He’s the bomb

Interview for the Globe and Mail (Elizabeth Renzetti) 12 March 2009

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090312.AFINLEY12/TPStory/?query=gerald+finley

Gerald Finley is knocking ‘em dead in London in the incredibly demanding role of J. Robert Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic. He tells Elizabeth Renzetti he’d like to add to his ‘baddie repertoire’ back home in Canada

It is the British premiere of John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic, and the London Coliseum is filled with the urgent, amplified sound of clocks ticking, out of sync. On stage, the scientists of the Manhattan Project slowly sink to their knees, covering their eyes with goggles that will, they hope, protect them from the effects of the world’s first atomic bomb.

None of them knows what will happen when they detonate “the gadget” in the New Mexico desert. Will it cause a chain reaction that sets the Earth’s atmosphere on fire? Will they all be incinerated, or die of radiation poisoning? At the centre of the group is their leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who has been neither eating nor sleeping properly, and whose certainty about the project has been eroded to the point where his superiors in the U.S. military worry for his mental health.

He is the Doctor Atomic of the title, and his fears, drawn from the Hindu holy book Bhagavad Gita, have just been powerfully sung by the chorus: “At the sight of this, your shape stupendous … terrible with fangs, O master, all the worlds are fear-struck, even as I am.”

The scientists quail as a roll of electronic thunder fills the auditorium, followed by a searing flash of white light; and the nuclear age begins.

Since the end of the Second World War, the world has lived in the shadow of the calculations, miscalculations and agonizing of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. That’s certainly true of Gerald Finley, the Canadian baritone who originated the role of Oppenheimer four years ago and has now brought his highly praised performance to London.

When Finley was a child in Ottawa, there was an air-raid siren at the end of his street. All it took was a thunderstorm to set it off. “When you heard it,” says Finley, “you’d think, ‘Well, that’s it. We’re done.’ ” Sometimes his primary school would hold duck-and-cover drills, although, like most kids who lived through the Cold War (John Adams included), he doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects.

In fact, Finley seems remarkably hearty, given that he’s in the middle of a punishing schedule – the equivalent, for an opera singer, of running competitive 400-yard-dashes for a month. While rehearsing Doctor Atomic with the English National Opera – the most difficult role in his repertoire – he’s also been singing a scene-stealing part in Erich Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt at the Royal Opera House.

He’s not complaining, of course; not many singers can say that John Adams, opera’s great chronicler of modern history (he also composed Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer) has written a part just for them. Even if that part sometimes feels like the nightly equivalent of a triathlon.

“John Adams does not stint on the vocal demands, or indeed the musical demands. Everyone in this piece is stretched, in a good way,” says Finley, who is singing at the top of his range as Oppenheimer. “The role is really demanding because it goes from absolute top to absolute bottom. He’s on the entire first act, and he’s very tense. I put everything into it, and I’m wrung out by the end.”

Finley’s got a cigarette in his hand for most of the time he’s on stage – a prop cigarette, which, thanks to the “magic of theatre” he doesn’t have to actually smoke. The beautifully dressed scientists of Doctor Atomic nervously puff away and swig cocktails; they’re like the cast of Mad Men, except with the fate of the world in their hands. Finley, who has a science background himself, was drawn to Oppenheimer because of the scientist’s ambiguities: He forged ahead despite his colleagues’ concerns about the bomb, but at the same time he loved nature and Baudelaire, and learned Sanskrit in order to read the Bhagavad Gita.

During the first production at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, Finley was making small compromises with the rigorous score, but now is singing “virtually what John Adams wrote.” The effort has paid off: While reviews for the London production have been mixed, there’s been universal praise for Finley’s performance, especially his singing of Batter My Heart, the stunning aria that ends the first act. The librettist Peter Sellars chose John Donne’s sonnet Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God as a way to magnify Oppenheimer’s anguish and conflict, and it works to chilling effect as the physicist, on the verge of altering history, falls to his knees and beseeches an unseen creator: “Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain/But am betrothed unto your enemy.” This, one critic said, “is the first great operatic aria of the 21st century.”

“Yes,” says Finley with a smile, “I’m ready for a rest after the first act.” He’s talking in the wonderfully named Royal Retiring Room at the Coliseum, before that afternoon’s rehearsal. A tall, boyish-looking 49-year-old, Finley has an opera singer’s careful diction, which means “water” is pronounced with a “t” in the middle rather than its normal Canadian inflection (“wadder.”) He’s a Londoner now, and raises two teenaged boys in the city where he received training nearby at Glyndebourne and at the National Opera Chorus, and where a singer can maintain an international profile. He is, however, Canadian at the core: He vacations at home every summer and he’s proud of the musical training he received growing up in Ottawa, first as a choir boy and later, during the “golden age of choral music” as part of the Ontario Youth Choir and the National Arts Centre Chorus.

Hard to believe now, but for a long time Finley wasn’t settled on music as a career – in fact, he’d planned to pursue science after winning a scholarship to study chemistry at the University of Toronto. “I’d never thought of it until now,” he says, “but it was Trinity College.” Trinity was the name the Oppenheimer gave to that first bomb test, held on July 16, 1945.

A few years training in England made Finley realize he could have a career in music – a career that now has him performing in opera houses around the world and has just netted him a Juno nomination for his 2008 CD, Schumann: Dichterliebe & Other Heine Settings.

Now he’s keen to sing a full operatic role in Canada, which has proved unfeasible until now because his schedule was locked up so far in advance. He’s talking to Alexander Neef of the Canadian Opera Company, and what he’d really like is to combine homecoming with a desire to sing some of the darker roles in his range (both vocally and dramatically), from Iago to Scarpia. “I’m looking forward to adding to my baddie repertoire,” he says. “That’s one way for Canadian opera to get me back.”