John Adams: DOCTOR ATOMIC at English National Opera, 25 February 2009
EDWARD TELLER, physicist.............Brindley Sherratt
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER................Gerald Finley
Physicist and director of the Manhattan Project
ROBERT WILSON, physicist.............Thomas Glenn
KITTY OPPENHEIMER.................Sasha Cooke
Robert Oppenheimer's wife
GENERAL LESLIE GROVES............Jonathan Veira
FRANK HUBBARD....................Roderick Earle
Chief meteorologist for the Trinity test site
CAPTAIN JAMES NOLAN..............Lee David Bowen*
Army Medical Corps, in charge of the hospital at Los Alamos
PASQUALITA......................Meredith Arwady
The Oppenheimers' Native American maid
(*Lee David Bowen standing in for Christopher Gillett, who was indisposed),
Scientists, technicians, secretaries and military personnel working on the atomic bomb.
Orchestra and Chorus of English National Opera, conducted by LAWRENCE RENES
Co-production with Metropolitan Opera, New York.
I consider myself very fortunate to have been present at the UK premiere of this work by John Adams.
Before the opera starts, the scrim in front of the stage shows the Periodic Table, from which four elements are missing. These are the ones that were used to create the atomic bomb. (The person sitting next to me tried to explain which they were, but he had forgotten!! Plutonium was one, obviously..............) Then as the opera begins, the stage is occupied by stacked cubicles in which the secretaries and military personnel are sitting, while in front of the stage Edward Teller reads out a letter from Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard asking him to circulate a petition against dropping the bomb on Japan. Oppenheimer responds to this by arguing that scientists should stay out of politics - while the audience is left to reflect that by getting involved in the Manhattan project in the first place, the scientists were getting very deeply involved in politics. This is obviously one of the questions Adams (and Peter Sellars, the librettist and the original producer) want the audience to consider - what is the responsibility of scientists?
The scene is thus set, musically and dramatically. The text in this scene consists of continuous recitative, which blends well with the music, at times almost approaching the Wagnerian ideal of symphonisches Gewebe. Adams is also fortunate this time in not being hampered by an embarrassingly bad libretto; the text is based on documents from the Manhattan project and other contemporary records, interspersed with quotes from Baudelaire, Bhagavad Gita and, as probably everyone already knows, a sonnet by John Donne - of which more in due course.
The second scene takes place in the Oppenheimers' bedroom _ Kitty sings a lyrical, plangent lament about love and loneliness, with the repeated question "Am I in your light?" and tries to seduce her husband, who sits on the bed, reading and chain-smoking. Then he starts to respond by quoting Baudelaire's poem La chevelure, in which the poet wants to lose himself in the dark tresses of his beloved, the perfumes of which implies the mysteries of far-off, exotic coasts - set by Adams to a beautiful lyric melody. But in the end she is left alone, as he returns to his work.....
In short, the music oscillates between passages of lyricism and the minimalism which has been Adams' trade-mark for so long.
Scene 3 takes place on 15 July 1945, the night before the test. There is a fierce storm, and the meteorologist reminds General Groves that these storms had been predicted several months previously. The General.....blames the meteorologist!! And says he will imprison or even hang him if the weather does not improve. We are assured this is based on historical records, but this sounds more like the behaviour of a crazed Roman emperor or barbarian war-lord; he will kill the sorcerers if they don't predict a good outcome of the battle! It is at the end of this scene that Oppenheimer recites the Donne sonnet "batter my heart, three-personed God".
Oppenheimer was a great enthusiast for Donne and Baudelaire, and obviously Adams and Sellars wanted to weave this into the drama. This is Holy Sonnet XIV, and it was this which inspired Oppenheimer to name the New Mexico test site 'Trinity'. But possibly in the context of the atomic bomb project, the lines "yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain/But am betrothed unto your enemy" have a Faustian reference – not of interest to Donne, of course, but Adams specifically conceived of Oppenheimer as a Faustian figure (the title is a reference to Thomas Mann's DOKTOR FAUSTUS), and the idea of being 'betrothed' to Satan may imply the idea of a Faustian pact.
Act II opens with a scene for Kitty, her Native American maid, and her baby. (Apparently Native Americans from the local area were recruited to work as maids/servants/cooks for the personnel at the base). It is the maid, Pasquita, who finally soothes the baby singing a Native American melody;there is obviously an attempt to balance what is seen as the Native American respect for Nature with the attempt of the American military to wrench her last secrets from her, at whatever cost (even to themselves).
The rest of the act consists of the build-up towards the test - the bomb (known up till this time as the Gadget) is seen hanging from the roof, an enormous silver sphere.
Just before the detonation, the chorus sing an excerpt from the Bhagavad Gita, (in the translation by Christopher Isherwood) which expresses fear of the dreadful forces that are about to be unleashed:
At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous,
Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies,
Terrible with fangs, o Master,
All the worlds are fear-struck, even just as I am.
As the tension mounts in the final moments, so do the off-stage sound effects, until the rumbling, earthquake-like sound almost, but not quite, drowns out the orchestra, who play a few bleak chords on the strings. Before this point, some very Fafner-like motifs could be heard coiling round the lower reaches of the orchestra. And the noise continues to increase in volume until some members of the audience were covering their ears, and the light – "brighter than a thousand suns" – started to cover the stage.
The work ends with the sound of a Japanese woman begging for water.
An ideal cast had been assembled for this premiere - Gerald Finley ideal as the tormented genius Oppenheimer; he was in fact the singer who created the role at the Metropolitan Opera. I have singled him out since he is the main character (not 'hero', I think!) but the entire cast was superb, evidently they loved this work and gave their all.
I was particular happy to discover that Adams was actually present: he came on to the stage at the end, and was greeted with well-deserved thunderous applause.
Dr. Jane Susanna ENNIS
http://members.fortunecity.co.uk/leonora/opera.html
Click on the photo of John Adams to visit his webpage.
