Its first scene is striking. Peter Sellars’ and John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, which made its New York début at the MET Monday night, sends its electronica pre-overture hurtling through the theatre speakers before two brief choruses, portentous and frenzied in turn, set an apt tone of nervous dread. We are in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in June 1945, where the brilliant American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley) is leading his team to test the world’s first atomic bomb. Other voices—notably Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink)—voice ambivalence: “Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands?” Oppenheimer waves him away.
It’s a long scene, and dramatically there’s little more to it than this. But two things keep you listening. The first attraction is the sheer documentary interest of the subject. It’s startling to recall that the Manhattan Project scientists were drafting a cease-and-desist petition to President Truman even as they labored; startling, too, to review (via designer Julian Crouch’s renderings) the maps of other Japanese cities which Truman (unopposed by Oppenheimer) was thinking of bombing.
The second attraction is Adams’ underscoring, which glitters and races and roars. His familiar ostinati remain, but here they seethe and mutate within a newly rich harmonic and timbral matrix. You’re aware, in this rapid, jaggedly pulsed scene, of occasionally artificial text setting—the orchestral process, not the actor’s needs, dictates the pulse of the speech. But this does scant damage to the overall effect. You’re absorbed.
But the second scene begins in the bedroom Oppenheimer shares with his wife Kitty (the fine Sasha Cooke.) This music iridesces. Not since Szymanowski have we heard such opulent ninths and elevenths; not since Saarijaho, such shimmering harps and gongs. The speech, though, veers sharply. Scene One spoke in blunt American prose: no attempt could be heard to compress, stylize, or otherwise shape that prose for music. In this bedroom scene, though, Kitty Oppenheimer sings language from Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Three Sides of a Coin,” which describes the very scene we’re seeing: a wife trying to distract her husband as he reads. Puzzlingly, though, the character narrates herself: she tells us what she’s doing even as she’s doing it.
Why? We know the practical answer. After Alice Goodman, Doctor Atomic’s original librettist, withdrew, director Peter Sellars chose to assemble a libretto himself from either primary sources (letters, the minutes of meetings) as in the first scene, or from poetry either familiar to, or descriptive of, the Oppenheimers, as in this scene. So Sellars’ Oppenheimer answers Kitty’s lovely, if inconclusive, Rukeyser poem with a translation of a Baudelaire ode to his beloved’s hair. Both his music and his text are lovely, too—the lines surge, and the images are Romantic and picturesque. True, they’re hardly specific to this man, this room: the aria sounds like it could fit nicely into a late draft of Pelléas et Mélisande. Also, so far (we’re about thirty minutes into the opera now) no musical choice sounds vocally driven: it sounds like Adams is writing orchestral paragraphs of a general emotional character (panting anxiety for the lab, sighing languor for the bedroom) and layering sensitive, if undifferentiated, vocal writing atop them.
Still, you’re with it: albeit eager to hear these characters in an urgent and convincing diction of their own. But when, after his Baudelaire solo, Oppenheimer leaves, Sellars spurs Kitty, alone, to quote Rukeyser again. This poem begins with the line “The motive of it all was loneliness”—hinting that she’s speaking about her marriage. But the poem also tours through “motives made superhuman,” “Plato’s rings,” and “Lenin’s cry of ‘dare we win?’” before concluding with “Love must imagine the world.”
It’s at this point that you realize that Doctor Atomic will be quoted, not dramatized: and that these two scenes will echo throughout—indeed, define—the evening. Its piquant data notwithstanding, formally Scene One announces yet another new American opera composed in prose recitative over ostinati. Scene Two proposes a contrasting method of dramatic composition that sounds like exactly what it is: forcing three orchestral song-settings of sharply different (and often ancient and exotic) verbal and musical accent to serve as characterization within Scene One’s naturalistic opera. And the rest of Doctor Atomic, alas, simply alternates between increasingly busy and lengthy variations on these two scenes.
So, in Scene Three, again the scientists wring their hands, in the desert-flat prose of the first scene. Will the electrical storm over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains set the bomb off prematurely? Do we know enough of the damage the radioactive fallout will cause? As the novelty of the milieu wears off, you notice in the writing how, while the worries change, the worrying doesn’t. We are running in place. More music of anxiety seethes in the orchestra. Now alone, Oppenheimer suffers a moment of moral crisis. Will he explore his actions and motivations: his curious callousness towards his potential Japanese targets, his stifling of his team members’ dissent in the first scene? No, not now (nor later, either): he’ll sing a somewhat Purcellian setting of John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” the antique Englishness of which is everywhere distracting and the content of which pertains only vaguely to the situation at hand. He’s the heart of the piece: we want to hear from Oppenheimer. Instead, we hear writers writing: or, more specifically, writers presenting research for a music-drama as a music-drama itself.
Talking to Alex Ross about this piece at its première, Sellars remarked, “…the nightmare of all art, as well as of all politics, is generalities. You cannot generalize. You’ve got to keep things as specific to the minute, as down to the wire, as possible.” Agreed: which is why it’s bewildering that Doctor Atomic is specific only about its trivialities. We hear from General Lesley Groves (Eric Owens) about his straying from his diet with this or that brownie: but no word from, say, Harry Truman? A junior scientist remembering Pearl Harbour? A German-born American with Nazi relatives? Including their voices would have been no less arbitrary than having Oppenheimer sing Baudelaire: and wouldn’t those specific voices have been at least as germane to this drama? In Act Two, Kitty, Martini in hand, sings “Easter Eve, 1945,” a particularly dense and oracular Rukeyser poem, which includes the following lines:
“Whatever world I know shines ritual death,
wide under this moon they stand gathering fire,
fighting with flame, stand fighting in their graves.
All shining with life as the leaf, as the wing shines,
the stone deep in the mountain, the drop in the green wave.
Lit by their energies, secretly, all things shine.
Nothing can black that glow of life.”
As poetry, this is beautiful, though these irregular lines are no friend to melodic paragraph. But as monologue—and such it is—it seems a coldly easy observation for this character to make, an ocean away from trembling Nagasaki. How does she come by her optimism? Would it withstand the Project team’s fear that the explosion will ignite the atmosphere?
A dramatic libretto would have opposed Kitty to, say, James Nolan (the captain who fears what he doesn’t know about fallout) in the same room and let them thrash out their conflicting views. But, in place of drama, Doctor Atomic offers footnote and collage. Now a Tewa nursemaid (Meredith Arwady), mute in Act One, is awarded a solo moment in Act Two. Here’s someone we want to hear from: and surely Adams and Sellars will resist the Orientalist temptation to portray this lone Native American figure as yet another emblematic earth-mother. What specifics, then, do Sellars and Adams give Pasqualita with which to express her unique perspective? A four-line lullaby about rain, in—yes—Erda’s contralto register. I accept that all these choices are historically informed: Pasqualita’s rainsong is authentic Tewa lullaby, Rukeyser may have been acquainted with the Oppenheimers, and Groves’s diet worries are amply documented. But a libretto is not a program note. Pasqualita’s lullaby boasts impeccable historical pedigree. But what does it tell us dramatically? If this is characterization, what on earth is stereotype?
And so it goes: we continue Act Two of this drama without character. Back at the test site, physicists fret. The test is delayed. Now the chorus of scientists gets its own tangentially relevant poem, bursting in with a trumpet-bright number from the Bhagavad-Gita about Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds: hinting, lest we missed it, that a nuclear bomb might well prove destructive; which prospect fills them with, well, dread. (Better, apparently, that we be reminded that Oppenheimer knew the Upanishads than to hear directly from these unique young people in their unprecedented dilemma.) At last, the young scientist Robert Wilson (Thomas Glenn) confides in us of the recurrent nightmare he suffers of “falling…falling” as he works on this project; but this personal moment ends as soon as it’s begun. Now begins the countdown: as it ticks to its last seconds, the music thins out to brief signals on the vibraphone as the recorded voice of a Japanese woman asking for water loops into silence. I don’t question this understated ending: as Anthony Tommassini wrote in his New York Times review of the world première, ”we know what happens next.” I do question, though, whether this opera, composed to so limited, arbitrary, and impersonal a design, has done enough to convince us of its version of what happened before.
Obviously Sellars and Adams have worked together long and fruitfully, and collegiality should count for something; but if, as a composer, I were presented with this libretto, I’d have torn it to shreds. Nothing is shaped: nothing develops; so there’s nothing to compose into. For all its moment-to-moment sparkle and range, the score functions in very limited ways: either as extended scare-tremolandi for the foreboding prose scenes, or as tastefully chosen frames for Sellars’ gallery of poetic sources; opalescent neo-Impressionism for the Baudelaire, severe D-minor and Scotch-snaps in the vocal line for the Donne, Rite of Spring primitivism for the Bhagavad-Gita. After a certain point, Adams disregards even basic expressive response to the text: Groves’s diet speech is appointed with the same pensiveness with which, earlier in the scene, Adams sets a captain’s broodings about the potential toxic effects of fallout. I sympathize with his problem: how many variations can you spin from a single ominous mood? But the composer should have demanded more from his librettist. Adams, in his interviews, describes Doctor Atomic as, in part, about “the guilt of being the only country in the world ever to have actually detonated an atomic bomb.” A fascinating topic: but one utterly unexamined here, as Adams apparently agreed with Sellars to end the piece before the explosion. Based on this draft, Sellars seemed more committed to an anti-dramatic method of creating a text than to exploring the story and the issues that, presumably, spurred the creation of the text to begin with. Didn’t Adams hear what was missing? If he did, didn’t he care?
The premise of Doctor Atomic is spine-tinglingly evocative. The basic materials (if not the shapes—honestly, Adams has never been much of an architect) of the music are versatile, expressive, and attractive. But the book is the work of a writer who hasn’t the first idea of how to build a drama and should have had the humility to admit as much. (Surely Alice Goodman was not the only living librettist that year. Did Tony Kushner refuse Sellars’ calls?) Penny Woolcock’s new production—stacked cubes of booths, on which motile projections shimmer and glow—is pretty and clear, and I had no problems either with her leadership of the cast or with Alan Gilbert’s pacing of the orchestra (although, one concedes with regret, Donald Palumbo’s chorus sounded uncharacteristically woollen for 2008.) But as written, Doctor Atomic is approximate where it should be precise, airily literary where it should be riskily personal: for musical characterization it substitutes remembered manners, and for political confrontation it offers chocolate cake. Everyone involved in this production—and, for that matter, in the press—is taking this piece seriously, as befitting an important première. How disappointing, then, that the first American opera on so complex and incendiary a subject should prove so obvious, so evasive, and thus—of all things—so safe.
Update, October 19: the conversation continues here.