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John and Peter Go Fission New York
Metropolitan Opera
10/21/2008 - & Oct. 13, 18, 25, 30, Nov. 1, 5, 8
John Adams: Doctor Atomic
Gerald Finley (J. Robert Oppenheimer), Richard Paul Fink (Edward Teller), Thomas Glenn (Robert Wilson), Sasha Cooke (Kitty Oppenheimer), Meredith Arwady (Pasqualita), Eric Owens (General Leslie Groves), Earle Patriarco (Frank Hubbard), Roger Honeywell (Captain James Nolan)
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Alan Gilbert (Conductor)
Penny Woolcock (Production), Julian Crouch (Set Designer), Catherine Zuber (Costume Designer), Brian MacDevitt (Lighting Designer), Andrew Dawson(Choreographer), Fifty Nine Productions (Video Design), Mark Grey (Sound Designer)
G. Finley (© Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)
The words-versus-music controversy in opera must be immaterial to John Adams. To this most unique opera composer, the theme is everything, and the theme must be monumental. In Nixon In China (which I heard in Hong Kong just before it went back to the P.R.C.), Adams explored more than history. He tried to explore the significance of those—honorable and dishonorable—whose positions shape the world. (It was never ever a satire against Nixon, which would have been too easy.) In The Death of Klinghoffer, Adams tried to understand the motivations of those who have lost their country and hope to regain it again. In America, the Diaspora relates only to the Jews. John Adams related it to the Palestinians as well, utilizing the music of Nabucco to apply to the Arabs who had lost their homes.
Ten years ago, Adams was given an idea of the Faust legend, in this case applying to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. It was Oppenheimer—more Moses than Faust—who would lead his tribe of physicists into the desert (New Mexico) to found a new kingdom based upon knowledge, equations, logic, resurrecting equations to life. The contract, though, had its cost. To achieve this World of Philosophers, Oppenheimer would have to create an instrument that would destroy this world. Man had been fighting, one against one since time began. Oppenheimer would become one man who could kill millions.
The final conception, Doctor Atomic, is a staggering idea. It had a staggering staging (not the original by Peter Sellars but the filmmaker Penny Woodcock), which tried to encompass everything about the idea. A scrim curtain greets us with the Atomic Table. When it rises, we are faced with a wall of 42 cubicles. Usually, they are packed with working scientists. In Act Two, the top has an American Indian lady and her gods. Other times, the cubicles turn into walls, which go in and out. Hanging above it all, like a noxious cloud is a grayish-ugly cone-shaped thing, the “Fat Man”, the bomb. The physicist and military are dwarfed by the set. They must make choices based on equations, not consequences. And herein lay a very important problem.
The problem was fundamentally in Act One. This is where librettist Sellars and composer Adams chose to use the words of official documents, and the words of biographies of the characters. And this is where Act One becomes a musical bore. The opening chords of the orchestra are absolutely thrilling. But when the orchestra dies down, so does the opera. The words are bureaucratese, they are unemotional. They have neither poetic scansion nor organic drama. They are not meant, I feel, for opera.
Nor did Adams make much of an attempt. The lines seem like unending recitative, sometimes difficult to understand (the titles helped), but even then, without much meaning. We hear the doubts of the scientists, we have one domestic scene of the Unhappy Wife, we see the officious General Groves who has his own doubts (these based on inefficient weathermen), and the chorus speaks with Adamsish repetition about their work.
But, like movie music, it took an act of consciousness to listen to the orchestral music. Under Alan Gilbert, the Met Orchestra played the tricky rhythms and twittering solos well, but the music simply underlined the words, and not too well. Not until the end of the act, when Gerald Finley (as Oppenheimer) sung his marvelous melody based on a John Donne poem (see below) did one hear a personal, sense of either commitment or music.
All of this changed in Act Two. Mrs. Oppenheimer begins with the Rukeyser poem “Easter Eve 1945,” a very moving moment, and some time later, their American Indian maid, Pasqualita, sings a haunting lullaby to the Oppenheimer infant. (Dr. Oppenheimer, needless to say, was fascinated by the New Mexico culture, though this is only implied in the opera.)
Where Act One didn’t need the tension, taking place a few weeks before the test, Act Two was the night of the test, and the tension now builds. At this point, too, the Faust–Moses legend takes another proportion. For this world is not an Aristotelian one of scientist-philosophers but three-layered: there’s Science (Oppenheimer), Magic (the Indian, as well as a hymn on the Bhagavad Gita), and Order (in the form of the suspicious Generals who still manage to keep their people working.)
At this point, too, Adams uses music which is slowly driving, which heightens the awareness of the Bomb, with spoken-sung hints about something called “radioactivity,” about which they scientists know little.
We, though, do know. We are products of the post-Los Alamos world. What for the scientists had been playing like Prometheus, producing their plutonium Frankenstein, their Golem, simply because they could do it, we recognize. They didn’t. The fear they felt was partly fearing a dud bomb, partly not knowing the consequences, partly a bit of guilt because it wouldn’t be used against the Germans—who had destroyed the families of many of the Jewish scientists here—but against some Asian people about whom they knew little.
Adams comes close to catching this, but something is missing. Simply because we know what they didn’t know, and because the words are supposed to be their own, we cannot come near to catching the horror of it all.
Adams tries it another way. I attended the first performance of his On The Transmigration of Souls in 2002, where the horrors of Nine-Eleven were evoked in words and music. Here, the horrors come only at the end with a wall of musique concrète, with sirens, and with pounding in the orchestra. The point is almost made. But not quite. For as the scrim curtain goes down, we hear a mother asking in Japanese for water for her children. A plaintive cry which grows dim, and then is heard no more.
Other operatic composers had taken the most powerful works—Wozzeck and Boris, for instance—and ended not with a bang but a whimper. Here, though, it doesn’t work. The curtain is descending, the audience is ready to put on jackets, look for the car-keys, ready to applaud and go home.
Two moments in this three-hour-long opera need some exegesis. They are based on poetry of west and east.
Oppenheimer loved the poetry of John Donne—perhaps because Donne, like certain scientists, enlisted logic and abstruse relationships to define his belief in God. “Batter my heart, three person’d God”, in Act One, only confuses things, since the poem itself is typically convoluted. Listening to it sung is an experiment in fine singing and the only melodic lines in the act. But I doubt if anybody in that attentive audience had the slightest idea what it meant. After two or three readings, I realized that Donne was imploring God to destroy the enemies of faithfulness, which had taken part of Donne himself. Was Peter Sellars saying that Oppenheimer was guilty about bombing? Did he need divine reason to peruse the rational? If so, it is barely understood in the opera.
Act Two uses several actual quotes, but the one long section comes from the Bhagavad Gita, where Vishnu reveals himself. Translations from the Sanskrit are always dramatic, and the Christopher Isherwood version here has all the right violence in the pictures. But what was it doing in Doctor Atomic? Again, Oppenheimer had a serious interest in Eastern religion (as did, ironically, the Germans forebears of Hitler); so he would have known, as the audience did not, why Vishnu revealed himself. The swordsman, Arjuna, has been commanded to go to battle against friends and relatives. He refuses, at which point Vishnu reveals himself in all his horrible power. So Arjuna goes back to do his duty.
As did Oppenheimer. As did all in this well-sung, finely mounted production. In a certain sense, it could be compared to Philip Glass’s opera, Satyagraha. But Glass, while basing it on history, made no attempt at realism, but offered mirrors and shadows and metaphors. Once we stopped attempting to decipher and simply listened, it made sense. Doctor Atomic uses real words for real people. It has moments of magic and symbol, it employs poetry, it visualizes a real bomb.
As opera, though, we need more. Oppenheimer and his scientists were so connected to their work that their doubts, questions and confusions were dwarfed by their creation. Not until years later did they realize what they had created. We, in the audience should connect with the horror, but we don’t. We see men at work, we hear moments of opera and we feel momentary sympathy. As in Greek tragedy and the Indian/Balinese Ramayana, we in the audience know the story beforehand, and we want to see how our artists will handle it. Adams and Sellars have told the story, illustrated it with music, but great style alone hardly evokes the creation of these geniuses, which still hangs above us, literally, metaphorically and, after 64 years, all too imminently.
Harry Rolnick
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