I am receiving an unexpected cataract of responses to my Doctor Atomic post: mostly passionate, mostly smart (thank you, Nico) —but there are others. Some applauded me for “eviscerating” the “pretentious” “attitudinizing” of the opera’s creative team: congratulated for “not drinking the Kool-Aid,” for “noting the chasm between intention and accomplishment” and so on.
Ouch. This is the first post to have made so scaldingly clear to me the internal tensions of this journal. I don’t presume to claim John Adams as a colleague; he loomed into national view at about the time I entered conservatory, and he’s composed six stage scores to my two. Still: as American artists evolving ways to sing the myths by which we live, Mr. A. and I are, in fact, trying to split the same atom. Even though new opera is this journal’s raison d’être, should I be writing about him at all? (The grinning ghost of Virgil Thomson—fluent stylist, toxic colleague—tips his translucent fedora.)
I asked myself this before I wrote, and decided yes, for three reasons. Firstly, this is a personal site, independent of journalistic politics; the audience self-selects. Secondly, the working creator’s perspective is rarely heard in our talk about new opera, and can add new and interesting questions to the dialogue. (I think it’s safe to assume that Anthony Tommassini and I approach new work from very different vantage points.) And thirdly, since I am working, gratia Deo—two operas complete, two more in process—I can be confident of my own motives. I write critically as well as, not instead of, offering my own pieces as evidence of what I believe.
So, succinctly: I mean to “eviscerate” no one; which is not to say that I back off one inch from my questions about how Doctor Atomic was made. It is to say that I mean my criticisms as a contribution to the conversation. Doctor Atomic is a serious piece. Locally, it offers to reframe how we see the atom bomb and its discontents. And generally—if you accept the way it was scripted as an artistic, rather than an ameliorative, choice—then Doctor Atomic offers to reframe how opera relates to drama. (Joseph Kerman, check your e-mail!)
I retain tough questions to ask of Doctor Atomic’s creators. I question whether, in making a libretto that is not so much seamless as all seams, its librettist is posing an early-twentieth-century Russian answer (Meyerhold’s defamiliarizations) to an early twenty-first-century Anglophone problem, with predictably non sequitur results. (Approaching the second century of camera- and microphone-driven mass culture, new opera in English needs to be defamiliarized about as urgently as Noh drama does.) And I question whether its composer left too much responsibility for the overall shape of piece to his collaborator. (If your librettist is making most of your structural decisions, then you’re not working as an opera composer, you’re working as a film composer.)
My other questions are here: but none aim to deflate anyone’s “pretentions.” (“Pretention” is just the word we use for ambition in an artist we don’t like.) Art matters. So do artists. This journal assumes every artist does the best s/he can by the light s/he has to see by. I invite my readers to assume the same.