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Doctor Atomic
5 out of 5 stars: The London Paper
“Gerald Finley is magnificent here and throughout as the tortured Oppenheimer” Evening Standard
“… his neurotic, chain-smoking Oppenheimer is a remarkable portrayal.” The Guardian
“Gerald Finley sings magnificently as Oppenheimer…” The Telegraph
“The excellent Gerald Finley … sings with a magnetic beauty that his unsympathetic character hardly deserves.” FT
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Composer |
John Adams |
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Librettist |
Peter Sellars |
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Venue and Dates |
English National Opera, Coliseum, London 25, 28 February, 5, 7, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20 March 2009 |
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Conductor |
Lawrence Renes [ UK opera debut] |
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Production |
Revised production Director: Penny Woolcock Sets: Julian Crouch Costumes: Catherine Zuber Lighting: Brian MacDevitt Choreographer: Andrew Dawson |
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Performers |
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Gerald Finley (except 11 & 13 March when James Cleverton stood in)
Kitty Oppenheimer: Sasha Cooke
General Leslie Groves: Jonathan Viera
Edward Teller: Brindley Sherratt
Jack Hubbard: Roderick Earle
Robert Wilson: Thomas Glenn
Captain James Nolan: Christopher Gillett (on 25 February, Lee David Bowen stood in on short notice for indisposed Christopher Gillett)
Pasqualita: Meredith Arwady (25, 28 Feb, 5, 11, 13, 16 March) Morag Boyle (7, 18, 20 March)
Peter Oppenheimer [son]: Rudi Goodman |
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Notes |
UK premiere. Co-production with New York Metropolitan Opera |
Photo: Tristram Kenton
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Click below to download a pdf of the Courtesy of the Met website |
Click below to hear an ENO Doctor Atomic podcast where Edward Seckerson discusses Doctor Atomic with Gerald Finley (Oppenheimer), Director Penny Woolcock, Sasha Cooke (Kitty Oppenheimer) and Conductor Lawrence Renes
http://www.eno.org/podcasts/main.html
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See the interviews section for articles and interviews about Doctor Atomic |
Doctor Atomic preview by Stephen Graham, musicalcriticism.com, 20 February 2009
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/news/eno-dratomicpreview-0209.shtml
John Adams is at the forefront of contemporary opera composition. Only Harrison Birtwistle rivals him for fecundity and invention in theatrical composition amongst the senior ranks of contemporary composers.
Favouring engagement with modern political issues and the experiences of the key players involved thereof, Adams' operas, including Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), A Flowering Tree (2006), as well as other operatic theatre works, are required listening for anyone interested in contemporary music theatre. Each work has comfortably entered the repertory.
Adams' third opera proper, Dr. Atomic, received its premiere in San Francisco in 2006 in a production directed by the composer's long-term collaborator, Peter Sellars. After touring to Chicago and Amsterdam, some alterations were made to the piece in response to feedback gained through these performances, and a new production of the piece opened at the Met in New York to generally warm acclaim. This production, directed again by Penny Woolcock (who directed the famous television film version of Adams' controversial Death of Klinghoffer), comes to ENO on February 25 featuring stage designs by Julian Crouch (whose work for ENO in Satyagraha two years ago proved a highlight of that production). Gerald Finley again reprises his much-praised performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the person who oversaw the controversial project, a role he created in the original production in San Francisco.
Dr. Atomic focuses on the moral dilemma faced by Oppenheimer and other key players in the Manhattan Project as they develop nuclear technology, and gradually come face to face with the possible implications of their actions. The libretto, assembled by Sellars, makes creative use of a variety of sources, primarily declassified U.S. government documents and communications among the scientists, government officials, and military personnel. It also uses poetry from John Donne, Baudelaire, the Bhagavad Gita and a traditional song of the Tewa Indians.
The music, from what I've heard, builds upon Adams distinctively sharp-edged and forward-driven minimalism, as comfortable in swimming lyricism as it is in spinning-top mechanics, heard in his earlier works. Moreover, The New York Times review of the Met premiere stated the following: 'this score continues to impress me as Mr. Adams's most complex and masterly music. Whole stretches of the orchestral writing tremble with grainy colours, misty sonorities and textural density.' Anthony Thommasini, the reviewer, praises its 'obsessive riffs, pungently dissonant cluster chords, elegiac solo instrumental lines that achingly drift atop nervous, jittery orchestral figurations.'
Adams has shown himself a subtle choreographer of large-scale movements of drama, and equally of stilling moments of great inner turmoil. He has an even-handed and always nuanced approach to the dramaturgy of history which imbues his works with their lasting ambiguity, and fascination. (Adams has nevertheless occasioned some controversy- witness Richard Taruskin's typically wrong-headed condemnation of Adams as anti-American, with respect to his apparent romanticisation of the terrorists in Klinghoffer, in an article for the New York Times after the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001). The ENO has staged Nixon twice to great acclaim, and this new co-production with the Met, opening on February 25 and running in rep until March 20, should prove a highlight of the opera calendar in the UK this year. Lawrence Renes, conductor at the European premiere of this work in Amsterdam in 2007, will lead the ENO Orchestra and Chorus in what should be an exciting and exhilarating set of performances.
Photo: Catherine Ashmore
What the critics say
Richard Morrison, The Times, 26 February 2009
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article5805970.ece
Rating: Four out of five stars
The atomic explosion, when it finally arrives two minutes before the end of John Adams’s epic opera, is all the more chilling for being so understated. First the orchestra builds a sinister crescendo of clocks, ticking down the seconds to that fateful moment in July 1945 when Robert Oppenheimer’s scientists tested the A-bomb and changed the world for ever. Then, as the cast crouches on stage, hypnotised in horror, a huge electronic rumble rolls round the Coliseum, and there’s an ear-splitting blast of babies screaming. Finally, over and over again, you hear a Japanese woman plaintively begging for water. That’s when the penny drops. In these closing moments the axis of the opera has twisted, and we have moved from chemistry to consequence, from scientists to victims, from the Los Alamos test site to the devastating reality of Hiroshima.
Nothing in the preceding three hours of Adams’s 2005 piece (receiving its British premiere at English National Opera) is as dramatic. Perhaps that’s inevitable. What’s come first — a portrait of the Manhattan Project’s climactic final hours — has been mostly discussions and deliberations. There are fascinating vignettes (much of Peter Sellars’s libretto is drawn verbatim from memoirs) mingled with agonised soliloquies in which characters wrestle with their consciences. There is even a tender love scene in which Oppenheimer (the superb Gerald Finley) soothes the fears of Kitty, his increasingly unhinged wife (the luscious-voiced Sasha Cooke) with sensuous renditions of Baudelaire.
It’s all interesting, but not exactly action-packed. We see Oppenheimer first as a laconic but cunning executive, appeasing his military master (Jonathan Veira, suitably irascible as General Groves) while deflecting the moral qualms of his increasingly uneasy colleagues, especially Brindley Sherratt’s ironic Edward Teller and Thomas Glenn’s angry Robert Wilson.
But as the atomic test draws near, Oppenheimer himself disintegrates, singing Donne’s sonnet Batter my Heart, Three-person'd God, an agonised cry for oblivion and a clean start which, of course, will never be possible.
That outburst is one of many stunning musical moments. And they are well conducted by Lawrence Renes, though the ENO orchestra and chorus sometimes sound as if they could do with another rehearsal or three. But there are other passages, particularly the Mystic Meg-like excursions into magic realism for Kitty and her maid, that should be trimmed.
Penny Woolcock’s production — though sitting awkwardly within Julian Crouch’s rabbit-hutch sets — already seems much tighter than it did at the New York Met. It’s certainly worth a visit. Once again Adams has turned 20th-century history into absorbing, provocative music-theatre.
Thomas Glenn as Wilson. Photo: Tristram Kenton
Ben Hogwood, MusicOMH, 26 February 2009
http://www.musicomh.com/opera/eno-atomic_0209.htm
Rating: Four out of five stars
The subject of the atomic bomb has become a fascination for the so-called 'minimalist' composers.
Steve Reich addressed the morality of its existence in his video opera Three Tales, yet here John Adams takes a closer look at the man behind the fearsome device.
Whether Adams should now be regarded as a minimalist composer is a pertinent question, especially taking in mind passages of music such as that beginning Act 2, a lengthy soprano aria that continued the build up of tension begun in the first act. For Adams' portrayal of 'Doctor Atomic' - aka J Robert Oppenheimer - takes in the lead up to the first test explosion of the bomb in New Mexico in July 1945.
Fraught with dread, the doctor's fellow scientists and companions consider the impact of this terrible thing they are close to, while the clock ticks inexorably towards zero hour.
As the tension rises, Adams uses Oppenheimer's extraordinary grasp of language and intellect to include passages of Baudelaire, the mystical Bhagavad Gita and, most dramatically, the John Donne sonnet Batter My Heart. This proved the musical highpoint of the first act in the work's UK premiere, Gerald Finley singing with barely concealed dramatic passion in the title role, while the orchestra, under the direction of Lawrence Renes, through out a particularly biting accompanying sequence.
The first half was however a little slow to ignite, hindered somewhat by Peter Sellars' unwieldy libretto, often lifted from actual writings of the doctor and scientists. The striking tenor of Thomas Glenn, however, brought the second part to life with an equally alarming and amusing vulnerability as Robert Wilson. This set the tension for a gripping passage of uncertainty among the main characters, the weather taking a turn for the worse and the awful hulk of the bomb itself looming large at the back of the stage.
The staging itself proved most striking throughout, Julian Crouch's designs centered on a flexible piece of apparatus that, if bare, would have resembled an oversize piece of shelving. However, split into three rows of fourteen compartments, it could be manipulated into a series of cubicles in which the chorus stood as scientists, or a series of small screens on which the equations themselves were scrawled. Most strikingly of all the screens were pulled aside to reveal the Tewa people observing the scientists' growing anxiety, wearing their sacred masks.
When the explosion finally arrived it capped Adams' most dramatic writing, and the hairs stood up on the back of the neck as the awfulness of the explosion took hold, the entire cast watching through protective glasses. That Adams was successfully able to convey this, and finish the opera on a suitable concluding note, was impressive. With a small Japanese voice asking for water, he was leaving the way clear for the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Gerald Finley was superb throughout as the Doctor, fretting even when consoled by his doting wife Kitty, the clear-voiced Sasha Cooke. Meanwhile Pasqualita, the couple's maid (a full bodied alto in Meredith Arwady) movingly sang against the bomb as she cradled their child.
The choreography was most impressive also, the eye kept busy by the material on screen when the cast was stood still. With perhaps Adams' finest opera score since Nixon In China, this made for a truly powerful evening - its message hindered only slightly by that libretto.
The Guardian, Friday 27 February 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/feb/27/doctor-atomic-coliseum-review
Rating: Four out of five stars
John Adams's previous operas have generally travelled the world in their original productions, faithfully rehashed from country to country. Doctor Atomic has already been seen in Amsterdam and Chicago, in Peter Sellars's staging created for the 2005 premiere in San Francisco. But for its British debut, English National Opera joined forces with the Metropolitan Opera in New York in a new version directed by Penny Woolcock, whose credits include an impressive film of Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer.
The decision is certainly vindicated. Adams's portrayal of the events leading up to the testing of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945 is far more convincing musically and dramatically than it seemed at its premiere. Woolcock's naturalistic staging, with designs by Julian Crouch and carefully gauged video projections, is far less cluttered and tendentious than Sellars's original, doing away entirely with the mimsy, inappropriate choreography.
Yet, though it has been possible to take Sellars out of the production, his contribution to the opera itself, as author of the libretto, remains persistently problematic. The text is a mosaic of borrowings from documentary sources, with extracts from Baudelaire, the Bhagavad Gita and a Donne sonnet thrown in for good measure. It's all too wordy, lacking real dramatic sweep or momentum. The kernel of the story - the uneasy alliance between the military and the scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer making the bomb, and the moral doubts of those involved - is also blurred by the domestic scenes in the Oppenheimer household, with Kitty Oppenheimer and the Navajo maid Pasqualita, which have a touchy-feely PC irrelevance about them. With that stripped away, the focus narrowed and perhaps even an all-male cast (like Britten's Billy Budd), it might have been more cogent.
The conductor, Lawrence Renes, shows there are moments in Adams's music that promise a tighter dramatic grip. Too often, though, as in the shapeless scene in the Oppenheimers' bedroom, a lack of harmonic movement becalms everything. The setting of the Donne sonnet, Batter My Heart, which ends the first act, remains the standout musical number, especially when sung with the gilded beauty that Gerald Finley brings to it; his neurotic, chain-smoking Oppenheimer is a remarkable portrayal. There are other well-formed characters, too - Brindley Sherratt as Edward Teller, Thomas Glenn as Robert Wilson, Jonathan Veira as General Groves. There is the stuff of a real opera in Doctor Atomic somewhere. Woolcock's production gets closer to it than one ever thought it could.
Photo: Catherine Ashmore
Richard Fairman Financial Times, 27 February 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c0f700ce-0426-11de-845b-000077b07658.html
A few atoms short of critical mass
When the financial markets are doing their best to stage Armageddon, why shouldn't the opera house have a go? John Adams's Doctor Atomic tells the story of the events leading up to the first atomic bomb - though even that is not such a challenge in opera, when Wagner has already done his best to portray the end of the world.
This is the first time that Doctor Atomic , premiered in 2005, has been seen in the UK, and it is the third in a series of co-productions between English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. At a difficult time for funding, ENO must be glad to have the alliance and not only because the previous two productions - Anthony Minghella's Madam Butterfly and the highly original staging of Philip Glass's Satyagraha - have been so successful.
As it turns out, Doctor Atomic is barely an opera at all, which is its number-one problem. After Adams's anti-heroes of Richard Nixon in Nixon in China and Palestinian hijackers in The Death of Klinghoffer , he turns his attention here to another figure with a moral dilemma that rocked the world - J. Robert Oppenheimer, who developed the atomic bomb.
The action (though this stretches the definition of the word) focuses on the month before the first atomic test in New Mexico in 1945. The librettist, opera producer and long-time Adams collaborator Peter Sellars, does not try to explain the science behind nuclear fission, but even that might have been more intelligible than the artsy patchwork of texts he has come up with.
Where most operas have story, Doctor Atomic has philosophising, ruminating, agonising and debating - by singers in ones, twos and threes, not to mention one vastly overlong quartet. Taken together, these ingredients simply cannot ignite any drama. As the test of the bomb approaches, Sellars proves fatally unable to generate the slightest explosion of tension.
Adams's score is much more successful. Although he still has minimalist motifs ticking away in the background, there is much else besides, from lavishly romantic orchestral writing reminiscent of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé to a moving setting of Donne's Sonnet No 14. The powerful ebb and flow he creates in the music almost convinces us there is a real drama going on. Throughout the first half that is enough, but the drawn-out build-up to the atomic test after the interval is beyond even Adams's salvation.
It is difficult to find any fault with the performance. The excellent Gerald Finley, who has played Oppenheimer in every city where the opera has been seen, sings with a magnetic beauty that his unsympathetic character hardly deserves. As his wife, Kitty, Sasha Cooke shows off an impressive young soprano voice. It is not their fault that their characters remain nonentities. Even in their long seduction scene they agonise separately over what to do, as though they are painstakingly trying to get the formula right first.
There are strong performances from everybody in the supporting cast, including Brindley Sherratt as Edward Teller, Jonathan Veira as General Groves, Thomas Glenn as Robert Wilson and Meredith Arwady as Pasqualita, the last pair refugees from productions in the US.
The conductor, Lawrence Renes, gives Adams's always involving music its head and Penny Woolcock's production is as striking as the material allows. When the bomb finally drops, she provides a distant rumble of thunder and billowing sheets - probably as near to nuclear as this opera can get.
Photo: Catherine Ashmore
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 26 February 2009
John Adams's opera about the atomic bomb doesn't quite ignite.
When I first heard John Adams's third full-scale opera Doctor Atomic at its 2005 première in San Francisco, I called it "a moving and compelling work of moral, as well as musical, grandeur". I'm not going to eat my words, exactly, but a second hearing – ironically, in a production superior to San Francisco's – leaves me less convinced.
The opera tells the story of the last phase of the 1945 atom-bomb test at Los Alamos, and specifically focuses on the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, a sensitive, spiritual, liberal man who was nevertheless prepared to develop a weapon of mass destruction. In early planning, Doctor Atomic was also going to deal with Oppenheimer's remorse after Hiroshima and his run-in with McCarthyism. But, after Adams fell out with the original librettist Alice Goodman, Peter Sellars (who also directed the San Francisco production) created a script that makes what seem to me two crucial errors – the text was assembled from actual historical documents, bumped up with poetry associated with the characters in question; and the opera is brought to an end with the first test explosion.
This makes for a peculiarly inert plot, with all the corny "countdown" tension of a rotten episode of Star Trek – will the weather clear in time? Will the darn bomb actually work? – and dramatis personae who remain flat figures, lumbered with unshaped words that they seem to recite rather than embody. What Sellars has assembled may be scrupulously fair to all parties and the deeper "for" and "against" ramifications of the issue, but it doesn't come alive as theatre.
Adams has also been left to grapple with some very clunky text, which he fails to animate into a flow of meaningful melody – tracts of the vocal writing are so dull that they have no business being music at all.
But I must stop complaining at this point, because there is much marvellous inspiration in the score – the impassioned setting of a Donne sonnet with which Oppenheimer concludes the first act, a lovely aria for Oppenheimer's wife Kitty, and the stunning Vishnu chorus, for example. Orchestrally too, the score is vastly more sophisticated than anything Adams has previously written in opera, the minimalist chug-chugging long behind him now.
Penny Woolcock's staging struggles with the problems that the text proposes, but it's far stronger than Sellars's version – and the bomb itself is chillingly represented. Gerald Finley sings magnificently as Oppenheimer, even if his expression of slightly baffled anguish becomes monotonous. He has excellent support from Thomas Glenn as a young scientist, Sacha Cooke as Kitty, Brindley Sharratt as the sceptical Edward Teller and Jonathan Veira as the calorie-conscious General Groves. The chorus sounds wonderful. Lawrence Renes conducts with flair, but ensemble wasn't ideally crisp.
The sum of it is an evening of episodes of intense pleasure mingled with stretches of tedium - like Verdi's La Forza del Destino, Doctor Atomic is a brave failure on a grand scale.
Photo: Catherine Ashmore
Barry Millington, Evening Standard 26 February 2009
Booming voices in Doctor Atomic
Exhilarating: the English National Opera’s imaginative production of Doctor Atomic builds the tension superbly and hypnotically with magnificent performances and first rate orchestral and choral forces
English National Opera is still on a high despite a disappointing La Bohème from Jonathan Miller a few weeks ago. Its relationship with Sky continues to bring productions to a large television audience.
Katie Mitchell is set to bring another multi-media project to the Young Vic in April. Box office is booming.
And ENO captures the zeitgeist once again by bringing John Adams’s latest opera Doctor Atomic to the British stage for the first time. The director is Penny Woolcock, who filmed Adams’s Death Of Klinghoffer for television, and her production is shared with the New York Met — further evidence that ENO is now in the big league.
Doctor Atomic grapples, as Adams often does, with contemporary moral issues, in this case the creation and unleashing of the atomic bomb in 1945.
The text, by Peter Sellars, also responsible for the first production in San Francisco, collates information from various sources: declassified US government documents, technical manuals and personal memoirs of scientists and military personnel, as well as fragments of Baudelaire, John Donne and the Bhagavad Gita.
The scientific material is a problem. Not even John Adams can make phrases like “interwoven with the twelve pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron” sound convincing, and in truth there’s too much banal conversation set to unlyrical, unmemorable music.
Fortunately that’s only part of the story. The poetry was appreciated by the formidably cultured physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, who masterminded the so-called Manhattan Project, and it provides welcome relief from those neutron chains. Indeed, one of the finest passages sets Donne’s Batter My Heart to a poignant Elizabethan-style lament: verse and music fuse to express the pangs of conscience.
Gerald Finley is magnificent here and throughout as the tortured Oppenheimer. Brindley Sherratt and Jonathan Veira as Edward Teller and General Groves are the other stars in a strong cast.
Adams’s score blossoms where the text is poetic, but it’s also impressive where he’s on familiar ground: those metallic shards of sound, the flickering highlights, the nervous, jabbing rhythms all cohere into an exhilarating whole.
Given that the entire work leads up to the catastrophic explosion, the tension is maintained superbly — thanks also to Lawrence Renes’s well-paced conducting of the first-rate orchestral and choral forces. More surprisingly, the overall effect is oddly hypnotic.
Woolcock’s imaginative production handles the native American and Japanese elements skilfully, their resonances picked up in Julian Crouch’s admirable set designs. The climactic explosion, heralded by an extraordinary passage of frozen time — vintage Adams — cleverly avoids cliché: we see not the mushroom cloud but the effect on the witnesses.
Were these gifted physicists saviours of the civilised world or mass murderers? The savage beauty of Adams’s score and Woolcock’s persuasive production leave the question open.
Photo: Catherine Ashmore
Warwick Thompson, Bloomberg, 27 February 2009
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aRkieJfJSmnE&refer=muse
Atomic Turbulence
There’s a storm of a different kind at the English National Opera. John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic” (2005) is about the testing of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945.
Destruction, creation, guilt - great themes for opera, you’d think. If only. The work has the explosive power of a balloon full of porridge.
The problem lies with Peter Sellars’s libretto, compiled from original accounts, diaries, memoirs and scraps of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s favorite poetry. While long on philosophical speculation, it’s short on drama and character conflict.
Eerie Explosion
Adams’s arresting music, hovering between atonality and lyricism, is a different matter. The setting of John Donne’s poem “Batter My Heart” as an anguished D minor aria for Oppenheimer is a showstopper, and the explosion of the bomb is an eerie mix of rumbling electronica and ticking clocks. Between these highlights there are scenes that feel more like musical padding.
Director Penny Woolcock does her best with an unwieldy piece. Julian Crouch’s expressionistic set -- two huge cubby-hole panels that slide apart to reveal a hanging sheet -- is occasionally cluttered with realistic detail.
The performances are excellent, especially Gerald Finley as Oppenheimer, and the orchestra, led by Lawrence Renes, plays up a storm. It’s still not enough to hit the target.
Photo: Catherine Ashmore
George Hall, The Stage, 26 February 2009
http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/23617/doctor-atomic
Premiered in San Francisco in 2005, John Adams’ third large-scale opera reaches the UK. Like its predecessors Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic selects a subject from modern history - in this case, the testing of the atom bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945. The chief characters are the scientists involved - primarily Robert Oppenheimer, trenchantly sung here by Gerald Finley, and Edward Teller, delivered with equivalent authority by Brindley Sherratt, plus their military colleagues, led by Jonathan Veira’s dominating General Groves. Humanising the lengthy discussions of scientific data and weather reports are an intimate scene between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, resiliently sung by Sasha Cooke, and an intervention by their Native American servant, Pasqualita, played by Meredith Arwady, who sings a lullaby to her baby. A Tewa Indian chorus observes the activities at the Los Alamos base.
The main difference between Doctor Atomic and its predecessors is the librettist. Whereas Alice Goodman was able to give the first two range and resonance with her poetic texts, Peter Sellars’ compilation of extracts from historic documents has a dusty, unnatural feel. Even the poems quoted by the characters - the John Donne setting that ends Act I is the score’s high point - merely underline its artificiality.
Designed by Julian Crouch, Penny Woolcock’s production works hard to keep the piece alive, but neither she nor conductor Lawrence Renes can stop the result from seeming portentous and dull.
Photo: Catherine Ashmore
Edward Seckerson, The Independent, 26 February 2009
Rating: Four out of five stars
At the end of the first act of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, J. Robert Oppenheimer – harbinger of mass destruction – is suddenly confronted by the enormity of what he has created.
Invoking the words of John Donne – his Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” – he hurls out his challenge to the Almighty amidst a rush of shrill, pulsating, fanfares. At this moment he is the loneliest man in the universe and in high baroque style John Adams lays bare his agony. This aria, heart-rendingly sung by Gerald Finley, is the detonation in Oppenheimer’s soul which triggers the big bang. You can already find it on You Tube and it might just be the single most beautiful thing Adams has ever written.
There is more, much more, where that came from in Doctor Atomic, now receiving its eagerly awaited UK premiere at the London Coliseum. But there are longueurs, too. Length is an issue. There’s a whole lot of information in the opera – it’s its own information highway, the libretto being almost entirely drawn from documentary sources. But then again, has scientific data ever sounded sexier? One of Adams’ theatrical tricks here – and as a composer with such an innate understanding of theatre he always has one or two up his sleeve – is his way of setting the mundane or impossibly complex to music of great beauty and simplicity. A chorus describing the process of nuclear fission assumes the tranquillity of a Bach chorale; a description of the effects of radium on the human body is so lyrical as to be almost sensuous.
There are two distinct kinds of music in Doctor Atomic: the busy, impatient, dryly kinetic music of scientific theory (and Adams harnesses his orchestra like a force of nature) and that which foreshadows and confronts the emotional consequences of the scientists’ actions. Oppenheimer found his refuge in poetry and in the intimate second scene of the opera with Kitty, his wife (Sasha Cooke, bravely negotiating the challenging vocal compass of the role) the heady poetry of Charles Baudelaire demands and gets an effusion of lyricism.
The look of Penny Woolcock’s excellent staging, designed by Julian Crouch, beautifully complements the musico-dramatic thrust of Adams’ work. With the sculptural look of an art installation (which was its inspiration) fragments of debris hang suspended, as if mid-explosion, while tented sheets rise up to invoke the desert mountain ranges of New Mexico. Tiered boxes house the Los Alamos project personnel as if they themselves are the objects of experimentation – human guinea pigs. Videos of scientific formulae (Fifty-Nine Productions) play on every surface; at one point, a map of Hiroshima eerily burns.
Woolcock, who did such a brilliant job with the TV movie of Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer, is especially good at building the composer’s signature choral tableaux. Nearing the climax of the opera – the testing of that first bomb – the entire ensemble moves downstage to confront us confronting them in Adams’ mightiest chorus “At the sight of this your shape stupendous” – words which could hardly be more pungently expressed in music.
No praise can be too high for the chorus work, still more that of the orchestra which, under Lawrence Renes, is forever powering towards, in Oppenheimer’s words “a brilliant luminescence”, trumpet-topped and grimly magnificent. As to individuals, Finley’s chain-smoking Oppenheimer is a model of edgy practicality, Brindley Sherratt towers as Edward Teller, and Thomas Glenn as wiry Robert Wilson is the unsettling voice of doubt.
The second act of dreams, premonitions, and predictions can only end one way and Adams’ real-time approach to “the shot” is an unbearably intense crescendo. How fitting then that the music of the final words – “Can I have some water?” in Japanese – is the saddest of the evening.
Photo: Catherine Ashmore
Joseph Woby, The London Paper, 27 February 2009
Rating five out of five stars
As director of the project to develop the first atomic bomb J Robert Oppenheimer saw himself as a peacemaker – but on testing his prototype in 1945 he quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
Oppenheimer is Doctor Atomic, and Adams’s 2005 opera, which had its UK premiere last night, explores, like the Faust legend, the terrible price man must pay for knowledge.
With a score which shifts from atonal stabs to mighty choral onslaughts and a libretto culled from declassified minutes and technical documents, the tale of how a lightbulb moment cast the world into darkness is told with chilling effect.
And for this critic, who grew up on nuclear panic, the sound of Gerald Finley’s standout “Oppie” begging God to “make him anew” offers a peculiar comfort.
Photo: Catherine Ashmore
Stephen Graham, Musicalcriticism.com, 27 February 2009
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/opera/eno-dratomic-0209.shtml
Rating: Four out of five stars
John Adams' Doctor Atomic was finally given its long-awaited UK premiere this week, almost four years after its debut in San Francisco. This run, a joint venture between ENO and the Met in New York where the production was housed late last year, presents a new staging by the British director Penny Woolcock, with set design by Julian Crouch. In four years Doctor Atomic has now been staged five times, in two different productions. This is strong evidence indeed, if such is needed, of Adams' pre-eminence in the field of contemporary opera.
Despite the opera's (intentionally) flippant, comic book title, it is a deeply seriously piece in which morality and myth collide in a complicated network of perspectives and ideas. The piece explores the personal experiences of the main players involved in the Manhattan Project, the initiative of scientists commissioned to build the world's first atomic bomb in the latter years of the Second World War. The initial impulse for the work came when Adams received in 1999 an invitation from Pamela Rosenberg, the director of the San Francisco Opera, to compose something along the lines of an 'American Faust', with the cultured, charismatic J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the team at Los Alamos, as the central Faustian figure.
This subject matter immediately suggested rich potential to Adams, a composer who has specialised in creating layered, intelligent operatic treatments of significant political events of the past century. Clearly the moral implications of promoting the possibility of nuclear war, and decisively enabling the devastating nuclear attacks which were to take place in Japan as a direct result of the teams' efforts, are vastly complex. Oppenheimer and his team believed they occupied a directly oppositional position, a space that was balanced by a German team working towards the same goals. The us and them mentality which seemed to reign amongst those involved certainly had historical justification, and the immediate pragmatism of the situation seemed to suggest a moral soundness to the project. However before the team had opportunity to complete their tests, defeat of Germany meant that the question of atomic assault, redirected now towards Japan, was being considered anew by some involved as a step too far. Fears of sparking on the one hand an unknowable global environmental catastrophe with the detonation of the bomb, and of course on the other of the surely massive human cost of unleashing this technology on the world, consumed each of the scientists in turn.
The opera essentially takes as its object the emotional vicissitudes of those involved with the project in the run up to the first test proper at Los Alamos on July 15, 1945. The self-performing mythical aspect of the tests; myth as a de-politicised act, a necessary function of the state outside of morality that will ensure the future integrity of that state, compelled the scientists forward. In an early scene, two weeks before the test, the moral question is raised amongst the physicists.
The robust and confident Edward Teller, played with assurance and firm stentorian voice by Brindley Sherratt, reads out a letter from the prominent physicist Leo Szilard (who had been the first, in the thirties, to understand the potential of a nuclear chain reaction). This letter asks the scientists to stand against the project, and is addressed towards President Truman himself. Szilard and 58 prominent co-signers state that 'an attack on Japan could not be justified under the present circumstances'. Oppenheimer declares in riposte that scientists have no business in politics, and that Truman would never see the letter. It is a stunning self-abnegation from such a cultured, deeply thoughtful person, and it is a moment that points towards the complicated interplay of nation-state myth, and the lack of space for personal morality within that narrative, at the heart of this emotional, searching opera.
Though each of the characters is shown to have moments of intense self-questioning and profound doubt in the opera (indeed these moments suffuse the work with an internal dramatic tension that would have been otherwise lacking), it is only Robert Wilson who maintains a consistent level of misgiving. Wilson is sung by the young tenor Thomas Glenn with an openness of voice and thinness of tone that fits the character perfectly. His line is always strained, high, almost pleading. Though there were some problems with projection, Glenn's characterisation was pitched at just the right point of ingenuousness, always contrasting well with the booming baritone and bass-baritone voices of Teller, and Jonathan Veira as General Groves, the boorish military head of the operation.
The fantastical, almost unreal scale of the moral implications of the project are brought out tellingly time and again by Adams and his librettist Peter Sellars, whether it be in Oppenheimer and Teller's quickly personal discussion of emotion and internecine group politics after the meeting in the first scene, or in the sudden introduction of the domestic, when Oppenheimer returns home to his wife in the second scene. As we watch, we are faced with issues outside of anything human morality has had to face before, issues that require a paradigm shift in how we understand and conceive of militaristic value-systems and war time morality in an age when fates of whole countries can depend on a single order and a single bomb. As we struggle with these enormous issues, bathos intervenes, and we suddenly see the figures at the heart of this complicated situation, figures who through both historical perspective and dramatic idolatry necessarily take on something outside of the conventional in terms of personae, having to negotiate a wives' frustration, deal with irritability caused by lack of sleep, or dally in personal politics between colleagues in the workplace. The opera brings out these absurd contrasts well.
However, despite much to praise within the piece (not least its high seriousness of intent), dramatic problems persist rob it of some of its vitality. Sellars assembled the libretto from historical documents, letters by each of the physicists, and memoirs (much of the dialogue thus has a ring of verisimilitude). Poetry from Baudelaire, the Bhagavad-Vita, and the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, is inserted into the narrative at crucial emotional points. The circumstantial and indeed aesthetic justification for including these texts is sound; Oppenheimer was known to have quoted these poets and texts frequently on the test site, famously commenting after the success of the test 'I am become death, destroyer of worlds'. He even named the test site Trinity after the Donne image of a 'three-person'd God'. Yet the syntactic and semantic contrast that they occasion in performance greatly upsets the coherence of the flow, even though those occasions in which poetry supervenes are surely the emotional nucleus of the piece. Equally, for instance, the technical descriptions that are anchored in theoretical physics with which the chorus opens the opera work to provide a curiously static set piece. Text such as that just does not sing well, and the large three-tiered set, which is the multi-functional backdrop for much of the work, is also static initially, with the extended team of scientists being shown working away on calculations and theorems in stark isolation from the others.
This set does open out later quite effectively though, particularly in the second act. There, the domestic, feminised world of Kitty Oppenheimer (a radiant, spellbinding Sasha Cooke, whose two solo arias and early duet with her husband contain some of the most movingly elegiac music in the opera), and her Native American maid Pasqualita played by Meredith Arwady, who sings with strength but whose voice lacks colour, is paralleled with the masculine test site, where scientists, meteorologists and army officers are all at odds and in varying states of distress over the impending deadline for detonation. The entreaties on behalf of peace by Kitty, and the evocations of visions of death from Pasqualita, fail to move however. They appear as facile, dichotomised representations of moral alterity. Though some of the sound images within the music here, particularly the misty, impressionistic sonorities that accompany Kitty's supple elegies, are strong and evocative, the attempt to choreograph a dramatic contrast between lament and action in this second act is only a partial success. The contrast just feels a little too tacked-on, too trite, for it to ring true as insightful theatre.
Though these problems do persist within the complex dramatic framework of the work, it is clear that its heart, its beating heart, is the music. Adams has created his richest score yet; teeming chromaticism ebbs and flows throughout his porous orchestration. Shards of jittery minimalism jut out in isolated brass or wind figures, whilst throbbing pulses emerge portentously, only to peel away in ambiguity. Vast tutti chords stab into the dark heart of the subject, rhythms clash and textures mount up of sandy detail and metallic toughness, only to break apart as the drama moves onward, into newer fragmentation. This is music of utmost suppleness, flexibility, richness of image and colour, and of a fresh, singular aesthetics. Minimalist mottos and strategies bubble up here and there, but this score is surely much too fluid, too plural, to be conceived simply within that tradition. The true forebears of Doctor Atomic are Sibelius, Debussy, early Schoenberg, even Mahler. The static, internalised perspectives the opera invites us to experience are of a piece with the Symbolist theatre of Debussy and Maeterlinck. The yearning polytonality underpinning the vocal writing and harmonic progressions within the arias, those sections where the dramatic current suddenly becomes interrupted by the imposition of formal generic convention (and all the implications of emotion thereof), suggests Mahlerian ambiguity, and the orchestral multi-voicing echoes back equally to the same source.
The Mahlerian elements are particularly clear in Oppenheimer's climactic act 1 aria Batter my heart, where the dominant actor within the opera, Gerald Finley, suddenly recognises the portentousness of his actions and pleads with the three-person'd God to 'break, blow, burn and make me new'. Adams thrusts upon the audience a monumental paragraph in D minor (a stark contrast to the previous unstable chromaticism), a passage of stormy inner turmoil to match any in recent music theatre. Finley, worn into the role now after four years of experience (he created the part in San Fransico), sputters out this poem, violently razing his previous arrogance, unexpectedly bringing to the fore the moral complexity of the events around him. Finley is magnetic throughout the work, his stooping self-assurance is a constant thread of certitude, and his thundering yet curiously restrained recitations carry the violence of the subject forward up until the successful test.
Adams conveys these final minutes, and the hectic and prone final countdown, stunningly. He builds a busy orchestral polyrhythmic countdown, and finally lets out a throbbing sub-bass rumble (the electronic element is subtle throughout, though the Coliseum's inadequate speaker system often strained at the edge of clarity). The explosion of light across the auditorium at the climax of the detonation is followed by the distant voice of a Japanese woman pleading for water for her children. As the cast stand frozen to their spots, looking out askance at the audience, the curtain comes down, and the voice of that woman, with text projected for all to see, apostrophises the true portent of the protagonists' actions. The staging works very well in these last stages, and the ENO orchestra, with an authoritative, limber Lawrence Renes at the helm, carry off the effect expertly, as they had throughout the evening. The opera might have benefited from making the action encompass each of the protagonists' postwar reactions to the devastation of Japan (the work is essentially a moral disquisition after all on the issue of nuclear technology used in warfare), but this might have been an endeavour too far. However in its present state it presents a powerful depiction of the dichotomy between personal action and the larger general consequences in this new age of nuclear technology. The subtlety and conviction of its execution, so still, so serious in effect, is deeply impressive.
By Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday, 1 March 2009
One great aria is enough to make John Adams's new opera a blast. But the rest is a fascinating failure
July 15, 1945. Dark and distended with potential, the A-bomb hangs like an anti-moon in the desert night. Alone and chain-smoking, its trilby-hatted creator rages against fate in the words of a poet who knew more than most about doubt and compromise. Somewhere nearby is a sympathetic woman who likes a drink, knows her place, and can quote verse too. Then there's the wise-ass side-kick, the dumb-ass general, the kid with a conscience, the weatherman, the local hired help and several hundred soldiers, scientists and secretaries. It's a busy place, Los Alamos. But for eight glorious minutes it's just one man and his gadget and the first great operatic aria of the 21st century: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God".
History is littered with one-aria operas. Is Doctor Atomic another? Scored for tectonic plates of brass, hissing strings, rapt cascades of tuned percussion, hot, darting flutes and shuddering electronica, John Adams's re-imagining of the storm-struck night before J Robert Oppenheimer's creation first exploded is part triumph, part disaster: an excruciating countdown that climaxes long before detonation. Of the bomb itself, all you need to know can be heard in the closing tape of a Japanese woman quietly asking for water for her children. (Adams refrains from attempting to represent the conflagration directly.) Of the scientist who built it, Gerald Finley's wracked performance of John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV at the end of Act I gives you more information than the rest of librettist Peter Sellars' syntactically baffling collage of poetry, memoirs and declassified military files.
Designed by Julian Crouch, Penny Woolcock's English National Opera staging pays close attention to period detail. Manhattan Project ID cards and Japanese street maps are projected on to screens. Cigarettes are omnipresent, sometimes passed from smoker to smoker in a gesture of sexual intimacy. Cocktails, like babies and wives, are restricted to private quarters. There are some stunning images: the three-tiered opening chorus, the film noir lighting of Oppenheimer's lonely, metaphysical aria. But it's hard to convey a New Mexico mesa on a narrow, cluttered stage. Woolcock is too unconfident to establish a mood and let it settle. Wary of stasis, she scatters the stage with actors, moving this or that desk or bed, often jarringly out of step with Adams's rangy score.
Where Woolcock succeeds is in close-up: Finley's arrogant, impatient, guilt-stricken Oppenheimer, Sasha Cooke's creamy, fretful, dipsomaniac Kitty, Brindley Sherratt's tough-guy Teller, Jonathan Veira's preposterous, gluttonous General Groves, Thomas Glenn's idealistic Wilson, Roderick Earle's despairing Hubbard. This is just as well, for Sellars' libretto sounds like a game of consequences. Judicious editing could trim 30 minutes without losing key character details, yet the supporting players form an orderly Mozartian queue for their individual arias in Act II. The Oppenheimers' loquacious Tewa Indian nanny, Pasqualita (Meredith Arwady), seems wholly incidental, there either to symbolise a pre-industrial idyll or simply to prevent the cast from turning into a stag party. But if Sellars needed more women, why didn't he use the other woman in Oppenheimer's life, Jean Tatlock?
Adams delivers the goods tirelessly – a blazing chorus from the Bhagavad Gita, a Debussian wash of sensuality for Kitty and Oppenheimer's Baudelaire and Rukeyser love duet, a rolling electric storm – but he cannot lend Sellars's untidy text real urgency. Though superlatively performed by the cast, chorus and orchestra under conductor Lawrence Renes, this is a fascinating failure: less nuanced and disciplined than Klinghoffer, less theatrical than Nixon (both written with Alice Goodman), less fluid and focused than El Niño or A Flowering Tree (both developed with Sellars). It's worth seeing Doctor Atomic for "Batter my heart" alone. Nonetheless, like the real-life Oppenheimer, you might prefer to leave after Act I.
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, Sunday 1 March 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/feb/28/doctor-atomic-coliseum-john-adams
John Adams's Doctor Atomic, to a libretto by Peter Sellars about the first atomic bomb test, has already been seen in an original San Francisco version and at the New York Met, relayed to cinemas worldwide last year. This was its first UK staging, in Penny Woolcock's Met production, with Adams's meditative, richly faceted score incisively conducted by Lawrence Renes. Impressive though the screen relay was, nothing prepared you for the impact in the theatre. If a work forces you, simultaneously and uncomfortably, to clench your limbs and hold your breath, you have to take notice.
Peter Sellars's script, a quixotic collage of historical data and poetry, doesn't bother much about dramatic conventions. True, the opening blinds you with scientific terminology rather than emotion or chat. How often does the word "dodecahedron" appear in opera? (Answers on a postcard. I can think of one occasion.) That's the point. This is not a political work. It's about how the beauty of mathematics, when applied to life, becomes a moral dilemma of incalculable human proportions.
Gerald Finley plays the troubled J Robert Oppenheimer, whose "Batter My Heart" setting is surely the finest aria written since Puccini. Over a huge range, Finley's voice has no discernible gear-shifts or squeezed notes. His seriousness and sensitivity are affecting. Sasha Cooke, as his lonely wife Kitty, was radiant-toned and anguished. Thomas Glenn and Meredith Arwady stood out in a powerful cast, with excellent chorus work after a messy start.
The first-night stalls were full of usual arts-world stalwarts but upstairs was awash with young faces, securing last-minute tickets for £5. Adams, whose Nixon in China became a late 20th-century operatic icon, has produced another landmark work, less obvious, more faulty, but finally more terrifying and provocative. In the closing minutes electronic noise roars and thunders round the theatre. If the earth didn't move for you, it did for me.
Simon Thomas, What’s on Stage, 26 February 2009
http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8831235642130&title=Doctor+Atomic
Rating: Four stars
If opera is to pull in new and young audiences, it’s works like Doctor Atomic that are likely to do it. The mix of contemporary resonance, political and moral musing and exciting new music, that doesn’t demand too much of the listener, is an attractive one.
The opera, which has done the intercontinental rounds since 2005, is set on the eve of the first nuclear test in 1945, in a world on the tipping-point of no-return. J Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist at the head of the team who split the atom, hangs in a literal storm of anticipation for a venture whose consequences are very far from certain.
Doctor Atomic is tauter and more focused than John Adams’ Nixon in China, without the earlier work’s surrealistic sallies. Seen at the Coliseum in 2000 and 2006, Nixon balanced the domestic and political/historical and the new opera seeks to do the same.
The bedroom episodes, which glimpse into the personal turmoil forced on Oppenheimer and his wife by his epoch-making work, are less successful dramatically than the strained work scenes. They are lyrical, with some nice Debussyan meandering in Kitty O’s poetically fanciful flights, but are over-long and lacking in the tension that pulses through the rest of the work.
Penny Woolcock’s production (with designs by Julian Crouch) is pretty much faultless, with nothing overdone or out of place. There’s an unsettling quality to the Native Americans who clean up and hang around on the fringes, barely noticed by the world-changers who wrangle and angst about their decision-making without really considering the people who will be most affected.
Adams’ music grinds, flutters and chimes throughout, serving as an under-score for the singers, which is apt considering how important the quasi-scientific, moral-mazing and tersely poetical words are to the work. When not supporting the singers, the music breaks into pounding, clashing orchestral interludes for which the concert hall surely beckons.
Gerald Finley brings all his charisma and richness of tone to the role of Oppenheimer, although it’s only at the Act 1 conclusion that the increasingly agitated inventor really bursts into life with a startling rendition of John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God”, leaving the image of the spot-lit man and his ugly creation scalding the memory.
Elsewhere, the characterisations are sketchy and functional: square-headed generals, bickering scientists and weathermen and conscience-pricked youngsters. The irrepressible rumble of history and “progress” threaten to swallow up the personal detail, although there’s a telling scene where Jonathan Veira’s scratchy General Groves confides his weight problems during a lull in the waiting.
This is mind-stirring and viscera-stabbing stuff, building to a disturbing (not to say very loud) conclusion that combines the huge significance of the world’s first atomic explosion with its simple human consequences.
Tony Cooper, Eastern Daily Press, 2 March 2009
It was exciting stuff at the Coli for the UK premiere of Dr Atomic - staged in association with The Met, New York - which also saw the distinguished film director Penny Woolcock - responsible for the marvellous TV movie for Channel 4 in 2003 of Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer - directing her first opera. She hit the mark first time!
First staged by San Francisco Opera in 2005, Dr Atomic was originally directed by Peter Sellars, Adams' collaborator on Klinghoffer and Nixon in China.
An outstanding and thoughtful production, it was greatly helped by Julian Crouch's innovative and amazing set which included 42 compartmentalised spaces (influences of Damien Hirst?) divided on three levels housing members of ENO's chorus (on superb form) commenting on the action as if Chorus in a traditional Greek play.
This must be one of the few operas in the repertoire that doesn't have a totally dedicated libretto from an original source as its text was gleaned from contemporary accounts and put together by Sellars while Adams' settings of texts from John Donne and Baudelaire with excerpts from the Bhagavad-Gita - all favourites of Oppenheimer - worked handsomely.
The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley - who studied at the RCM and King's College, Cambridge - sang the chain-smoking role of J Robert Oppenheimer with ease. But he has sung the part since the opera's inception. He knew it well and it showed. His performance was simply impeccable and at the end of act one he passionately delivered a wonderful setting of John Donne's holy sonnet 'Batter my heart, three-person'd God'. It reached deep (very deep) into Oppenheimer's burning conscience and left him looking puzzled and bewildered when realising the monster he had created and what it would eventually be used for.
Uncertainty (and fear) overtook him but at the same time he was determined to see the Manhattan Project - nurtured and brought to life in the wilderness of the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1945 - to its final conclusion. There was no turning back!
Much of the action of the opera takes place in the days running up to the experimental test. Adams' score is electrifying at this point in keeping with the stormy weather conditions that nearly caused the test to be abandoned.
Running alongside the weather problem was the political angle, too, calling to account those physicists who doubted the viability of the whole affair and senior in this role was Thomas Glenn who put in a commanding performance as the nervous-looking young physicist Robert Wilson. He repeatedly questioned the moral issue of the whole affair and pleaded with the authorities not to drop the bomb on Japan. Making his UK debut he was also no stranger to the opera having created the role of Wilson for the world premiere production and repeated it at De Nederlandse Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
The mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke - as Oppenheimer's alcoholic wife, Kitty - possessed a fine lyrical voice and in an intimate scene in which she longed for her husband, she found once again that work observed all his time and energy. A member of the Metropolitan Opera's Young Artist Development Program, Cooke's a singer destined for a brilliant career!
Meredith Arwady as Oppenheimer's Tewa Indian maid Pasqualita (a role she sang at the Met) possessed a strikingly-rich mezzo voice while Brindley Sherratt (Oppenheimer's senior physicist Edward Teller) showed authority over his young colleague and Jonathan Viera (as General Leslie Groves) found his scientific charges slightly out of step to his normal ratings!
Roderick Earl (as the nervous meteorologist Frank Hubbard) played his role admirably particularly when coming under fire from Groves for not getting the weather conditions right, the big issue (along with the moral one) of the whole damned Manhattan Affair which was actually conceived in fear that Nazi Germany was ahead in the bomb-making stakes and would come up with the deadly weapon first.
The conductor Lawrence Renes - also making his UK debut having conducted the European premiere of the original staging at De Nederlandse Opera in 2007 - controlled the big passages of the score with a rod of iron and in the closing minutes of this three-hour compelling piece of music-theatre it was one of the most thrilling moments I've ever encountered in live performance. The whole of the auditorium was immersed and shaking to electronically-produced crying sounds of babies while the heavy rumbling of the aircraft carrying the bomb to its ultimate destination sent shivers down my spine. I was gripped with tension in my seat!
On stage Oppenheimer was quoting his sacred Baudelaire slightly scared of the impending event before taking to the trenches on hearing the warning rocket. And after a period of frantic activity everyone gathers - sporting dark glasses - to witness what they've all been working (and patiently) waiting for. Will it fizzle out? Will it be a success? Will it kill them and other for hundreds of miles away? A silence overcomes the action, then the explosion. Here Woolcock was very imaginative in her staging cleverly staying away from showing actual footage of the explosion.
The whole idea of dropping the bomb on Japan was highly questionable as Japan was more or less finished as a war nation but the well-known argument that by using the bomb it saved over a million lives. Maybe, but the fall-out from that gruesome day of 16th July 1945 (05.30) leaves a bad legacy and the argument still rages. But after seeing this opera it brings that argument back to centre stage and makes you wonder!
The explosion rocked the sky with a luminous intensity many times that of the midday sun, shattered windows 125 miles away and produced a mushroom cloud between 50,000 and 70,000 feet high. The army initially reported it as an accident at an ammunition dump. Never believe the truth!
The final moments of the opera were heart rending as the action switches to Japan where the lone voice of a Japanese woman is heard in the wilderness begging for water. It was a most moving and sensitive ending to a work that left a deep (a very deep) impression on me.
Paul Driver, The Sunday Times, 8 March 2009
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article5851928.ece
Gerard Finley classy in John Adam's Dr Atomic
The baritone, director Penny Woolcock and set and video designers do much to enliven operatic drama about the nuclear bomb
An opera that ends with the explosion of the first atomic bomb cries out for attention. Yet, as an opera rather than a dramatised documentary, the interest of John Adams’s Dr Atomic (2005) — receiving its British premiere from English National Opera at the London Coliseum (a production shared with the Metropolitan Opera, New York) — centres on, and is even confined to, the quarter of an hour that ends the first of its two acts.
It is at this point that J Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project scientists who developed and tested the bomb at Los Alamos, in the New Mexico desert, is found for the only time in solitary reflection. He sings an inspired setting of his favourite poem, John Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three person’d God” (the line gave rise to the project’s other name, Trinity), indirectly expressing his torments of conscience about the terrible nuclear step he was helping the world take, but making my ears prick up as they hadn’t hitherto.
Not that the work isn’t dynamically scored, with fizzing orchestral excursions and potent choruses, but the vocal lines mostly have that Adamsish, semi-spoken flatness, as though to sing out lyrically would be old-fashioned and un-American. Peter Sellars’s libretto, a collage of factual and poetic sources, doesn’t help. The rather embarrassing bedroom scene for Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty — it comes in stark juxtaposition to the masculinised technical talk of the laboratory — is a hodgepodge of Englished lines from verse by Baudelaire (another favourite of Oppenheimer’s) that comes across as baffling poeticism, no help at all in delineating the characters.
Although it concerns an immensity, the piece actually seems to be about rather little. The copious interplay between the physicists amounts to little of dramatic consequence. It would be hard, indeed, in an opera to define the various ethical positions taken, before and after the atomic test, by Oppenheimer, Edward Teller (the bass Brindley Sherratt) and Robert Wilson (the tenor Thomas Glenn), never mind make convincing music-drama from them. And, although there is one huge element of suspense from the outset — will we see the bomb go off? — dramatic tension is for the most part limited to reports from the project’s chief meteorologist, Frank Hubbard (Roderick Earle), and testy responses to them from General Leslie Groves (Jonathan Veira), the military commander of the project.
There is no more story than this question of whether the test will happen at the appointed time, but in a wan attempt to eke out drama and texture, Adams and his librettist give feminine prominence not only to Kitty — portrayed here as an absurdly perfect all-American wife by the impressive mezzo Sasha Cooke — but to Pasqualita, the Oppenheimers’ Native American nanny, who, at least as realised by the contralto Meredith Arwady, combines the singing of verses from a lullaby with the portentousness of an earth-mother figure such as Erda in Wagner’s Ring. This injection of ecological or chthonic Californian chic is very Sellarsish, and extends to the chorus, who at one point sprout antlers. At other times they are scientists filling blackboards with equations in stacked-up hutches that form the moveable main set.
The director, Penny Woolcock, does much to enliven an essentially static drama, as do the set designer, Julian Crouch, and the video designers, Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner, and the ending is strange and subtle. What lifts the evening right out of spectacle and orchestral razzmatazz and into a properly operatic dimension is the portrayal of Oppenheimer by the baritone Gerald Finley. With his trilby, bowed gait and twitchy movements, his perpetual cigarette (Oppenheimer died young from throat cancer), he resembles a character from film noir, but vocally, with his wonderful rendering of the Donne set piece, Finley takes us into a world more like that of a Britten opera. It is chastening to think that the high point of Adams’s opera would be more like the ordinary level of operation of one by Britten.
Photo: Donald Cooper
Thomas Heinold, Nürnberger Zeitung, 4 March 2009
Translated by Petra Habeth
How the present is brought to the stage in London
Dramatic art about atomic boobs and atomic bombs
Let’s be honest: Opera of today has got a problem. Although year after year at different opera houses courageous and ambitious world premieres take place, contemporary characters and stories who could move the minds and thoughts of a huge audience just don’t find their way to the stage. The classics of the repertory such as “La Traviata”, “Don Giovanni”, ”Magic Flute” or “The Ring” touch the universally significant questions of human existence. But our species has changed since the beginning of the 20th century, the world living together in a way and in a tempo which leaves opera looking old– in contrast to other arts which are orientated much more to the present.
In London, one of the most creative melting pots of our globalized time, they are trying to change this. Of all the dignified and distinguished opera houses, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden wants to stage the shrill and wild life of a glamorous supermodel. The Texan Anna Nicole Smith was not out of the headlines after she, at 26 years old, married the 89 year old billionaire J. Howard Marshall. But behind this glaringly luxurious, jet set life which was shadowed by dubious film projects, fatherhood disputes and the death of her son Daniel Smith, hid a woman who often was alone and depressive and who died in February 2007 at only 39 years through an overdose of prescribed medicines.
The fate of Anna Nicole Smith can be seen as a parable on our time and would be the perfect material for a play, says Elaine Padmore, the leader of Royal Opera House who is pushing this project and has engaged the British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. She does not shy away from the abyss of the gutter press “just because a person is mentioned in the gossip column it doesn’t mean that you can’t take care of their life”, she says: “We want to break with the cliché of the old and dusty opera with this piece”
While the drama of a jet set queen will soon come into operatic life at the Royal Opera house, so the English National opera seated at the London Coliseum, just a few streets farther on, is currently venturing upon the crucial fall of mankind in the 20 century. John Adam’s opera “Dr Atomic” compacts the night before the ignition of the first atomic bomb on the test ground of Los Alamos, New Mexico, into a dramatic crescendo, and tries to boost the bomb developer J. Robert Oppenheimer to a figure of Faustian tragedy. Since this night in June 1945 mankind has attained the disastrous power to turn Wagner’s apocalyptic vision of the burning world of the “Götterdämmerung” into reality.
The material is of monstrous format but the US composer Adams (62) who is regarded as a specialist in the conversion of recent history to music theatre has fewer problems with this than with the opera “the Death of Klinghoffer”. This opera experienced a highly regarded German premiere at Nürnberg opera house but the story of the murder of the hostage Leon Klinghoffer during the abduction of the cruise ship “Achille Lauro” by Palestinian terrorists did not get beyond the static of an oratorio.
In the London Version of “Dr. Atomic”, a co-production with New York Met, the director Penny Woolcock also does not get much motion into the libretto which is constructed by Peter Sellars out of historical conversation records. But brings facets into the bomb night which are enlightening, and partly because of their banality, frightening. Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley) appears like a Biedermann [in German the term Biedermann is an “everyman” but with a slightly negative touch – nothing special, not open minded] who as scientist does not want to interfere with politics. At the same time he is afflicted by pangs of conscience which he is not even able to ease by an escape into the poetry of Baudelaire and the “holy sonnets” of John Donne. Critical voices of his scientist colleagues Edward Teller (Brindley Sheratt) and Robert Wilson (Thomas Glenn) are brushed aside, they disrupt the timetable of the bomb detonation which is dictated by politico-military demands.
Adams creates for this inescapability a nervous, small section [?] music with lyrical points of rest and electronic alienation. But not until the huge crescendo at the end, reminding one of Orff’s archaisms, does the music, conducted by Lawrence Renes achieve the intensity which comes up to the existential dimension of the theme. Then the music fuses with the blast wave of the explosion, which not only had disastrous consequences at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but changed our whole world completely. What an opera subject – and how nightmarishly up-to-date.
Photo: Tristram Kenton
Rob Ainsley, Sky Arts
http://www.skyarts.co.uk/opera/article/review-doctor-atomic/
Boom! John Adams's explosive 2005 opera, getting its UK premiere here, covers the hours leading up to the first nuclear test in 1945.
Adams has created a unique kind of opera-meets-newsreel genre of his own: his two previous operas dealt with Nixon's meeting with Mao in 1972 (Nixon in China, 1987) and the Palestinian hijacking of the cruise ship the Achille Lauro in 1985 (Death of Klinghoffer, 1991). Like them, Dr Atomic is not history-with-tunes, but an examination of characters coping with new situations - or, as Adams puts it, 'three hours of men arguing', the main arguer being J Robert Oppenheimer, the multi-lingual, well-read, driven brains behind the bomb.
First, the (relatively minor) problems. Peter Sellars's magpie libretto fizzles out. It mixes transcripts and direct quotes with the poetry of Donne and Baudelaire and the Bhagavad Gita. Like a Californian sausage-and-strawberry pizza, the mix is too much. The direct quotes prove unsettable, clumsy and unlyrical. Still, there's something of a novelty value in hearing how a composer sets "the 32 points are the centers of the 20 triangular faces of an icosahedron interwoven with the 12 pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron".
Some parts drag, and the scenes with the wine-swigging, love-hungry Mrs Oppenheimer don't feel like they relate. The vocal lines are largely tough-edged, grey and unmemorable: fantastic for building tension but hardly reproducible in the shower next morning.
But what fabulous, fantastic orchestral music! This is Adams's best opera score to date. There are fleeting glimpses of many styles - Ellingtonian dazzle, 1970s TV cop-show theme urgency, filmic poignancy, or baroque magnificence (in the moving 'Batter my heart' aria at the end of Act I) - but it's all Adams. He keeps up the tension while moving things on with great excitement: a science lab full of brilliant, expectant young minds cross-talking in music.
And the end - when the bomb goes off - is well judged. No 'orchestral explosion', but subdued, weirdly colourful percussion clockwork counting the seconds to the big bang. When the flash comes, accompanied by recorded thundering, it's brilliant in all senses, and the opera fades poignantly to the sound of a Japanese woman asking for water for her children.
The set is mighty, with a backdrop of mid-air debris, suggestive of an explosion in freeze-frame, and drapes that hint at the desert mountains. The researchers are up in pigeonholes, each with a blackboard, decorated by frequent back-projections of handwritten formulae and burning maps of Hiroshima. The costumes are great, brown and grey materials in full fifties flow. Full marks to designer Julian Crouch and director Penny Woolcock.
Performances are outstanding all round. Oppenheimer is brilliantly sung by Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who's been in every performance since that 2005 premiere, especially in that moving 'Batter my heart'. Sasha Cooke as his wife brought passion and vulnerability, while Brindley Sherratt's strong, ironic Teller was an absolute delight. Jonathan Veira's General Groves was the perfect do-as-I-say brasshat demanding a good weather forecast, shouty and imperious without ever descending to caricature, and Thomas Glenn's Wilson entirely convinced as the fresh voice of youthful conscience. Haunting work too from Meredith Arwady as the Tewa Indian maid, her low notes an ominous warning from the local tribe.
If you're looking for romantic tunes, look elsewhere: it's not Puccini. But if you want something uniquely 21st-century, tense and gripping, with brilliantly inventive music by a modern master, taste this special experience now.
Rick Jones, New statesman, 12 March 2009
Blinded by the light
The drama of John Adams’s nuclear opera is lost in theorems
It is a sign of these self-reproachful times that we should even contemplate going out on the town for a show about the nuclear bomb. John Adams’s bleak opera Doctor Atomic dramatises the build-up to the first test at Los Alamos in 1945. It focuses on the scientist J Robert Oppenheimer, who at the crux quotes poetry by John Donne. He is a physicist reciting a metaphysicist. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” he sings as he wrestles with his moral dilemma: serve the state or his own conscience. It is in Donne’s honour that the test was code-named Trinity.
This is opera seria at its most serious. It is probably the first time a Donne poem has cropped up in an opera, a form of theatre that does not have a history of rating words highly. The librettist, or rather compiler, Peter Sellars, is better known as a director, often a controversial one, and might have been expected to devise the unconventional. Unfortunately the whole pentameter does not fit on the subtitles digital display board and Donne’s lines are broken up, but the poem is in the programme. Gerald Finley as “Oppie” sings it in a creamy baritone alone on stage.
He is an isolated figure. In the first scene he is alone among many, in the second alone with his wife, Kitty. They make love but it is perfunctory on his part. The bomb goes off tomorrow. In the past an explosion might have been a metaphor for how’s-your-father. Not here. This is the destruction of mankind. Perhaps that is sexy after all. I remember some quite passionate arguments in the playground about whether the A- or the H- was more destructive. But nobody here is enthusing about the bomb. If they’re not depressed, they’re joking about it. The camp has a lottery called “Guess the Extent of the Fallout”.
Finley’s Oppenheimer is not an ogre of a bomb-maker. He is a youngster (the average age of the scientists at Los Alamos was 25) among the bald generals. His vulnerability comes across as he appeals to the gallery with sad eyes. However, his and the cast’s diction is too good. One hears every word of the scientific discourse about plutonium, though it makes little difference to the level of understanding and might as well be in Italian. The fundamental truth (“matter is not created or destroyed but only altered”) comes right at the start, like a theorem, which is not the best basis for a developing drama. The bed scenes, where the talk is of love and yearning, are a relief from the incomprehensible calculus. In Act II the missus is drunk, but Sasha Cooke, the silky mezzo, gives her despair a touching realisation.
A third element appears in the person of the Indian nanny, sung this night by Meredith Arwady, a fruity contralto. She smiles and her low notes are echoing tombs. She represents the villagers who are natural sun-and-moon pacifists and soon-to-be-downtrodden, but are also a subplot too many. The scientists are the main chorus, stacked in three tiers as the curtain rises, their legs lit first, clad in 1940s stockings or turn-up trousers. They give much-needed human life to Adams’s rhythmic score, conducted by Lawrence Renes. There is still a tendency to play the music of the minimalists and their offspring robotically with every beat emphasised equally but, whether the composer wants it to sound like that or not, they should still distinguish between the crotchets a little more. Admittedly Adams has moved on considerably in complexity but much of the music still has that insistent, steady pulse. It lacks spring and doesn’t dance. At the moment, one feels as if one is being pinned to one’s seat. The dancers of the New York production, relinquished here, might have helped.
Penny Woolcock’s production is impressively staged. Besides being in hen coops, the chorus, wearing dark glasses, is on for the finale’s explosion, which comes from behind the audience while a harrowing reminder of the consequences of the foregoing is heard and seen on the descending curtain. I was reminded of wind blowing through a wheat field.
Adams’s opera is potentially a moving piece of theatre. There are some top voices on display, especially the two female principals, but the science is too much for most and the music itself wants a lighter interpretation. The bomb is a little off-target.
Carla Rees, seen and Heard
http://www.musicweb.uk.net/SandH/2009/Jan-Jun09/adams2802.htm
Set at the end of the Second World War, Doctor Atomic is John Adams’ opera about the testing of the atomic bomb, focussing on its inventor, J. Robert Oppenheimer. With a libretto by Peter Sellars, the opera’s first production was performed in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Chicago, while the present ENO production is a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, which recently received its premiere in New York.
This was a mixed evening, with stunning moments interspersed with some disappointments. The staging and set design was mostly excellent; the cube set was highly effective, as was the simple but elegant use of projections and shadows. The sound was generally good, with the live sounds mixing well with electronics.
John Adams’ score was imaginative and well conceived, with some wonderful orchestral effects and dramatic use of silence and volume. His minimalist style was still in evidence, with accents and pulsations and repeated rhythmic and melodic fragments, but the rich harmonies were expressive and almost verging on the romantic. The challenges faced by the orchestra were considerable but under the baton of Lawrence Renes, who was making his UK opera debut, they were, for me, the stars of the show, with some impressively precise rhythmic and technical playing and some wonderfully expressive moments. The singing was excellent throughout, with Brindley Sherratt’s Edward Teller a particular favourite. Gerald Finley was a convincing Oppenheimer and the low tones of Meredith Arwady’s rich alto voice will haunt me for a long time. Adams’ use of the chorus was also particularly impressive, especially the dramatic entries of the female voices in the second half, which contrast beautifully with the essentially male-dominated soloists.
There were some unforgettable moments, especially Adams’ setting of the John Donne Sonnet “batter my heart” at the end of Act 1. The style was faintly reminiscent of Purcell, with Adams’ sudden use of tonality providing contrast and tension. This was a deeply moving and expressive moment, which I would happily listen to over and over. Gerald Finley’s performance here was particularly impressive and left everything that came after it to pale into insignificance.
My main reservations with the evening came mostly through the narrative and the text, which left Adams to create tension through his music. The story is historically accurate, and tells of the scientists gathered in New Mexico to create the first atomic bomb, in a race with the enemy to be the first to get results. The opera deals with the month before the first bomb test, and refers to many of the issues surrounding the project, including the political pressure, the secrecy of the testing and the scientist’s own doubts that the project would succeed. As an educational project, introducing the story to teenagers, this would be fascinating and extremely worthy. However, I felt that not enough was made of some of the aspects brought up in the programme notes, such as the sense of community between the scientists, the things they did to fill the time and the political pressures to succeed. These things were all touched upon, although in a disjointed way which did little to add to the overall events. A discussion about the General’s diet seemed particularly incongruent with its surrounding events. The text is sourced from various historical documents, which assist with the accuracy of the tale, but sometimes come across as musically clumsy – how many operas, for example, use the word icosahedrons?
The long slow build up to the final moments of the opera served to lead me to feel the frustration of the scientists, in terms of them sitting around and waiting for something out to happen. If this was what the creators were trying to achieve, they did an excellent job, although at times it seemed like the parts were overacted in order to fill in for the lack of action.
I also found myself wondering with whom, if anyone, our sympathies should lie. The plot did little to reveal the inner workings of any particular character, and even Oppenheimer, on whom the attention is focussed, was a slightly distant character who did not command much empathy. Kitty Oppenheimer’s role, although superbly sung by the young soprano Sasha Cooke, was particularly difficult to comprehend.
Robert Hugill, Music and Vision
http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2009/03/atomic.htm
Thought-Provoking
John Adams' opera Doctor Atomic is his third large scale opera, following on from Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Doctor Atomic was premièred in San Francisco in 2005 directed by Peter Sellars -- a production which has also been seen in Amsterdam. English National Opera's new production (seen 28 February 2009), shared with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, is directed by film director Penny Woolcock. She directed the film of Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer. Woolcock's production of Doctor Atomic premièred in New York at the Metropolitan Opera last year with a very similar cast to that which appeared in London.
For his first two large scale operas Adams collaborated with librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars. Reading Adams' recent autobiography Hallelujah Junction, you realise that Sellars had a large input into these operas. His input into Doctor Atomic was even greater as the proposed collaboration with Alice Goodman failed and Sellars assembled a libretto from existing texts. This mixes extracts from diaries and autobiographies of the original participants with poetry. The libretto seems to have been generally unpopular with critics: many commented on its wordiness. But reading Hallelujah Junction you come to realise that Adams is a very dramatically percipient composer and is apt to alter texts as he sets them, so we must come to accept that Doctor Atomic deals with its subject matter in just the way its composer wanted it to.
The subject is the creation of the atom bomb by a team of American scientists in New Mexico. After the first scene in June 1945, the opera concentrates on the final 24 hours before the first test on 15 July 1945. The main engine of the drama is the anxiety of the scientists (Robert Oppenheimer -- Gerald Finley, Edward Teller -- Brindley Sherratt, Robert Wilson -- Thomas Glenn), as to whether the 'gadget' will work at all, the pressure from the military (General Leslie Groves -- Jonathan Veira, Captain James Nolan -- Christopher Gillett) that the test occur on time to suit President Truman's political needs and whether the stormy weather will allow the test to take place at all (Roderick Earle plays the hapless meteorologist Frank Hubbard). Also mixed in is the sheer incompatibility between the military and scientists.
By and large the scientists and the military use naturalistic dialogue, hence the perception that the libretto is wordy. But threaded through this is the presence of Kitty Oppenheimer (Sasha Cooke) and her maid Pasqualita (Meredith Arwady) whose expression is entirely poetic. With Kitty Oppenheimer's part drawing heavily on the poetry of Muriel Rukeyeser.
The opera opens with a fabulous chorus in which the chorus explains the scientific theory behind the splitting of the atom. Woolcock and her designer Julian Crouch present the chorus on a floor to ceiling screen, each singer in their own research cubicle: a stunning coup which matches Adams' haunting music. Throughout the opera these screens move about in a flexible manner, sometimes holding singers, sometimes receiving projections: the work of video designers Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner.
To say that the scientists and military in Act 1 sing their dialogue in a naturalistic manner is not to imply that this is one of those operas whose form is more like a play with accompany music. Adams leaves plenty of space between the vocal contributions, so that the orchestra effectively forms the interior dialogue of the singers which is absent from the words. Quite often, it is in the orchestra that the main musical interest lies. Woolcock's action is almost entirely naturalistic, taking place steadily whatever the musical content, sung or otherwise. This creates exactly the right sort of feeling for the scientists going about their business. Brindley Sherratt and Thomas Glenn impressed as the two leading scientists, with Gerald Finley in stunning form as Robert Oppenheimer. Jonathan Veira was almost unrecognisable as the apoplectic General Groves, who has extreme difficulty coping with the unruly scientists. (At one point, later on in the opera they run a sweepstake on what the outcome of the test will be!) As someone who did a scientific degree and worked for five years in a government research establishment, I felt that Adams and Woolcock have achieved the right sort of atmosphere balancing extreme sophistication with naivety and sheer silliness.
In the middle of Act 1 Oppenheimer has a distracted love scene with his wife Kitty. In Hallelujah Junction Adams talks about how the role of Kitty was created with the talents of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in mind. Adams and Sellars obviously intended this poetic scene to be a balance to the rigours of the act. But unfortunately Sasha Cooke (who also played the role at the Metropolitan Opera) seemed to be fatally lacking in the sort of intensity that you could have imagined Lorraine Hunt Lieberson bringing to the role. She had all the notes and sounded lovely, in a generalised sort of way. But intensity and vividness were lacking. Quite by how much was shown when we came to the end of Act 1 when Oppenheimer breaks into one of the holy sonnets of John Donne. The real life Oppenheimer knew these poems and the one used, 'Batter my heart', gave the test site its name 'Trinity'. Here Finley's performance was amazing: suddenly the buttoned up scientist breaks loose and we glimpse inside his tortured soul.
From then on, the design of the opera makes more sense. As the test gets closer Oppenheimer increasingly breaks free of the dialogue to express himself in verse and even Wilson (Thomas Glenn) confides in us a dream that he has been having. The structure of the libretto becomes metaphor for the way that the scientists anxieties are breaking down their control.
In the third scene of Act 2, Adams gives us what is essentially an operatic ensemble, when all of the main characters have interlinking soliloquies where they confess their private terrors. The locals, the native Americans who perform menial tasks for the scientists, perform a traditional ritual high up at the top of the screens, with Meredith Arwady singing a genuine Tewa text using her wonderfully dark contralto voice. And the whole scene concludes with a terrible chorus from the Bhagavad Gita (which the real Robert Oppenheimer could read in the original Sanskrit).
Like all of Adams' major works, the opera was presented in a sound design (sound designer Mark Grey). Though the opera had opened with some non musical sounds, for much of the time the sound design had seemed only to function as a means of allowing the singers to be heard over the large orchestra. But as the final scene proceeded to its tense close, Adams increasing use of non musical sounds brought the tension to screaming pitch in a way that no western orchestra could quite do alone. For the final explosion, Crouch's set de-constructed brilliantly and the conclusion was not an explosion of sound but the simple, haunting sound of a Japanese woman asking for water.
My reservations about Sasha Cooke's Kitty Oppenheimer apart, everyone in the cast impressed. All seemed entirely at home in Adams' sound world and in Woolcock's production, creating a feeling that what we were hearing and seeing was natural and inevitable (not always the case with new operas). All the singers made light of whatever technical challenges that Adams provided. But towering above them was Finley's portrait of neurotic, chain-smoking Oppenheimer who finally almost cracks under the weight of his anxiety.
Lawrence Renes conducted the large orchestra and kept his forces in firm control, whilst still allowing the excitement and poetry of the score to blossom. There were a couple of moments at the opening when the hard working chorus were not quite in unison, but given that some of them were placed high above the stage this is perhaps understandable.
John Adams' Doctor Atomic is a richly multi-layered work which cries out to be seen more than once. It treats a complex scientific matter with clarity, in a way which few composers have managed, bringing science and art together. (Incidentally, I never thought to hear the word 'icosahedron' set to music as part of an opera libretto). Penny Woolcock, Lawrence Renes and their hard working singers and musicians have ensured that Adams' conception has been brought to the stage in a sympathetic and thought-provoking way.
Helen Meany, Irish Times, March 5, 2009
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2009/0305/1224242293992.html
Ravishing drama of destruction
In his epic moral work about the dilemmas of nuclear scientist J Robert Oppenheimer in the countdown to Hiroshima, US composer John Adams challenges preconceptions about opera. But for Penny Woolcock, director of ‘Doctor Atomic’ , this is what makes Adams’s art important.
Commisioned as “an American Faust opera”, John Adams’s latest work, Doctor Atomic , cannot be so neatly summarised. Portraying the final weeks in the US military’s secret development of the atomic bomb in July 1945, it raises the kind of moral questions that this audacious American composer has been drawn to in previous works. Here, as in Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1990), he favours multiple perspectives and interpretations of real historical events, breaking new ground in terms of what operatic form can encompass. Doctor Atomic focuses on the heated discussions that took place among the leading physicists of “the Manhattan Project”, who were working at the test site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J Robert Oppenheimer.
For John Adams, once the idea of an opera about Oppenheimer had been proposed to him by the director of San Francisco Opera, it generated an urgent response that led to four years of research on the topic. He writes in a programme note: “The atomic bomb is the all-time American symbol of our darkest mythology – power, technology, science and, of course, the responsibility of having the ability to destroy the planet. For me these are Wagnerian topics, ideally suited to operatic expression.”
If there were questions, before its premiere four years ago, about the suitability of this complex subject matter to opera, the finished work gives the answer. In a new co-production between the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and English National Opera, it opened last week at the London Coliseum to the same audience acclaim that the original production received in San Francisco and in Amsterdam in 2007.
Its director, British film-maker Penny Woolcock, pinpoints the work’s fascination. “There is a ravishing beauty in destruction,” she says. “John Adams has composed a beautiful opera, and we’ve set out to create a production that captures the beauty and horror of its ambition.”
Working on the libretto with his long-term collaborator, Peter Sellars, who directed the San Francisco/Amsterdam production, Adams began by delving into the military and political archives, as well as memoirs and recollections of those who had worked alongside Oppenheimer.
Sellars’s libretto is an elaborate mosaic. Verbatim documentary material – quotes from the scientists and army generals working at the test site in Los Alamos – is juxtaposed with extensive quotations from poetry, especially the poetry that the multilingual Oppenheimer knew and loved. The result is initially disorientating, as the characters and chorus proceed from detailed technical exchanges in the opening scene (“the 32 points are the centres of the 20 triangular faces of an icosahedron interwoven with the 12 pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron”) to lyrical excerpts from Baudelaire and the Hindu sacred text, The Bhagavad Gita , delivered at moments of emotional intensity.
For Penny Woolcock, directing her first opera, the text, which included no stage directions, was daunting. “I worked from Sellars’s annotated libretto, which cited the documentary sources for every single line of dialogue,” she says. “I went off and read the original sources, letters and memoirs, everything I could get my hands on.”
Her most helpful background reading was American Prometheus , a recent biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, which helped her to understand why Oppenheimer was so determined to proceed with the testing of the bomb, when some of his fellow scientists were expressing misgivings. Many of them, especially those who were Jewish refugees from Nazism, had originally joined the project because they wanted to help develop atomic power before Hitler did. After his defeat, they were less convinced about the necessity of its use.
The opening scene of the opera dramatises this moment, two weeks before the test in July 1945, when Germany had surrendered and the Japanese were already prepared to discuss peace terms.
“There was a real choice here, but Oppenheimer wouldn’t entertain it then,” Woolcock says. “As a secular New York Jew who had experienced anti-Semitism in earlier years, he had found it very seductive to be part of the political decision-making elite, to have the power to call the president at any time. ‘Isn’t it better that I have a voice within the government?’ he says, when he is challenged by one of the other physicists and asked to sign a petition against the use of the bomb.”
Yet he is also shown to have qualms and conflicting emotions, and, as performed by baritone Gerald Finley (for whom the part was composed), Oppenheimer becomes increasingly nervy in successive scenes in which the tension at the site is pitched to almost unbearable levels. The opera’s expressive high point comes at the end of Act One as Oppenheimer is left alone with his thoughts after the deadline for the explosion has been set. He sings an aria, Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God , which is the full text of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet of the same title. An exquisite solo, in which the falling and recapitulating melody increases in intensity, it captures his anguish in an unforgettable musical and theatrical moment.
“It’s a complex characterisation,” Woolcock says. “We know that Oppenheimer was discarded later, when he had served his purpose, and that was a tragedy for him. Yet 240,000 people were killed outright by the bombs in Japan, 90 per cent of whom were civilian – that’s a hell of a lot to have on your conscience. He had to believe that something good would come out of this creation, and that ultimately it had saved lives.
“Later, after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he went to see President Truman and said, ‘we scientists have known evil’. Truman called him a cry-baby, and Oppenheimer quoted The Bhagavad Gita, saying: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ But he never actually recanted or renounced it. I think if he genuinely had regretted it, he would have had to commit suicide.
“The opera tries to understand the context in which these men were working. Here was a group of extraordinary scientists, brilliant and cultured young people, who were being given the opportunity of their lives. At a very basic level, they wanted to see if their experiment worked. I’m talked to some of them who are still alive, and they are fascinating people. And they had a sense of omnipotence and excitement.”
The characterisation of Kitty Oppenheimer is one Woolcock is less comfortable with. The historical Kitty was a fascinating woman, a biologist and thrice- married former Communist Party member, who was wholly supportive of her husband’s work on the atomic bomb. The libretto portrays her through selections of densely symbolic verse by the American poet, Muriel Rykeyser, which express a Cassandra-like sense of foreboding. Drinking heavily at home in the Oppenheimers’ prefab accommodation, Kitty functions as an emotional barometer.
“I would have liked her to be more rounded, and more engaged with the world, as she actually was,” Woolcock says.
With ingenious set design by Julian Crouch, archive footage, and video projections of maps of Japanese cities and mathematical equations (by Fifty-Nine Productions), Woolcock’s production is starker and much less frenetic than Peter Sellars’s first production. Yet tension is sustained throughout by Adams’s enveloping, richly textured score, building to the final explosion with a succession of polyphonous ticking clocks and frantic choruses.
“So much is already given by the music,” Woolcock says. “The staging is about bringing the music alive. For me, coming from film-making, I had to get use to this. There could be no cross- cutting between scenes or changing the rhythm of the action at the editing stage. Everything had to happen on stage and was precisely timed by the score. So I simply couldn’t do it in a naturalistic way. I had to invent my way from one scene to the next, and invent things for the scientists to do on stage while they’re all counting down to the moment of the explosion.”
Woolcock’s film version of The Death of Klinghoffer for Channel 4 caused a lot of disquiet in its carefully even-handed portrayal of Palestinian terrorists and their Jewish victims.
“At one film festival, people queued up to insult me, saying ‘you are disgusting and your film is disgusting’,” she says. Yet, for Woolcock, this is the kind of art that is important to make. It’s not difficult to see why she returned to work with Adams on this thrillingly ambitious opera that is driven by an urgent, questioning impulse.
Curtain call photos
20 March
Curtain call photos
Reproduced with kind permission from
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