Countdown, to the world's annihilation? John Adams created an opera from a true story and the massive moral crisis of the scientist in the centre of it.
Doctor Atomic premiered in 2005, with revised versions in the years following. The story told in the opera, unlike the story of the development of nuclear power, is short - but the work manipulates time, building tension with fast dialogue and unbearably slow waiting. The cast is huge, but the opera centres on the key players in the Manhattan Project, the moral trauma of Robert Oppenheimer and - in the background - the voices of women, excluded from the test site, and waiting, telling of their love and fear and their respect for nature. Kitty, his wife, challenges Oppenheimer's fascination with physical laws, "Lit by their energies, secretly, all things shine."
As Adams tells it, SFO asked him to compose an "American Faust" and proposed the story of "the father of the atomic bomb".
Here's Adams in 1987."Opera, if it’s to be successful, has to function on a mythic level. Otherwise it’s utterly ridiculous to have these people running around the stage screaming at the top of their lungs. But for me as an American today the myths aren’t King Lear or Odysseus but historical figures and events, cultural focal points often blown up by the media into a mythological dimension in the way that Andromache meant something very specific to the Greeks. I think that’s enough to do me for a lifetime of work."
The characters he creates are, he says, archetypes. Of Richard Nixon, "I take him to be an archetype of an American head of state- maybe not even necessarily a head of state, just any emotionally undeveloped man who finds himself in a position of tremendous power. It’s a particularly American figure we’ve developed. If you take that as a given and try to forget the Nixon of Checkers and Watergate, I think it immediately becomes a more interesting opera. My Nixon has as much relationship to the real Nixon as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar does to the Roman emperor."
And the relationship of his Oppenheimer to the real U.S. physicist and Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer? If you've seen the recent film "Oppenheimer" check out this comparison.
It's an unusual opera in pace and balance. The two acts are dramatically different. In the first we pace the excitement, tension and controversy around the scientific process (about a month before the first test detonation of the bomb in the New Mexico desert). The second act is a breathholding long coverage of the morning countdown, July 16, 1945. As this commentator remarks, "Plot progression is usually a key element of opera. But in the second act of Doctor Atomic, time seems to slow down as tension and fear mount. The scientists discuss their uncertainty of what will happen, conceding the possibility that the bomb could ignite the Earth’s entire atmosphere- an apocalyptic theory at the time. Time seems to stop in the final moment before the bomb’s detonation, when the curtain falls."
Julia Bullock, who sang Kitty in Santa Fe in 2018 talks of how the opera confronts.
"A noble, probing examination of scientific responsibility, it’s his most visionary and ambitious stage work to date, though it is not without its flaws. These largely derive from Peter Sellars’s libretto." so wrote Tim Ashley in the Guardian. And it's worth reading what the Atomic Heritage Foundation thought of the piece.
Despite the libretto?
So - what was the problem with the libretto, and what does that tell us about strengths and challenges in opera construction? For this opera, as in Girls, Peter Sellars created a libretto from contemporary sources. This time, it's not from personal communications but from a range of official sources and poetry. According to Adams, Sellers was fond of saying `This is the first time that a composer has set a declassified government document.' But did it work? The Met, in their later production, created a backdrop of the filing boxes for characters.
Few reviewers were prepared to criticize, and those who did were adamant that the opera was saved from confusion and dreariness by Adams' music. Clive Barnes said of the 2008 Met production, "Peter Sellars’ dull libretto draws from official sources, memoirs and poems as diverse as John Donne’s great sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” It has its moments, but too few. What carries the opera is Adams’ music, which has a shape, definition and texture unmatched by any other American opera composer with the possible exception of Philip Glass."
Ron Rosenbaum for the Spectator, however, walked out. He wrote a long piece, worth reading, as tackles the importance of libretto in opera. "Yes, the libretto was some kind of verbal assemblage. But does that mean its aural effect is more important than its oral content? On a subject like this, the moral coherence of the words—or lack thereof—seems a worthy subject for review. Instead, perhaps understandably given the incoherence of the assemblage, the critics focused their attention on the music, which I, too, found powerful. But they didn’t seem bothered by the emptiness of the words. Do words not affect how an opera is judged?"
This very critical commentator agreed: "For me, it’s as if librettist Sellars Googled “Manhattan Project” and simply took the contents of the Wikipedia entry, pasted it into a doc, inserted a load of line returns to make it look sort of like an epic tome and passed it off to Adams as modern verse."
The answer from Adams: "It was a wonderful opportunity to use poetry and use the elevated tone of poetry. For example, the John Donne sonnet 'Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God.' "
Batter my Heart
It's the best known of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, and perhaps the least understood, partly because its metaphors are multiple. But the message is shocking - a demand for violence and overpowering of the submissive supplicant, as the only way he can be taken by God from Satan. The sonnet's text - and a good Wiki account of the various interpretations - are here.
Britten set the Holy Sonnets to music before Adams gave the words to Oppenheimer on the eve of the test - with amazing music that has made it a top modern baritone aria. One critic praised "Adams’ ability to convey in musical terms so much of Oppenheimer’s interior complexity — the combination of pride and shame prompted by the success of his massive undertaking — felt little short of miraculous." Poetry the scientist loved, used as a statement of - what? Adams is quoted (essay in the DVD booklet) as seeing the poem conveying "an almost unbearable self-awareness, an agonistic struggle between good and evil, darkness and light."
Here's a recording of Gerald Finley with the aria in the production by co-commissioning De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam 2007. And here's that ending of Act 1 in the French premier of Dr. Atomic at Opéra national du Rhin (Strasbourg, France). Dietrich Henschel is J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Bringing in Donne was actually Oppenheimer's idea - inspired by this sonnet (he loved poetry) he had named the nuclear test site in New Mexico "Trinity".
“Oppenheimer begins to sing, pouring out his soul in stark, anguished, cantorial phrases. The words – ‘Batter my heart, three-person'd God’ – are John Donne's, the music is the creation of America's greatest living composer, and the scene compresses all the terror and fascination of the opera's subject into eight minutes of wrenching, sinewy musical genius… a major addition to the operatic repertory of this new century.” For the SFChronicle's music critic, "everything else in the three-hour opera -- from the talky debates about nuclear physics and geopolitics to the fuzzy poetic reveries of Oppenheimer's wife Kitty to the choral outbursts of fear and sickness unto death -- derives its energy from Adams' compact setting of the poem. Some of the evening sputters, most of it is a forceful blend of tenderness and urgency leavened with occasional touches of graveyard wit. But any piece crowned by a stretch of writing as visionary and as stubbornly unforgettable as that Act 1 finale is already some kind of masterpiece."
And that music? A comment from Malcolm Miller. "The Act I aria ... depicts Oppenheimer's anguish as well as his obsession with the bomb: sung at the entrance to a large wooden edifice in which the bomb is housed, it has a Purcellian or even Handelian grandeur, with its falling chain of dotted rhythm gestures. That stylistic allusion created a strong postmodern clash with the refrain based on the pulsating minimalism of Adams' earlier style."
Adams describes it as "in a sense a fractured passacaglia" [What's that?] "It probes the very deep, morally puzzled state of mind of Oppenheimer." In this account, Adams says Oppenheimer "feels that he has lost his soul... That sense of his responsibility and guilt came over him in later years, so we're using artistic license to take that frame of mind and put it on the stage."
Responsibility and guilt ... for scientific research ambition and its societal results - a more complicated bargain than the one Faust made with his devil?
Musical from poetry
Several commentators have called this Adams at his most Wagnerian - it's "through-composed" opera, the music carrying the tension and the action often breathlessly. You don't get many hummable arias in such music. But this opera swerves off the demanding story to pause us with poetry - twice.
The most famous music, as above, is at the end of the Act. With Oppenheimer left alone, time stops. But earlier in the first Act, the bedroom scene offers breathing space, with a different kind of tension. For both these scenes, Sellars' libretto cuts from the rattle and rush of official documents and correspondence to poetry - from poets Oppenheimer was known to love. The act ends, as above, with the seventeenth century John Donne sonnet 'Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God.' Earlier, in the bedroom scene, a modern poem is matched to a nineteenth century one.
'Am I in your light?' That poem which Adams set as Kitty's aria in the bedroom, is Three Sides of a Coin by Muriel Rukeyser - here is the poem. Adams' music is shockingly sweet in contrast to the earlier scenes - cutting into the noisy music that drives the men's fixation with the science and politics, as Kitty tries to drag her husband back from there. (‘I love you/ and you should raise your head’). There's a (fuzzy imaged but good sound ) version from the Met production here. (Sasha Cooke was the Met's Kitty, with Gerald Finley.)
Sophie von Otter has recorded the aria here. It makes an amazing stand-alone love song!
And Oppenheimer's response? - the 'odour of your hair poem' is from the nineteenth century - Baudelaire's Hémisphère dans une Chevelure’. Lots of (very different) translations online - I like this one!
The things you find online - try this site for a good read!
And for those who want to dig deeper, I found the opera's entire libretto here: https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/doctor-atomic/libretto/.
For those of the 'close your eyes and listen to the music' brigade, BBC orchestra recorded the soundtrack with Adams conducting. Many extracts are online - audio only. Julia Bullock is Kitty (later she starred as Dame Shirley in Girls of the Golden West.)
Just Google 'doctor atomic bbc symphony adams conducting' and you'll get them all.
Nearly two decades on, this opera has not become a 'popular' classic. But as this critic comments, it holds its place in modern operas. "True, “Doctor Atomic” will never replace “Carmen” and “Butterfly” in public favor, but its success indicates the existence of a vast number of opera-goers who seek more than mere entertainment. It is a work that demands a critical response from all who see it."
Lyn 5/6/24
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