the strontium from that first test blast has bled into the bones of every one of us. It's not over."