A Screaming Comes Across the Sky: John Adams’ Doctor Atomic
by Mark Schiebe
John Adams, Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera
The idea to do an opera about the atomic bomb was the brainchild of Pamela Rosenberg, who in 2002 was the politically-minded director of the San Francisco Opera. The genesis of the bomb’s music, however, came much earlier, in a childhood experience of John Adams: “I do remember as a kid — I don’t know how old I was, maybe seven or eight years old — living in the most secure, Stephen Spielbergesque, idyllic village in New Hampshire… getting into bed one night, and my mother gave me a kiss and turned out the light. I heard a jet plane way, way high up in the sky, and I went into a panic, because I wondered if that was the Russians coming to bomb us.” Adams’s experience, the vague but numbing fear of nuclear annihilation, was the experience of the entire baby-boomer generation, who grew up during a cold war and an era of widespread paranoia, symbolized most poignantly by ‘the bomb’ itself, whose invisible waves of radiation threatened skin and sanity alike. As Norman Mailer has put it in his 1957 essay “The White Negro,” the bomb ushered in a new phase in the history of human consciousness; a kind of psychic fracturing occurred where normal Americans would go about their everyday lives of getting and spending, all the while aware, on another level, of the possibility of the instant, impersonal, absolute extinction of the race. Such bone-chilling thoughts provide the psychic materials for Adams’s bracing score in Doctor Atomic, which
opened at the Metropolitan Opera House on October 12, and runs though November 13.
The opera is Adams’s third, and continues the composer’s commitment to giving operatic treatment to controversial social and political issues that have deep significance in the collective American psyche. 1987’s Nixon in China (the title pretty much sums up the plot) was the beginning of a collaboration between Adams and the adventurous director Peter Sellers. 1991’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which stages the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation front, brought heavy criticism including charges of “romanticizing terrorists,” which drove Adams away from the medium for over a decade. Doctor Atomic, the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the first atomic weapon, is perhaps a less politically charged topic, though certainly no less psychologically unnerving. While it was first staged by Sellers in San Fransisco in 2005, the Met’s version features an entirely new stage design by Penny Woolcock, a British television director whose film version of Klinghoffer helped mitigate some of the earlier criticism of the opera. Woolcock’s vision of the stage is stripped down, as she eliminated Sellers’s chaotic, electron-like dancers. In fact, there is relatively little movement on stage, the visual dynamism coming more from electronic gimmicks like the digital projections of mathematical equations and Japanese bombing targets grafted onto the oversize windows of the Oppenheimers’ bedroom. The over-worked, strung-out physicists even nap at one point.
The story spans the tension-filled two weeks in the summer of 1945 before the first testing of the weapon, scheduled for July 16 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the site Oppenheimer would name “Trinity” in a deeply personal nod to John Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” Here Donne’s famous poem serves as the text of Oppenheimer’s aria, which ends the opening Act. The line “bend / your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new” is addressed not to God, but to the bomb, which hovers menacingly over the stage, suspended by wires. Not surprisingly, the focal point of the entire opera is the soul of the enigmatic director of the Manhattan Project, who was a brilliant physicist with the heart of a poet, and whose struggle is here projected in Faust-like magnitude.
Act I opens near the testing sight in New Mexico with Oppenheimer (played by Gerald Finley) and fellow physicists Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink)and Robert Wilson (Thomas Glenn) arguing the merits of deploying the weapon in Japan at a time when the war in Europe was winding down. Sellers’s libretto, perhaps the most experimental element in the opera, is a collage of pre-existing texts, a heady mixture of the prosaic and the sublime: declassified military documents, transcripts of meetings, interviews with participants in the project, standard histories, and poetry. The effect rendered is an odd mixture of gritty realism and surreality. When the idealistic Teller laments that Americans will lose their souls if they release the deadly weapon, the mercurial Oppenheimer responds by quoting Baudelaire: “The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes so embarrassing that at this loss I felt only a little more emotion than if, during a walk, I had lost my visiting card.” The three principals go back and forth in heated debate until the matter is decided.
Scene two takes place in the bedroom of Oppenheimer’s house in Los Alamos, late in the night, where Oppenheimer tries to calm his wife Kitty (played by Sasha Cooke), who tries and fails to sustain her husband’s attention. The two briefly connect through poetry: Kitty sings Muriel Rukeyser’s “Three sides of a coin” and Oppenheimer again responds with Baudelaire. In these tense times, the emotional heights of poetry are the plane on which husband and wife can briefly meet. After an argument, Oppenheimer leaves and Kitty is left alone to contemplate the uncertain future. In the first act’s final scene, the eve of the testing date, the weather turns ugly at Trinity, and the barrel-chested military supervisor of the project, General Leslie Groves (Eric Owens), stampedes around the stage, frustrated by a meteorologist’s predictions of continued storming. Oppenheimer warns of the possible dangers of testing in storm conditions, and then, in an attempt at comic relief that he can’t quite carry off, teases the General about his weight. Groves leaves, and in what is certainly the emotional climax of the opera, we find Oppenheimer alone with his creation, singing Donne’s sonnet. The Act ends with what is perhaps the opera’s most effective tableaux: the bomb is lowered into view and hangs suspended in air, a pool of yellow light on its upper left corner, and as we gaze at the illuminated sphere we perceive the linkages between the spherical weapon, the physicist’s brain, and the earth itself. A moment of reflection ensues: is this the end of the road for technological man? The curtain falls.
Act Two opens with a rumbling electronic white noise created by blending numerous radio frequencies, a static froth and aural analogue of the nuclear radiation shortly to be released into the desert air. Adams’s score deftly interweaves “found” radio sounds and various types of musique concrete with traditional orchestral sounds. His palatte in Doctor Atomic is particularly rich, emphasizing how far he has come from his minimalist work in the 1970 and early 1980’s, and even from Nixon in China, which featured live stage voices imitating the sound of tape loops. Minimalist repetition still plays an important role, but Adams draws from a far larger array of symphonic styles, incorporating molten Wagnerian brass, lush French impressionistic harmonies, and (what Peter Sellers dubs) “Stravinsky emergency music,” which Adams employs as a leitmotif.
Two hundred miles from the test site, the Oppenheimer’s Indian maid Pasqualita (played by Meredith Arwady) croons a lullaby to their child: “In the north the cloud-flower blossoms/ And now the lightning flashes, / And now the thunder clashes, / And now the rain comes down!” The baby sleeps but the storm rages deep into the night and Adams’s music rides along in its electricity. The radio rumblings gain in prominence and compete throughout with the “Stravinsky emergency music,” the French horns and trumpets, the oboes buzzing pedal tones below, strings swirling wind spirals above. The General Leslie Groves has disregarded all warnings about the storm, and the test shot is scheduled for 5:30 am.
From this point on, time itself seems to warp. Narrative fizzles and we the audience wait with the scientists and the generals, the Indians and the children. There is nothing, really, left to do. In a brilliant move, Adams emphasizes the deathly slow pace of the final day with a choice bit of minimalism, introducing an array of clocks which tick away underneath the orchestra, looping in an out of sync — not one countdown but many… an infinity of countdowns. The physicists, in a touch of black humor, make predictions about the size of the explosion: how far will the heat travel? Will the radiation reach their families? Will the earth’s atmosphere catch fire and the planet burn? Suddenly the night sky is filled with a vision of Vishnu, as described in the Bhagvad Gita. The chorus chants in slow crescendo: “At the site of this / Your shape stupendous / full of mouths and eyes / terrible with fangs / when I see you Vishnu / with your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring / all my peace is gone / and my heart is troubled.” The physicists and military personnel lie in rows of ditches as the warning shots are fired… It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
