‘Doctor Atomic’

Sometimes it works to great effect. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2002 work On the Transmigration of Souls. It was commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Nixon in China, his first opera, was about just that. Critics seemed astounded that Adams had managed to put the president’s 1972 meeting with Mao into the grand, primarily European, tradition of opera.

The Death of Klinghoffer, his next opera, followed in 1991. That work, about the hijacking six years earlier of the Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and their murder of a Jewish-American passenger, saw protests as soon as it had its premiere in Brussels, from both Jewish and Arab groups. The one saw the opera as anti-Semitic; the other saw it as pro-Israeli. Many companies that had planned to present the work demurred after the controversy.

The tough reception for Klinghoffer was hard on Adams; he said at the time that he would never write another opera. But artists have always made–and ignored–such pronouncements, and so Adams’s latest work based on real events, Doctor Atomic, fittingly had its premiere this past fall at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House.

Adams’s ambition has not waned. Doctor Atomic tackles one of the defining events of the 20th century, the creation of the atomic bomb. The action takes place in June and July 1945, as the Los Alamos scientists prepare for (and debate) the bomb’s first test. The group had been racing to complete the multibillion-dollar project, convinced that the Germans were doing the same. But, by the summer of 1945, Germany had surrendered; the likely target is now Japan.

Everyone is on edge: “Our conflicts carry creation and its guilt,” Kitty Oppenheimer deftly observes, while the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller wonders, “Could we have started the Atomic Age with clean hands?”

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory’s director, is a bundle of nerves. Idealistic Robert Wilson wants him to urge the government not to drop the bomb on Japan. Edward Teller is a mass of angry resentment. Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife Kitty competes with the bomb for his attention. And the government wants a resounding success for the billions it’s spent.

The real-life story certainly contains the elements of a good drama. So much that director Peter Sellars fashioned his libretto almost entirely out of historical documents–previously classified materials, letters, reports, and documented conversations. There is some poetry: Oppenheimer was a cultured man, fond of quoting verse. (He recited from the Bhagavad-Gita after the test bomb exploded, here set, perhaps predictably but surprisingly effectively, to Carmina Burana-like music.) Sellars gives Kitty Oppenheimer, for whom there wasn’t much documentary material available, the words of Muriel Rukeyser, a contemporary poet who was a Communist sympathizer, like the Oppenheimers themselves.

This attention to detail might seem admirable, particularly to those who dislike their art filled with historical inaccuracy. But it has not helped the opera’s success qua opera. Beauty, all-important to a work of art, here has been sacrificed to accuracy. The words actually spoken by the principals weren’t always mellifluous, after all, and so Adams often has a hard time getting a melody around the speech. But it may not entirely be Sellars’s fault; the composer has had this problem before.

Adams’s gifts lie elsewhere. He has a way with choruses, for instance, which frequently serve as the moral center of his works, their beauty belying the ambiguity that is often his subject. In Doctor Atomic, chorus members are often dressed as the workers who sing about the bomb’s possible consequences–“unimaginable devastation”–as they help to create it. Particularly moving is the rundown of possible targets for the bomb. The beautiful voices underscore that the name of each Japanese city stands for a multitude that would be destroyed.

But the central figure, of course, is Oppenheimer, and neither the composer nor the librettist disappoints here, either. Here is a man who quotes John Donne and Charles Baudelaire, but could be responsible for the destruction of the world. (In the case of Baudelaire, this might not be all that much of a paradox.) Of course, it helps that he is portrayed by Gerald Finley, a Canadian baritone whose star is swiftly (and deservedly) rising. Finley manages to make nuclear physics sound incredibly sensual.

“To what benevolent demon do I owe the joy of being thus surrounded?” he sings, looking longingly up at the bomb. And he can act.

The high point is Finley’s wrenching D-minor aria set to a John Donne sonnet–the one that inspired Oppenheimer to name the test site “Trinity”–that begins, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” The words, which tell of a man in conflict with his God and himself, echo the theme of Doctor Atomic as Doctor Faustus, whose quest for knowledge brought forth the Devil.

In between Finley’s dramatic reading of the words–That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new–Adams has written some bewitching music to represent the inevitably successful attraction of knowledge. Oppenheimer, like Teller and others, sees the creation of the bomb as a confirmation of the greatness of the human mind. Naive Robert Wilson doesn’t stand a chance.

The “Batter my heart” aria actually sounds like something written during the time of Donne. It’s not really like anything else in the opera. And therein lies the problem. John Adams has a great many influences. He learned from, rejected, and then went back and assimilated the serialist music he studied at Harvard. Then he became one the country’s foremost minimalists, along with Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Much of Adams’s vocal work draws on the oratorios of Bach. But he also integrates more recent forms, like jazz. He can channel Wagner, particularly in his use of the orchestra in passing judgment on events onstage.

But all these influences threaten to overwhelm. Adams’s work often suffers from a mishmash of styles, and Doctor Atomic is no exception. The composer simply hasn’t yet made opera a genre of his own, despite some very good attempts. And like his past operas, Doctor Atomic contains little that is memorable, beyond a moment here and there. It all makes for an interesting evening of theatre, but not much of it will remain with you, musically, afterward.

How does it rate as theatre? There’s no question that this opera has some effective moments. It’s not all doom and gloom, either. Adrianne Lobel’s mostly abstract sets changed color with the mood, from gloomy blue to electrifying red. Sellars wisely provided some relief now and then from the omnipresent bomb, which, in Act Two, literally hangs over all–including, not too subtly, the Oppenheimer’s baby crib.

Particularly funny are scenes involving General Leslie Groves. The hard work of bass Eric Owens always garnered audience laughs, as when he informed Jack Hubbard, “The test will proceed tomorrow with full weather compliance–or you will spend the rest of your life behind bars, Mister Meteorologist.” Hubbard was one of the standouts as performed by baritone James Maddalena, who created the roles of Nixon in Nixon in China and the Captain in The Death of Klinghoffer.

The ending may disappoint some, though: After two hours of build-up, some kind of grand release seems deserved. A cynic might say that Adams didn’t know how to write the sound of a bomb exploding. But the composer seems to have taken T.S. Eliot’s prediction to heart: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Adams is true to his minimalist roots and opts for understatement. The opera’s ending is powerful despite its near silence. The voice of a military official serenely describes the effects of fallout. Instead of crashing music of dread and thunder, we hear the barest sounds of percussion. Finally, the recorded voice of a Japanese survivor fills the room. Only a few people in the audience could understand what she was saying. But everyone could comprehend her despair.

Of course, wringing emotion out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be easy. Explaining how it happened is harder–particularly in a dramatic opera. It’s a genre, after all, that tends to the black and white; the real world does not. You don’t find too many flawlessly virtuous heroines in real life. Or thoroughly evil villains. But that is basically the model on which librettist Peter Sellars has forced the people and events of 1945.

Some–like Kitty Oppenheimer–just can’t bear the weight. The role of Kitty was written for the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, but estimably, if not powerfully (despite amplification), performed by Kristine Jepson when Lieberson withdrew due to a back injury. The wife and her maid give the opera its feminine foils, musically and stereotypically. While the men are out building bombs to blow things up, the women stay at home and sensitively worry about the consequences. While the men ignore the people of Japan, Kitty sees visions of the dead. Her theme of life–“Nothing can black that glow of life,” she sings–is odd for an alcoholic, as they’re usually self-destructive.

In Doctor Atomic she’s ambivalent, at best, toward her husband’s job; their real-life shared Communist sympathies, which must have been intertwined with his important work, go completely unexplored. The complexity of the real events is lost. But then, these flaws wouldn’t have served Sellars’s purpose. For it seems he certainly had one, and it wasn’t purely artistic. He’s practically announced it: Sellars teaches a class at UCLA entitled “Art as Moral Action.” Doctor Atomic seems like an attempt to make a point rather than a successful opera.

For all the controversy it engendered, The Death of Klinghoffer was remarkably even-handed. Of course, that balance was exactly why the opera upset so many. But it also gave the work its power. Librettist and poet Alice Goodman didn’t have any agenda other than to explore human nature, in all its varieties. Unfortunately, it seems Goodman and Adams had a falling-out after they worked together on Klinghoffer and Nixon in China. The composer turned to Sellars, who was stage director of those works, for his libretto, and in doing so, he let politics trump art.

“Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart,” Oppenheimer sighs just before the bomb goes off, for all intents and purposes the last line of the opera. And it’s true–wars and how to fight them are a vexingly difficult question. Unfortunately, Doctor Atomic doesn’t get at quite how difficult. But John Adams should be given credit for forging the way to a truly American operatic tradition.

The music isn’t quite there, and this time, the libretto certainly wasn’t. But he’s shown that American life can be just as big and symbolic as, say, that of a bunch of Bohemians living in Paris.

Kelly Jane Torrance is books columnist for American Enterprise Online, arts and culture editor of Brainwash, and fiction editor of Doublethink.