BBC Radio 4 Front Row

17 February 2009

Mark Lawson talks to Gerald Finley, Penny Woolcock and John Adams about Doctor Atomic

ML: The American composer John Adams has made opera newsworthy again by making operas from the news: First Nixon in Chinaand then the Death of Klinghoffer. After presidential diplomacy and Middle Eastern hostage taking, the third of Adams’s so called Docu-operas was Doctor Atomic, dramatising the creation of the nuclear bomb in Los Alamosin 1945 by scientists led by J Robert Oppenheimer. English National Opera stage the British premiere next week in a production that began at the New YorkMetropolitan Opera last October. The story of this terrible scientific gamble was in many ways a high risk project, as I discovered when talking to the creative team. Beginning with John Adams on why he was inspired by this historical headline.

JA: Well obviously the atomic bomb was a major psychological event for anyone living in the 50s and 60s, and it should be, even as we speak. You know, I live in Berkeley California which is the home of the University of California, where Teller and Oppenheimer taught, and where many Nobel Prize winners live and some are friends of mine, and the idea of creating a work of art that was essentially about science and about scientific invention was something very appealing to me. And of course when word got out that I was composing this opera, a lot of my science friends invited me to dinner, because they wanted to, you know, introduce me to somebody who knew Oppenheimer… of course when I go to these dinners these physicists only want to talk about music [laughs].

ML: In that connection a lot of artistic people are hopeless at science. It’s a famous divide in the schoolroom. To what extent did you understand the science?

JA: Well, I understand it on a very abstract level, I mean, I have the same limited mathematical and physics abilities that most musicians do…

ML: And in some ways it was the, in terms of atmosphere, is the opposite of Nixon in China, because in Nixon in China they’re big public figures appearing in public with Anthems and so on, and Doctor Atomic is something happening in private, people hiding away from the light almost

JA: It is. I mean the event, you know, of making this bomb happened in a very remote isolated spot, I mean, the New Mexico desert, it was almost like a concentration camp. Secrecy was of the highest order, that’s one of the main themes in this opera, the scientists really want this knowledge to be shared, so yes you’re right, I’d practically never thought about that until right now, it is an opera about the toxic results of paranoia and secrecy

ML: Although the composer was skimpy on the physics, he took the precaution of casting in the lead part one of the few opera singers who would probably be capable of splitting the atom during breaks in rehearsal. Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley

GF: Well I’m fortunate enough to have had a concentrated scientific training in my secondary school back in Canada. I was actually going to be a biochemist at university before the great call of music sort of took hold, so that has always been an excitement for me to have been able to link my initial excitement of perhaps being a scientist to now being able to portray someone of extreme intelligence and cultural depth

ML: Although the main singer was schooled in nuclear physics, Adamsgambled on a producer who is a novice to opera. TV documentary director Penny Woolcock had made a film version of the composer’s The Death of Klinghoffer. When Peter Sellars, who had staged the San FranciscoandAmsterdamproductions of Doctor Atomic, fell out with the New YorkMet over their revival, Woolcock was hired to make her stage directing debut

PW: I think in a way when you do something for the first time, ignorance is bliss to some extent, so I think if I’d really understood how daunting it was I would have been much more terrified. But I had a fantastic support team, and I’d taken about 8 month off to prepare for it as I didn’t want people turning around and saying “she doesn’t know what she’s doing”

ML: The divisions of labour in opera productions can be a difficult area, did you just stay entirely out of the musical aspect of it?

PW: It’s a collaboration really, and I have very strong views about what I find lovely to listen to and affecting, but I’m not… I mean I don’t know if the singers are singing it at exactly the right pitch or whether they are a bar late, or anything like that so the conductor deals with that side of it, but I might say to someone that I think they sound strained, and that there should be a different colour to the voice and then Lawrence [Renes] will help me to find it, so we work together really

ML: Another risk that Adamstook was not to commission a libretto – the texts of Nixon in Chinaand Klinghoffer had been written by the poet Alice Goodman. But for Doctor Atomic he used factual documents and also drew from Oppenheimer’s known love of poetry. At the moment of blistering impact, act 1 ends with Oppenheimer at the moment of the bomb’s creation, exploring his moral doubts in a setting of John Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three person’d God”.

GF: When I first saw the music and played through it, and sang through it, it was clear it was an extremely powerful bit of vocal writing, particularly in the context of where one is in the opera there’s so much excitement, so much tension, so much driving towards the end of the test and suddenly Oppenheimer has this chance to be isolated from all the chaos, be alone with the bomb on stage, and really confront his own, well… moral decision really, about what’s going on, and the Trinity sonnet is slightly apocryphal as to whether he chose the name of the test site “Trinity” from this sonnet, but what is clear that this poem was offered to him by Jean Tatlock, who was one of his… the loves of his life, so it’s got a very deep, personal meaning for him.

PW: At that moment after all this frantic activity and arguments about the weather in which General Groves is threatening to hang the meteorologist if he doesn’t predict that the storm will end, you know, there’s this absolutely beautiful moment. Every time I hear Gerry sing it, it makes me cry.

ML: It’s interesting in terms of tension, this opera I think, because we know what they’re doing, and we know what’s gonna happen, and we know the world isn’t going to end, but oddly it’s as if it is. I feel there was an astonishing tension in that theatre in New Yorkwatching it

PW: Almost all of the opera, apart from a love scene with Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, is in the hours before the actual test, and so John’s music on the one hand is ravishingly beautiful and very lyrical which you might expect, and other times he sort of cranks up the tension in an almost unbearable way

ML: If Finley were an actor playing the scientist in a film he’d be judged by the extent to which he achieved an impersonation of the historical figure, but I suggested for him musical expression must come before physical impression

GF: As far as physical similarities I’m… that was one of my great hesitations about taking the role. I’m not a smoker at all, I don’t in any way attempt to emulate that, On the stage of course one wants to give really an enthusiasm and the excitement of being a theoretical physicist at the time. His ability in the extreme circumstance to unify these very clever minds and focus on this very very complex industrial and scientific project. The singing is very much trying to reveal the inner soul of Oppenheimer, and I think in an operatic rendition that’s the only way forward.

ML: Gerald Finley, Penny Woolcock and John Adams were discussing Doctor Atomic which starts performances in Londonat the Coliseum on February 25th