Doctor Atomic

Photo: Nick Heavican

“Gerald Finley’s Oppenheimer — ruthless in attack, pellucid in delivery — remains one of the truly great opera-house performances of the past decade.” Opera News

“Finley supplies a fundamental warmth of tone, piercingly precise diction, and an array of mercurial inflections…”New Yorker

“The impressive baritone Gerald Finley, who created the daunting lead role unforgettably, brings his portrayal to the Met, grown even richer, more vocally visceral and emotionally nuanced…” New York Times

“…magnificently sung by Gerald Finley” Newsweek

“…he sings with the mellow baritone of a man about to stride into legend.”New York Magazine

Composer John Adams Librettist Peter Sellars Venue and Dates Metropolitan Opera, New York

13, 18, 21, 25, 30 October, 1, 5, 8, 13 November 2008 Conductor Alan Gilbert Production Revised production

Director: Penny Woolcock

Sets: Julian Crouch

Costumes: Catherine Zuber

Lighting: Brian MacDevitt

Choreographer: Andrew Dawson Performers J. Robert Oppenheimer: Gerald Finley

Kitty Oppenheimer: Sasha Cooke

General Leslie Groves: Eric Owens

Edward Teller: Richard Paul Fink

Jack Hubbard: Earle Patriarco

Robert Wilson: Thomas Glenn

Captain James Nolan: Roger Honeywell

Pasqualita: Meredith Arwady Notes Met premiere for the opera. Co-production with English National Opera

The 8 November performance was broadcast live around the world

Photo Gallery

What the critics say

Ronald Blum, Associated Press, 14 October 2008

(printed in many newspapers)

A-bomb is a hit: Adams’ `Doctor Atomic’ given new production for Metropolitan Opera premiere

John Adams’ intense and fascinating “Doctor Atomic,” given its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera three years ago, made it to the Met on Monday night. Rather than use Peter Sellars’ original production, which also was seen in Chicago and Amsterdam, the Met created a new staging, a rarity for a work this new [?], by Penny Woolcock.

She has done away with Lucinda Childs’ hyperkinetic choreography and created a far more direct and effective narrative. Driven by propulsive music, the first act moves swiftly. And while the second drags during its hallucinatory middle, the countdown to detonation and destruction is tense and tantalizing.

Adams, who also composed “Nixon in China” (1987) and “The Death of Klinghoffer” (1991), has created one of the more successful contemporary operas. Still, modern music is a tough sell, and orchestra seats that usually go for $175-$220 were discounted to $30 following a $500,000 donation by a Met board member. It’s the bargain of the season.

Stripped of the running, leaping and pirouetting, the focus of “Doctor Atomic” becomes sharper. The contempt and sneering of Gen. Leslie Groves at the cigarette- and cigar-puffing Los Alamos scientists hisses like steam. The moral second-guessing by Edward Teller and Robert Wilson floats like a cloud over the cool, analytic fatalism of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kitty Oppenheimer’s opening aria, “Am I in your light?” becomes a dreamy counterpoint.

Before the curtain rises in Woolcock’s production, a periodic table of elements is projected on a scrim and loud electronic sounds are played, as if bombers are overhead. After the music starts, photos of the Manhattan Project team are projected in three rows of 14 rectangles each onto a wooden set designed by Julian Crouch. The people behind the photos are revealed.

What appears to be white sheets form New Mexico’s Oscura Mountains. Mobiles of debris hang above the stage. Rain and other visions by Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer are projected.

The Bomb, referred to as “The Gadget”, looks pretty much as it did in the first production, a sphere based on photographs of the original test bomb that was detonated on July 16, 1945. When booming recorded music fades at the end, the voice of a woman at Hiroshima begging for help and water in Japanese is heard.

Sellars’ libretto is based on memoirs, interviews and histories; texts of works by John Donne, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Baudelaire; the Bhagavad Gita; and Songs of the Tewa. Curiously, for a libretto dealing with science and numbers, the weight-conscious Groves reads from his diet diary and claims three pieces of chocolate cake totaled 300 calories and two brownies 200. Indeed, kilotons aren’t the only figures that have inflated through the years.

Adams has created a score filled with color, syncopation and lush interludes. The most moving aria is Oppenheimer’s at the end of the first act: “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” with a text from Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV interrupted by urgent, frantic music portending doom. Oppenheimer named the test site Trinity because of that sonnet.

The primary misstep to this ear was the overuse of Pasqualita, the Oppenheimers’ Native American maid, in the more abstract passages of the second act. Her visions sounded like ruminations from a Great Mother Goddess and tended to slow the pace.

Many of the singers reprised their roles from the original production, including baritone Gerald Finley (Oppenheimer), bass-baritone Richard Paul Fink (Teller), bass-baritone Eric Owens (Groves) and tenor Thomas Glenn (Wilson). They were joined by mezzos Sasha Cooke (Kitty) and Meredith Arwady (Pasqualita) and baritone Earle Patriarco (meteorologist Frank Hubbard). After watching the excellent Opus Arte DVD of Sellars’ production recorded in 2007 and the Met’s opening-night performance, it became clear that the primary singers’ interpretations have deepened considerably.

Finley, Fink and Owens managed their soaring vocal lines magnificently. Cooke was a bit screechy as the alcoholic Kitty. Arwady was moving.

The chorus sang with beauty even after being forced into twisted and sometimes upside-down positions in the rectangles. Alan Gilbert, who takes over as music director of the New York Philharmonic next season, conducted with vigor and drama in his Met debut.

The staging, a co-production that travels to the English National Opera in February, has eight more performances through Nov. 13, and the Nov. 8 matinee will be televised to movie theaters around the world in high definition. “Doctor Atomic” is proof that contemporary opera can be a fulfilling experience.

Anthony Tommasini, 14 October 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/arts/music/15atom.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=arts

Faust Unleashing a Destroyer of Worlds

After the premiere of John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic” at the San Francisco Opera in October 2005, the original staging by the director Peter Sellars made its way to the other two companies that produced the work: the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Most composers would consider that a terrific send-off for a new opera.

Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, wanted to bring “Doctor Atomic” to New York. But he was unimpressed by the Sellars productions. So on Monday night the Met presented its own staging of “Doctor Atomic” by the British film director Penny Woolcock, in her Met debut.

It is rare for an opera composer to have a second production of a new piece so soon. The situation was complicated, because Mr. Sellars was closely involved in the creative process that produced this ambitious, haunting work about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who presided over the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb.

Mr. Sellars wrote or, more accurately, assembled the libretto for the opera, fashioning passages from interviews with project participants, history books, conversation transcripts, memoirs, declassified security documents and poetry, notably “The Holy Sonnets” of John Donne. Though Mr. Sellars’s production might not have been his most inspired work, it was vivid, fluid and effective.

When Mr. Gelb hired Ms. Woolcock, she had never worked as a stage director. Her production mixes metaphorical imagery and poignantly human interactions in dramatically involving ways. Seldom has the Met made such elaborate use of videos and electronic sound resources. Presenting a new production was an expensive move for the Met. Whether Ms. Woolcock’s staging represents an improvement over Mr. Sellars’s work is open to question.

The impressive baritone Gerald Finley, who created the daunting lead role unforgettably, brings his portrayal to the Met, grown even richer, more vocally visceral and emotionally nuanced, especially during Oppenheimer’s climactic Act I aria, a setting of Donne’s “Batter My Heart.” Here is this brilliant, arrogant character’s only moment of doubt, anguish and despair.

But the big news may be the work of the conductor Alan Gilbert, in his overdue Met debut. The performance he draws from the Met orchestra and chorus is a revelation. This score continues to impress me as Mr. Adams’s most complex and masterly music. Whole stretches of the orchestral writing tremble with grainy colors, misty sonorities and textural density. Mr. Gilbert exposes the inner details and layered elements of the music: obsessive riffs, pungently dissonant cluster chords, elegiac solo instrumental lines that achingly drift atop nervous, jittery orchestral figurations.

Yet in bringing out the intricacies, he never impedes the music’s organic shape and forward thrust. The tension mounts as Mr. Adams builds up a din of pummeling rhythms and fractured meters, with orchestra chords exploding into shards of harmonic debris: call it Atomic Minimalism.

The central component of Ms. Woolcock’s production, with set designs by Julian Crouch, is a large, movable wall in two sections, each divided into rows of cubicles. When the opera begins at Los Alamos in 1945, we see the scientists, military personnel and major characters of the story holed up inside their individual cubicles, like a human spice rack.

But soon Oppenheimer and his imperious colleague Edward Teller, the bass-baritone Richard Paul Fink (who created this role in the original production), move to the front rim of the stage, where they hover over scientific reports and confront the harrowing implications of the project. The Oppenheimer of “Doctor Atomic” is a 20th-century Faustian figure who understands that he could be unleashing unimaginable forces within the world and even more ominous forces within mankind.

By relying on the metaphorical cubicles during the crucial opening scenes of the opera, Ms. Woolcock constricts some pivotal characters, especially Robert Wilson, the idealistic young physicist, portrayed here by the sweet-voiced tenor Thomas Glenn. Troubled by the unknowns and implications of the experiment, Wilson has called together meetings of concerned scientists. But stuck in his cubicle, he is distanced from Oppenheimer during their heated exchanges, and thus diminished.

Elsewhere Ms. Woolcock has devised touchingly human scenes for the characters. During one, as a group of scientists tinkers with the actual bomb, another relaxes at night by watching the 1939 film “Beau Geste,” the scene in which Gary Cooper and his two brothers who have joined the French Foreign Legion face attacks from Arabs in the North African desert.

The scenes with Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, sung with aching, wistful intensity by the mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, are beautifully rendered. Kitty, an insecure alcoholic, humanizes Oppenheimer, who loves and accepts her. During a romantic scene in the bedroom, they sing in a dialogue of quotations from the poets Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser, and Mr. Adams’s rapturous music is like updated, harmonically unhinged Debussy.

Yet just as Oppenheimer avoids facing Kitty’s troubles head-on, he shuts off the part of his brain that would allow moral scruples to impede his work. The mezzo-soprano Meredith Arwady, in her Met debut, was also affecting as the fearful Pueblo Indian maid Pasqualita, a sort of Erda of the Southwest, who cares for Kitty with maternal affection.

In adding video to the production, Ms. Woolcock uses the shuttered cubicles as backdrop screens, projecting images of pelting desert rain or maps of potential target cities in Japan. Because Mr. Adams uses amplification and electronics in the orchestra, he has requested that, to achieve the right balances, the singers and chorus use body microphones. The Met complies.

Though the miking of the individual singers is quite subtle, the chorus comes across as strident during full-voiced outbursts. I am still not convinced that the sound-enhanced payoff is worth compromising the principle of opera as a haven for natural sound.

But during climactic moments, when recorded sounds, spoken voices, radio static and eerie noise create aural collages, the effect is chilling. At the end it’s deafening, when the recorded tracks evoke the cataclysmic aftermath of the detonation. Wisely, Mr. Adams never sets the actual explosion to music. To convey such a thing would be trite.

The bass-baritone Eric Owens, in his Met debut, portrays the blustery Army commander on the project, Gen. Leslie Groves. One moment the stocky general is bellowing threats to a beleaguered military meteorologist, the next he is bragging to Oppenheimer about his success at calorie counting. During this scene, Mr. Adams enshrouds Groves with alluring harmonies and pleasing melodic lines, as if the orchestra were urging the one person on the project with the power to call off the test to do so before it is too late.

Sadly, the opera is all too timely. As the scientists worry about the implications of the bomb — if, that is, the “gadget,” as they call it, actually works — Oppenheimer cautions them that the nation’s fate should be left “in the hands of the best men in Washington.”

David Finkle, Theatermania, 15 October 2008

http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/15777

If you believe outsized events are the ones that lend themselves most auspiciously to magnum-opus treatments, then it takes little imagination to understand why composer John Adams jumped at the chance to create Doctor Atomic, now making its belated New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera.

First commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, this probing work is about J. Robert Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley in muscular and almost consistently anguished mode and wielding an ever-present cigarette), the central figure behind building the first atomic bomb. The opera, which features a libretto by Peter Sellars derived in part from Oppenheimer’s and his colleagues’ writings and recorded comments, turns out to be more than intermittently arresting under Alan Gilbert’s grand conducting, even if it fails to reach its intended heights.

The opera’s action unfolds during the run-up to the first A-bomb test in 1945 — when Oppenheimer was still hearing from associates about their misgivings and was grappling with his own — and then in the tense hours before the test when an electrical rain storm threatened to throw a monkey wrench into the grim proceedings. Also included in the story line are two separate scenes featuring wife Kitty (Sasha Cooke, radiating great mezzo-soprano conviction) — presumably to not only give audiences a look at Oppenheimer as husband and father, but to remind them of how women and children would be affected internationally by the man’s handiwork.

Adams and Sellars were wise to position Oppenheimer and his interior struggles at the center of the narrative. Moreover, they most often approach their creative zenith with the Oppenheimer-oriented segments, notably when the erudite but understandably anxious scientist interacts with associates like the morally dubious Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink in robust bass-baritone form) and the equally concerned Robert Wilson (pure-voiced tenor Thomas Glenn).

Musically, Adams hits more of his peaks at the orchestra-juddering test-about-to-occur coda and, before that, in the first-act-closing aria, “Batter My Heart.” That heartfelt text is actually a John Donne poem set to music — and Sellars also includes odes from Charles Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as excerpts from the Bhagavad Vita. However, during much of the opera’s latter stretches, Adams’ inspirations flag. He conjures passages of bad-weather music and running-for-cover music that wouldn’t be out of place as thriller-movie underscoring.

There’s also a problem with a production that boasts a kick-off show curtain that depicts the Periodic Table and its then-94 identified elements. Indeed, to claim that director Penny Woolcock includes even more elements than that only begins to describe the clutter of this show. Take the moments when set designer Julian Crouch’s three-tiered rectangular units start swiveling or what seems to be a huge replica of the A-bomb core drops from the fly space.

Indeed, Adams, Sellars, and Woolcock may require a return to the drawing board for Doctor Atomic to become a fully explosive piece of work.

Eric Myers, Variety, 14 October 2008

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117938685.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

The Met continues its commitment to contemporary opera with this new production of John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic,” which world preemed three years ago in San Francisco. Adams’ frequent collaborator Peter Sellars directed that original staging, as well as cobbling together a libretto of sorts from existing sources. At the helm this time around is filmmaker Penny Woolcock, making her opera debut. It’s disappointing that someone who works in a medium as fluid as cinema has come up with such a static staging.

Woolcock’s task was not aided by Sellars’ lumpy libretto, a cut-and-paste job made up of excerpts from a variety of texts including the Bhagavad Gita, Native American songs and poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Baudelaire and John Donne. These disparate sources all figured into the thoughts and consciousness of the opera’s eponymous character, atom-bomb inventor J. Robert Oppenheimer, but they do not coalesce into a compelling libretto.

Julian Crouch’s unit set consists largely of a huge white sheet drawn up into a tent-like form; a large mobile representing radioactive fallout and other debris; and three tiers of open cubicles. Many chorus members and some principals are stuck in the cubicles for a good part of the night, and the view becomes unvaried and monotonous for the audience. It recalls the “advent calendar” effect of John Doyle’s disastrous “Peter Grimes” at the Met last season.

For much of act two, Woolcock also apes Doyle’s “concert staging” aesthetic, with the principals standing in a straight line across the lip of the stage, singing directly out to the audience. And in what appears to be yet another bow to imported-British-director cliches, Woolcock has the set deconstruct itself at the finale. We’ve seen it all before — too many times in the past 15 years.

The evening is not a total loss. Fortunately, Adams’ restless, eclectic score keeps the mind engaged, and the cast assembled for this production is a strong one. Adams surrounds the auditorium with speakers that weave available-sound sources into the music — typewriters, babies’ cries, radio static, snippets of 1940s songs and broadcasts. As part of this total sound design, amplification appears to be in use for many of the singers — a practically taboo rarity in this house.

There are moments of violence in the score, moments of dreamlike beauty and a particularly striking use of silence at the opera’s end to underscore the aftermath of the first bomb test at Los Alamos. Elements of Adams’ early minimalist aesthetic are present, but this cannot be considered a minimalist score along the lines of a Philip Glass opera, laced as it is with moments that evoke Janacek, Gershwin and Bernstein.

Canadian baritone Gerald Finley is superb as Oppenheimer, a role he created. He makes Oppenheimer a charismatic figure full of quick-witted nervous energy, thrilled by his success yet increasingly burdened with guilt over the devastation he will wreak. Finley’s fine-grained baritone seems to fray a bit during his long aria that serves as the climax to act one; fortunately, he has less solo singing in act two.

Sasha Cooke uses her dark, straight-toned mezzo effectively as Oppenheimer’s tormented wife Kitty and looks smashing in Catherine Zuber’s spot-on period costumes. Richard Paul Fink, with his nuanced phrasing, clear diction and penetrating sound, strongly evokes the moral conflicts of Oppenheimer’s collaborator Edward Teller.

Debuting Eric Owens does what he can with the underwritten role of General Leslie Groves, but his sizable bass-baritone could be a real asset to the Met in the future. In smaller roles, tenor Thomas Glenn and powerhouse contralto Meredith Arwady are standouts. Rising young conductor Alan Gilbert makes a solid Met debut leading Adams’ very exacting score.

Vibhuti Patel, 15 October 2008, Newsweek

http://www.newsweek.com/id/164067

One Very Explosive Opera

John Adams’s ‘Dr Atomic’ makes its atom-smashing New York debut.

“Opera,” says composer John Adams, “has a curious ability to handle life’s biggest themes in a way no other art form can approximate.” Adams has repeatedly used opera to convey some of the major contemporary themes that have engaged him: “Nixon in China” (1987) focused on market economy vs. socialist ideology, “The Death of Klinghofer” (1991) explored terrorism and “Dr. Atomic” (2005), which opens at New York’s Metropolitan Opera this week, deals with the creation of the atom bomb. The idea was to create a “contemporary Faustian myth” centering on J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the team of scientists who created the first nuclear bomb in 1945 and who, in his pursuit of ultimate knowledge, essentially made an infernal compact with the U.S. government and its military to deliver the world’s most powerful WMD. “What gives me great satisfaction,” Adams says, “are those pieces that weave American cultural and historical material … to summon up the essence of America’s collective psyche.”

The Metropolitan’s production of “Dr. Atomic” (the title evokes both science fiction and Goethe’s “Dr. Faustus”) is stunning. The opera opens with brash, loud, recorded electronic music before the orchestra (conducted by Alan Gilbert) takes over and we find ourselves in the midst of the labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oppenheimer’s team is discussing their project in what turns out to be not a conventional operatic libretto but the prosaic words they had actually used: Peter Sellars has created a collage of words culled from memoirs, declassified minutes of Washington meetings and poetry. Oppie, as his friends called him, was a highly cultivated man (magnificently sung by Gerald Finley) who had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, where he had composed sonnets in his first year. He loved Baudelaire (a French copy of “Fleurs du Mal” was in his pocket when the bomb exploded), was interested in Eastern philosophy (he studied Sanskrit to read the Bhagavad Gita in the original), spoke many languages and loved classical music. Adams claims he was the most cultured scientist in the world—more than Aristotle.

In fact, none of the team fits the stereotype of a nerd. The brightest young men of that generation were assembled in Los Alamos, but although Hitler was dead and the Nazis had surrendered, these idealists believed they were “saving civilization.” That conflict is at the heart of the Oppenheimer saga: he was consumed by guilt for the rest of his life—after the detonation, he quoted from the Gita, “I am become Death”—but he believed he was going to end the war with the bomb. The lone skeptic was Robert Wilson, Oppenheimer’s favorite, who circulated a petition against dropping the bomb (wanting instead to “demonstrate” its strength to the Japanese), which of course never reached President Truman. Oppie believed that it was the responsibility of politicians, not scientists, to decide whether to bomb or not.

But opera is traditionally about love, and Adams does not disappoint: in an erotically charged bedroom scene, Oppie’s wife, Kitty (played by sexy new mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke), sings a love poem by Muriel Rukeyser as an aria. Kitty, who was also a scientist, felt lonely and frustrated being a “faculty wife.” In the opera, she represents feminine consciousness and moral sensitivity. We see Oppenheimer absorbed in his reports as the neglected Kitty sings, “Am I in your light?” Eventually, he responds with a sensual Baudelaire poem. Then, at the climax of Act I, left alone in the desert, Oppenheimer voices his inner conflict through John Donne’s intense, powerful sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” It is a perfect summing up of Oppenheimer’s spiritual struggle: like Donne, he asks God to destroy him because he has been “usurp’t by your enemy.” Sellars uses Oppenheimer’s favorite poem, with its aptly violent metaphors of war, battle, conquest and submission, to reinforce the Faustian leitmotif as Adams abandons atonality for gorgeous music that he describes as an “archaic trope.”

Indeed, Adams’s music is not unrelentingly modern—it is lyrical, romantic, Wagnerian by turns, and it matches the enormity of his myth. The choral singing is grand as the libretto uses the Bhagavad Gita’s horrific descriptions of universal destruction to create the terror of the bomb. This is opera at its most cerebral, and Adams admits he aims to create ecological awareness: man is upsetting the balance of nature even as Pasqualita, the Oppenheimers’ maid, sings a Pueblo lullaby about preserving the earth. That is the alternate myth of the Native Americans, embodied in their ethnic costumes and ranged silently over the top of the multilevel set that offers a cross section of the scientists’ labs and offices. Outside, the desert is suggested by huge white mountains of cloth and above it all hangs the wired bomb, an exact replica of the real one, but somehow made beautiful, like the moon. The end is suggested, not shown, as the final explosion is heard. The cast gapes at the audience, as if to say: we are the bomb.

Jeremy Eichler, Boston Globe Staff, 16 October 2008

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2008/10/16/an_opera_that_hovers_on_threshold_of_the_nuclear_age/?page=2

An opera that hovers on threshold of the nuclear age

The composer John Adams writes operas that exist at the junction of history and modern mythology. Taking an event such as Nixon’s visit to China, or the creation of the first atomic bomb, he has shown how this centuries-old art form can be used to reimagine seminal moments of a more recent national past and bring to those over-chronicled episodes a new multidimensionality and resonance.

It’s a curious brand of alchemy Adams has mastered, one that transmutes the dry, hard factness of the past into something more vital and vibrating, something that hints at the psychological states of history’s protagonists, that taps underground reservoirs of emotion, and that plumbs the mythic dimension of moments that – even as they unfold – seem to stand outside the normal flow of time.

Such is certainly the case with Adams’s recent opera “Doctor Atomic,” a hauntingly powerful, deeply humane and eloquent work that opened in an effective new staging at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday evening. (It is to be simulcast to local movie theaters on Nov. 8.)

It would be hard to invent a fictitious sce nario for a modern opera more gripping than the one that is taken here straight from the history books. It is June 15, 1945, with the Manhattan Project building to a climax in Los Alamos, N.M. The atomic bomb is ready for its first test. Truman will soon meet with Stalin and Churchill in Potsdam to carve the contours of postwar Europe, and the president is demanding a successful test of the weapon to strengthen his hand. But the young scientists assembled in the desert, led by the brilliant Robert Oppenheimer, are growing restless and wavering in their conviction. What had begun as a race against Nazi Germany has become something much more morally hazy. Germany has surrendered, and the weapon is to be used on Japanese civilians. Oppenheimer pushes through his team’s resistance but wages a private war with inner demons. The test-bomb hangs ominously in a tower. A dangerous electrical storm breaks out. Scientists wonder whether the bomb’s blast will ignite the earth’s atmosphere. The storm subsides by dawn. There is a lengthy countdown of almost unbearable tenseness. The bomb is dropped. The nuclear age has begun. The opera is over. Adams rightly approaches this history as the “American myth par excellence,” a Faustian story of the human intellect deciphering the secrets of nature to create a weapon with a destructive force beyond its wildest imaginings. In his newly published memoir, the composer describes the atomic bomb as “the overwhelming, irresistible, inescapable image that dominated the psychic activity of my childhood.” No wonder the subject drew out some of his most compelling and imaginative music to date. The score of “Doctor Atomic” weds a cool Stravinskian precision and rhythmic vitality with a kind of seething Wagnerian dread. Rapid caffeinated figures dart around the orchestra like hyperactive electrons. Strange, darkly glowing woodwind chords hover like a vapor. Low brass notes rattle ominously as if marking the edge of an abyss. At various points, loudspeakers positioned throughout the hall project prerecorded sounds – truck engines, snatches of period pop music, and, in the end, a long, loud digitally distorted timpani roll whose vibrations rise from the floor like an earth tremor. The libretto is itself a remarkable document assembled by Peter Sellars entirely from historical sources: popular and technical scientific writing, memoirs, interviews, declassified government documents, apocalyptic passages from the “Bhagavad Gita,” and poetry by Baudelaire and John Donne (both beloved by Oppenheimer) as well the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Taken as a whole, this unusual brew of sources has a paradoxical two-pronged effect. It creates an air of authenticity – the physicists converse in their own actual words, the chorus sings about the plutonium core and the “twelve pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron” – while at other moments it wisely distances the opera from any notion of small-minded documentary reenactment, as Oppenheimer suddenly expresses himself in ecstatic quotations from Baudelaire or the chorus frantically apostrophizes the Hindu God Vishnu, “shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow/ With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring.” The opera’s original production, directed by Sellars, premiered in San Francisco in 2005, and was later performed in Amsterdam and Chicago. It was a viscerally powerful staging that seemed intent on reproducing a version of the complex interpenetration of history, science, and mythology found in the libretto. The chorus deployed an arsenal of primal physical gestures and the whirling choreography by Lucinda Childs was freighted with symbolism. For this newest staging, the British director Penny Woolcock, who had never worked in opera before, tacks in the other direction, making clarity and simplicity her mission. There are stacked rows of tiny cubicles with blackboards, and stage projections of the endless rain and of scientific equations scrawled like modern hieroglyphs. An assortment of exploding debris hovers frozen in the air, and of course the bomb itself, a giant sphere crisscrossed by wires like veins on an eyeball, hangs oppressively above the test site. Overall, it is an effective production less for any novel interpretation Woolcock brings, than for the way she showcases the layers of this already complex work with minimal intrusion. This fortunate modern opera now has two viable stagings in circulation. The excellent cast was anchored by the Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who created the role of Oppenheimer for the San Francisco premiere. On Monday night, his performance was focused and disciplined, portraying the genius scientist and learned man of culture as a leader functioning under immense psychological strain, in the fray but also above it, that is, with a tense awareness of his own historical moment. With his colleagues he projected a single-minded confidence. But such a facade also exacts a punishing psychic toll, which he made clear in Oppenheimer’s wrenching aria that concludes Act I. On stage alone with the bomb, he poured out his torment through the words of Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” Adams’s writing here is inspired in its somber lyricism, and Finley sang with a deep tone and a deeper sense of spiritual anguish. Beneath it all, this Faust is a broken man. The other principals were universally strong, with the robust bass-baritone Eric Owens in the role of General Leslie Groves, an impassioned Sasha Cooke as Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty; and the husky-voiced Meredith Arwady as the Oppenheimers’ knowing maid Pasqualita. Among the scientists, Richard Paul Fink was Edward Teller; Thomas Glenn was Robert Wilson, and Earle Patriarco was Frank Hubbard. Making his Met debut in the pit, conductor Alan Gilbert drew wonders from the Met Orchestra. This was an exceptionally clear reading but also one with an intuitive feel for the music’s broader emotional arc. We do not “hear” the final nuclear explosion, yet Adams finds a way of dramatizing it to harrowing effect. “Doctor Atomic” is not a work that bangs you over the head with its moral verdict, but one that bears sensitive witness to the crossing of a threshold in world history. The opera maintains a kind of dual-consciousness: We are drawn into the moment, full of empathy for these young, brilliant, and often conflicted scientists caught up in events much larger than themselves. And at the same time we watch, of course, from the future, looking back at an immensely fateful hour with a mournful knowledge of how this story will unfold. And it’s all within the music. Friedrich Schlegel once described the historian as a “prophet facing backwards.” John Adams is a composer with a rare gift for creating works that look in both directions at once.

Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, 16 October 2008 Classical Music/Opera Listings http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/arts/music/17classical.html?ref=music ‘DOCTOR ATOMIC’ (Saturday and Tuesday) The film director Penny Woolcock, in her Met debut, has staged a new production of John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic.” The work had its premiere in 2005 at the San Francisco Opera in a production by the director Peter Sellars, who also wrote the libretto, compiled from documents, interviews, memoirs and poetry. Mr. Adams’s opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, cultured and arrogant physicist who presided over the history-altering Manhattan Project, increasingly seems like this inventive American composer’s most complex, ambitious and masterly work, especially in the insightful, urgent and wondrously detailed performance that the conductor Alan Gilbert, in his overdue company debut, draws from the Met orchestra and chorus. The production, which imaginatively uses video projections and electronic sound resources, combines metaphoric imagery with poignantly personal scenes among the characters. The baritone Gerald Finley, who created the role of Oppenheimer, brings his portrayal, now even richer and more visceral, to the Met. The mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke as Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty; the bass-baritone Richard Paul Fink as Edward Teller; and the bass-baritone Eric Owens as the blustery project commander Gen. Leslie Groves are all excellent.

Patricia Zohn, Huffington Post, 15 October 2008 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patricia-zohn/culture-zohn-emdoctor-ato_b_134672.html Energy of all kinds is on everyone’s mind. Nuclear energy, once the scourge of any right-thinking person who had lived through Three Mile Island and Chernobyl has not-so-suddenly become something Americans need to revisit if we are to tackle our energy problems in a holistic, modern, fashion. The French and the Europeans and Eastern Europeans have had no such qualms. Not blessed by oil reserves, they have had to forge ahead with nuclear options and have been largely successful. Like their trains which are unsurpassed in efficiency, nuclear plants are all over France, near urban centers, yet you never hear the French talk about potential explosions unless they have to do with Nicolas Sarkozy’s combustible love life. And then there’s the other use of an explosive atom. When the periodic table is projected on the curtain at the outset of Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera House, you know we are going to get involved in how elements, chemical and human, can rub up against each other with toxic results. To the drone of an airplane, mug shots of the team of scientists who put together the A bomb in remote Los Alamos, New Mexico in the forties, are projected on small, Eames-style cubicles, an ant colony of genius mathematicians and physicists stacked one on top of the other (if you know Robert Longo’s work, it is precisely that image). Flotsam and jetsam floats in front of what looks to be a series of white tents. Doctor Atomic, with music by John Adams,spectacular production design by Julian Crouch (as in the Glass Satyagraha last season ), video design by 59 Productions, libretto by Peter Sellars (who was supposed to direct but had some kind of creative fallout with the Met — the first fallout of the project) and directed by Penny Woolcock in her debut, is a haunting and sobering work. The opera was commissioned by San Francisco and has since been in Chicago and is a coproduction with the English National Opera. Having visited Los Alamos and read the various J. Robert Oppenheimer biographies and letters (upon which this libretto is based), I was already intrigued by the notion that bomb makers could also pine for Baudelaire and speak six languages. A romantic who had socialist leanings made the first nuclear weapon, imagine that. The idea that someone could sing about nuclear fission and make radioactive fallout compelling was not entirely surprising, and in some respects, especially those of the truly ingenious sets and video projections, the creators have succeeded beyond wildest imagination. The music is relentless and serves its deadly subject well — but I had to climb over it sometimes to stay in the emotional moment. This performance was conducted by Alan Gilbert, the NY Phil conductor-in-waiting, who contributed much warmth to the challenging score. The cast, especially, Gerald Finley, who created the role of Oppenheimer in San Francisco and Sasha Cooke who plays his wife and colleague, Kitty, acquit themselves admirably, even when they are having to give life to Sellars circumlocutions which are alternately Shakespearean (fain) and Sanskrit-y, even declaiming about the weather and caloric intake, though extra weight was not needed for a production already heavily laden with a bomb hanging over its head most of the time. The closing moments of the detonation as the team watches with their sunglasses is probably the most incandescent way this chapter of our checkered nuclear history has ever been portrayed. It’s not the first time the creation of the bomb has been given a romantic veneer, all those smart people hanging out in the desert, able to think big thoughts. But Sellars makes sure the take away is of a Japanese mother searching for water and her children in voice over, a reminder of the eventual holocaust and toll on real lives and not just desert fauna. The building of bombs, whether in Iran, Russia or the US is, alas, a topic that is still combustible. It is with a heavy heart that we leave the theater, knowing all too well that the incendiary concerns of Doctor Atomic are still very much with us.

Jerome R. Sehulster, Greenwichtime, 17 October 2008 http://www.greenwichtime.com/ci_10742723 The Met’s ‘Dr. Atomic’ premiere is dynamite The much anticipated Met premiere of a John Adams opera came Monday, Oct. 13, with “Dr. Atomic,” a tale of the scientists, the military, the bureaucrats and observers who weighed in on the development of the first atomic bomb at the end of World War II. As contemporary operas go, “Dr. Atomic” is a work of consummate elegance. If the opera’s initial impact in the theater does not, at first, meet its potential, don’t stop: Many rewards come with repeated exposure. Adams weaves a complex score that will linger in memory. More importantly, he has musically crafted characters who speak to us. We’re more than a half-century away from the events depicted here on the Met stage, but the issues explored in “Dr. Atomic” are very much with us today. Principal in the tale is Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, chief among those who developed the A bomb, the archetypal weapon of mass destruction. In “Dr. Atomic” he is, to a degree, romanticized as a Faustian creature who deals with some internal devils of his own making. Does he push the testing and use of the bomb as the ultimate realization of scientific progress? Then, too, there was a war to win. But Oppenheimer was a more rounded intellectual: He read the Indian Bhagavad Gita in its original Sanskrit, self-taught, and he quotes sonnets by John Donne (in his closing aria in Act One). These and his personal eccentricities are roundly brought out in the libretto by director Peter Sellars, who drew from these literary sources, but mainly from firsthand accounts, memoirs, declassified official documents and the like. Adams’ “Dr. Atomic” had its world premiere in San Francisco in October 2005; many of the principals from that production come to the Met this fall. “Oppie,” as Oppenheimer was nicknamed, is played with exquisite aplomb by baritone Gerald Finley. Finley, who will own the role here in New York, as he has in previous productions, demonstrates at every second a total immersion into his character. He conveys all by his clean, expressive voice and considerable stage presence. His are the most lyrical and poetic utterances in the score; his mannerisms, the chain smoking, his pacing and so on, augment the characterization. Adams has created a monumental present-day persona. Oppenheimer is surrounded by yaysayers, naysayers, and some useless, interminable commentators. But none is really a simple character: To Adams’ credit, those who surround Oppie are well drawn musically and dramatically. Two, Edward Teller and Robert Wilson, respectively sung by Richard Paul Fink and Thomas Glenn (in his Met debut), are vivid creations. Wilson is consistently present with his ethical commentary: The decision to drop the atomic bomb on a Japanese city, or, for that matter, to test the bomb in the desert near Los Alamos is never simple or easily made. Adams’ “Dr. Atomic” considers, if at a tad too much length in the theater, the second thoughts about using such a device against humanity. Teller asks us to consider inhuman acts perpetrated by the Nazis. Will the U.S. be doing the same to the Japanese with the bomb? Captain James Nolan, for instance, sung by Roger Honeywell (in his Met debut), outlines Plutonium’s gruesome effect on the human body. There are also characters whose one-liners or whose stance will raise a broad smile. General Leslie Groves, sung by baritone Eric Owens (in his Met debut), is rightly, if on stage a little absurdly, more concerned about his waistline, but he also worries about the effect of the threatening weather on the direction of the fallout from the test explosion. Earle Patriarco sings Frank Hubbard, who contributes updates to Groves on the weather. Add to this the softening, sensitive commentary by women. Oppie’s wife Kitty (sung by Sasha Cooke) is all about interpersonal connections, love and dreams; Pasqualita (sung by Meredith Awardy, in her debut) is a Native American who provides the perspective of one still closer to nature. Alan Gilbert (in his Met debut) conducts Adams’ complex score with a sweeping hand. The production by Penny Woolcock (in her Met debut) keeps the named characters in the foreground with a Greek-like chorus in the background. Julian Crouch’s sets, so atmospheric in last season’s “Satyagraha,” are curiously bland, but often creatively used. Though the opera ends seconds before the nuclear test in the desert, a high decibel, low frequency tone rattles the rafters of the Met. It’s quite an experience.

Christopher Morris Lent, Columbia Spectator, 20 October 2008 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/56315 Dr. Atomic Starts Off With a Bang at the Metropolitan Opera The only theme more operatic than the atomic bomb’s effect on the lives of millions of people is the tragedy the atomic bomb caused in the lives of a few people. John Coolidge Adams’ new opera, Doctor Atomic, is a character study that focuses on the last few days at Los Alamos prior to the test payload’s detonation. Gerald Finley stars as conflicted, hyper-literary genius J. Robert Oppenheimer, Eric Owens plays General Leslie Groves, and Sasha Cooke plays a mean Kitty Oppenheimer. But how does Adams go about dramatizing his problematic yet pruriently promising subject, the atomic bomb? As the surprisingly young audience settles down, the periodic table as it would have appeared in 1945 is projected against the curtain. The curtain rises to reveal a series of dystopian cubicles, bringing to mind Brazil or Patrick Stewart’s Bolshoi production of Macbeth last spring. The opera commences with a post-apocalyptic howl from radio footage, but the overture proper begins with a more traditional romantic fanfare of terror. It’s obvious from the beginning that the score is going to be a lot more conservative than expected, and Adams’ sound-world owes a lot more to Stravinsky and Shostakovich than it does Reich and Reilly: it is tonal, with abrupt and constant shifts in meter, and there are string tremolos, murmuring woodwinds, celeste glissandi, muted cymbal clashes, and occasional outbursts from the brass against one-note timpani ostinati. All are expertly controlled by conductor, Alan Gilbert. Adams, who has accrued enough critical and commercial success to be denied tenure by the Columbia music department, is not always on his musical A-game here—but few composers ever are, especially in opera. The music is at its best when it needs to be at its best. Mostly, though, it just provides a backdrop for the libretto by Peter Sellars (not to be conflated with Peter Sellers, mastermind of another cultural icon about the a-bomb with “Doctor” in the title). The entirety of the action is set in the middle of the New Mexico desert—with not a single scene in the basement of Pupin, regrettably—and the characters muse about love, death, and those other operatic tropes. The music grows more conservative and the language more poetic as the subject becomes more apocalyptic and the second act nears its conclusion. The voices, the acting, the orchestra, and the set are all terrific up until the end, when the very foundations of the Met rumble with distant reverberations and the bomb bursts silently in a flash of light. The last minute, with nothing aside from recordings of Japanese asking for help and water, is unexpected, inorganic, and inexcusably bad. I kept waiting for Finley to ascend the scaffolding and proclaim: “I have become death, destroyer of worlds!” But he never did. If there’s any cause for complaint in Doctor Atomic, it’s the libretto. Its chief conceit is its compilation from a variety of sources—U.S. Army memoranda, memoirs. Oppenheimer quotes Baudelaire, and Leslie Groves reprises the very words he spoke in his autobiography. As the first act of Doctor Atomic moves past a plodding exordium to a euphonious love duet and then a tragicomic close, the libretto holds together well, but by midway through the second act, the device begins to degenerate into gimmick. “Unlike anything the opera world had seen before,” writes John Adams in the program notes. There must be a less overdetermined way of portraying Oppenheimer’s obsessive literacy, and a more direct way of portraying his existential angst. In spite of all this, though, no amount of maudlin moralizing could deny the cast, the composer, and the conductor the standing ovation that they got and so richly deserved.

Alex Ross, New Yorker, 27 October 2008 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2008/10/27/081027crmu_music_ross False Dawn The Met’s take on John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic.” I first heard John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”—an opera set in the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear test, on July 16, 1945—while driving toward the patch of New Mexico desert where the detonation took place. In the course of chronicling the first production of “Atomic,” at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, I had arranged to visit the Trinity site, and brought with me the composer’s computer realization of his score. An eerie trip ensued. Even as the hot gleam of the highway gave way to desolate roads and fenced-off military zones, Adams’s characteristic musical gestures—the rich-hued harmonies and bopping rhythms that have made repertory items of “Harmonielehre,” “Nixon in China,” and “Short Ride in a Fast Machine”—disintegrated into broken clockwork rhythms, acid harmonies, and electronic noise. Rehearsals for the première revealed “Atomic” to be not only an ominous score but also an uncommonly beautiful one. Scene after scene glows with strange energy. There is an inexplicably lovely choral ode to the bomb’s thirty-two-pointed explosive shell, with unison female voices floating above lush string-and-wind chords and glitterings of chimes and celesta. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the atomic project, and Kitty, his brilliant, alcoholic wife, sing sumptuous duets over an orchestra steeped in the decadent glamour of Wagner and Debussy. Oppenheimer’s central aria, a setting of the John Donne sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” has a stark Renaissance eloquence, its melody a single taut wire. The night of the countdown is taken up with a hallucinatory sequence of convulsive choruses, lurching dances, and truncated lyric flights. After the first run-through with singers and orchestra, it seemed clear that “Doctor Atomic” was Adams’s most formidable achievement to date. Staging the opera, though, has proved a challenge. The director of the première was Peter Sellars, who has helped to create all of Adams’s stage works from “Nixon” onward. Sellars also devised the libretto, sometimes basing the dialogue on the documentary record and sometimes fashioning interior monologues from Oppenheimer’s favorite poets. (The physicist had the Donne sonnet in mind—“break, blow, burn, and make me new”—when he called the site Trinity.) The inaugural staging likewise wavered between literalism and fantasy. A replica of the bomb hung over the stage, and authentic-looking gizmos were scattered around the desert camp, but dancers wove through them, enacting the bustle of research, the instability of the weather, and the hazards of radiation. The action at Trinity was intercut with glimpses of Kitty Oppenheimer drinking herself into a visionary stupor back at Los Alamos; Native Americans wandered on and off, delivering apocalyptic prophecies. The result flirted with chaos, but it matched the unruly power of the score. As often with Sellars, the production evolved as it went from city to city. A newly released DVD, filmed at the Netherlands Opera last year, refines yet further the director’s vision, with closeups giving emotional focus to those whirling tableaux. Three years after the première, “Atomic” has arrived at the Metropolitan Opera—but not, curiously, in the Sellars staging. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, admired the music, but asked Sellars for changes that the director refused to carry out. (Relations between the two have since been repaired: Sellars is slated to direct “Nixon” at the Met, in the 2010-11 season.) So Gelb turned to Penny Woolcock, a British filmmaker who had made a tensely absorbing television adaptation of Adams’s second opera, the terrorist drama “The Death of Klinghoffer.” The choice seemed sound: gritty realism would be a plausible alternative to Sellars’s impassioned surrealism. Alas, it doesn’t quite work. Woolcock’s production comes across more as an anxious revision of the Sellars than as an independent piece. It is simpler in conception, with no dancers in sight and considerably less frenzy onstage. The sets, by Julian Crouch, are dominated by walls of cubicles in which the physicists are seen scribbling on chalkboards and catching naps. Digital projections show mathematical equations, stormy weather, and maps of Japanese bombing targets. Minatory ranks of Native American warriors confront the audience. As before, the bomb hovers above, like an evil moon. The staging is a sleek, stylish affair, but, in its blending of the mundane and the dreamlike, it’s hardly a radical break from the Sellars, with the notable difference that the emotional temperature is significantly lower. This show lacks the burning conviction that drove the original. It also lacks the stamp of authenticity. For example, the male physicists wear three-piece suits, as if reporting to an ad agency. (The original production scrupulously followed Los Alamos’s casual, Western style.) We end up floating in some international, twentieth-century, big-science nowhere. “Doctor Atomic” was Woolcock’s first stab at theatre direction, and her inexperience showed in some hesitant performances on opening night. The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley has sung Oppenheimer in every “Atomic” to date, and seems to have attained vocal greatness in the course of inhabiting the role. No matter what he sings, Finley supplies a fundamental warmth of tone, piercingly precise diction, and an array of mercurial inflections, whether in a new work by Kaija Saariaho or in classic fare such as Schumann’s “Dichterliebe.” (His new recording of the latter, on Hyperion, is among the best on disk.) In the part of Oppenheimer, Finley shows inexhaustible ingenuity in bringing to life lines that might otherwise fall awkwardly on the tongue. Early on, he sings, “I explained that the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous.” The mixture of excitement and dread that he injects into the rising third and falling major seventh on “tremendous” isolates Oppenheimer in three notes.

Bradley Bambarger, NJ.com, 19 October 2008 http://www.nj.com/entertainment/music/index.ssf/2008/10/metropolitan_opera_presents_dr.html “Dr. Atomic” by John Adams and Peter Sellars hinges on the big bang that created the modern world — and its potential for self-fulfilling apocalypse, with the tension of a ticking clock pervading the opera. At heart, it is an elegy on the end of American innocence, the point in 1945 where the country’s twin ideals — technological and moral — diverged. The Adams/Sellars theatrical partnership has taken on tipping points in American history since 1987’s classic “Nixon in China.” But “Dr. Atomic” has struck a chord exceedingly rare for a contemporary opera, even considering Adams’ standing as the nation’s signature composer. Since its 2005 premiere in San Francisco, the original Sellars production has run in Chicago and Amsterdam (with the Dutch staging documented on DVD). The Metropolitan Opera has also launched its own atmospheric production of “Dr. Atomic,” by British filmmaker Penny Woolcock. It’s one of the most high-tech stagings ever at the Met, with a web of electronic effects, visual and sonic. But the true special effect is Adams’ kaleidoscopic orchestration. Conductor Alan Gilbert, who takes over the New York Philharmonic next season, is making his Met debut with “Dr. Atomic,” and he led a performance of precision and expressiveness, bringing the score’s harmonic piquancy, metrical complexity and textural detail together as a visceral rush. The Dr. Atomic of the title is J. Robert Oppenheimer, the genius polymath and eccentric humanist who made something of a Faustian pact to lead the Manhattan Project in the New Mexico desert. Sellars’ libretto draws from government documents, memoirs of those on-site and the poetry that Oppenheimer loved to recite. Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who created the role, plays the part with furtive intensity; one can practically see the character’s mind burning like his chain-smoked cigarettes as the fraught days lead up to the first, storm-threatened test of the atomic bomb. The opera is a study in stress, anticipation and guilt — not only for Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, but for conflicted scientists working on “the gadget” and their less-conflicted military minders. The most stirring aria has Oppenheimer singing John Donne’s sonnet “Batter My Heart” to music that beseeches like a Bach cantata, the scientist reaching for the spiritual to no avail. He eventually puts his faith in the other direction, in “the best men in Washington.” Kitty, as sung with warmth and gravity by mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, is a sensual, human presence; a bedroom scene in which she and Oppenheimer try to deal with the pressures of Los Alamos is desperately romantic, their voices entwining and separating like hands unable to hold on. A different sort of presence comes from the Native Americans on site; they seem like ghosts from a past of living in nature instead of working against it. As Pasqualita, the Oppenheimer’s maid, mezzo Meredith Arwady sings an affecting lullaby for the couple’s child — for all children. Designer Julian Crouch’s wall of cubicles shows men literally climbing the walls at the strain, while screens that pull down over the cubbyholes show black-and-white projections of mathematical equations and desert storms. Adams doesn’t depict the explosion, though, instead building a final countdown with rumbling percussion and tolling pizzicato, even a few queasily sliding strings in an allusion to Penderecki’s famous “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.” There’s a flash of light, then a tape with an oddly calm voice of a Japanese woman begging for water for her child.

Justin Davidson, NY Mag, 19 October 2008 http://nymag.com/arts/classicaldance/classical/reviews/51357/ Fission Power Penny Woolcock’s production of Doctor Atomic burnishes a masterpiece. Was there ever a more operatic sunrise than the artificial one loosed upon the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945? All through the previous night, slantways rain and lightning bolts slammed around an ungainly metal ovoid, bristling with wires and primed to wreak inconceivable destruction. An angry general demanded obedience from the skies. An unnerved J. Robert Oppenheimer declaimed lines of Hindu scripture. Another scientist reassured himself that dawn would not bring the world’s end. This is the stuff that a Wagnerian epic is made of. The first wonder of John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic is that he saw the music drama lurking in that final vigil of the pre-nuclear age. The second is that Adams has the mastery to cope with his topic’s fundamental flaw: Nothing actually happens. From first chord to final cataclysm, the blackboard oracles and slide-rule warriors can do little besides wait. Adams has written his finest work, a darkly riveting if grandly imperfect opera. I attended the unveiling in San Francisco in 2005 and came away bewitched but fearful that opera houses might avoid such a big, contemplative, and intricate drama. The Met’s new production, directed by Penny Woolcock and spectacularly conducted by Alan Gilbert, intensifies the music’s strengths and sharpens the libretto’s weaknesses. Gilbert has a gift for seeing the lucid core in mountains of complex detail, and he reveals a score of microscopic clarity and panoramic sweep. The text that Peter Sellars fashioned out of memoir, oral history, and other people’s verse remains an inelegant thing, lurching between documentary and mythic modes. But then Adams could set a Chinese-takeout menu to music without sacrificing lyric fluency. Doctor Atomic rumbles toward the inevitable with ravishing dread, reaching a peak of poignancy in the final fifteen minutes of Act One. “There is an air of excitement at the camp that I do not like,” barks General Leslie Groves, but the composer thrills to disquiet. Pumping rhythms give off syncopated sparks and dangerous little fanfares. As the general and Oppenheimer contemplate the possibility that an errant gust of radioactive wind could poison people for miles around, the score judders with percussive intensity—a herky-jerky dance of industry and panic. Then, suddenly, the adrenaline abates. The orchestration thins to a nocturnal wash of strings, with minor glints of brass and a horn murmuring pianissimo. From his early experience as a minimalist, Adams learned to organize nothingness. Here, two burdened men float on a cushion of soft recitative into intimate trivialities about the general’s diet. “Three pieces of chocolate cake—300 calories,” Groves sings mournfully, and there’s something touching about his faith that such things will continue to matter. For three years now, Eric Owens has been singing the role of Groves and Gerald Finley has inhabited Oppenheimer, and each has had time to burrow deep into his character. Owens tries to instill calm and winds up spreading terror with his meaty basso. Finley, chain-smoking and jittery, seems constantly on the verge of psychosis, yet he sings with the mellow baritone of a man about to stride into legend. Oppenheimer ends the act with John Donne’s poem “Batter My Heart,” set to music that recalls a lament by Henry Purcell. The melody sighs, slides, and recovers by leaps, only to roll back gently into exalted gloom. This is the opera’s hit single, and its power comes from sweeping away the cluttered rattle of building, calculating, fretting, and arguing. Donne pleads for faith to storm his hesitant soul; Oppenheimer utters his doubts aloud and alone, asking for certainty that the course of mass destruction is just. The real Oppenheimer did whip out a volume of verse in moments of stress, and he loved Donne’s invocation of a “three-person’d God” so well that he named the Trinity site for it. So long as Sellars sticks to the historical record of the Manhattan Project, the opera thrums briskly along, with Adams deftly threading together the scientists’ terror and self-satisfaction. The chorus in the opening scene helpfully explains that “we surround the plutonium core from 32 points spaced equally around its surface [to form] … an icosahedron interwoven with the twelve pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron.” Adams threshes that bushel of syllables deftly, separating the sense of focused urgency from the chaff of technical verbiage. This leaden lingo sounds fleeter and truer than the opaque poetry of the characters’ confessional mode. Kitty Oppenheimer might have been more persuasive as a troubled heroine if she had been allowed to utter her own words, instead of being saddled with the language of the poet Muriel Rukeyser. In the Oppenheimer bedroom, while the great man reads, his volatile wife suggests a snuggle with a jab of apocalyptic verse. (“My eyes / Splitting the skull to tickle your brain with love.”) He parries with Baudelaire. This game of quotations, played in the privacy of the conjugal bed, turns humans into symbols draped in glittering harp glissandos. When the characters fail him, the composer retreats into beauty, and both this scene and Kitty’s Act Two aria (a setting of Rukeyser’s “Easter Eve, 1945”) are lovely baubles that Sasha Cooke sings with seductive fury. Sellars directed the original production, available on a new Opus Arte DVD, and kept everything in constant motion, as if he didn’t trust either his own text or Adams’s music to sell the opera’s big ideas. Woolcock has pared the staging down, simplified the décor, and focused on the story. Julian Crouch’s sets are admirably humble, even childlike: Draped sheets represent New Mexico’s polychrome mountains; a mobile of suspended debris stands in for all explosions; projected equations furiously write themselves, transforming into lunatic doodles. Woolcock and Crouch wisely avoid competing with history or overwhelming the score. The production is muted because the topic is blinding, and because Adams’s music is so iridescent.

Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times, 19 October 2008 http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article4962101.ece Doctor Atomic fails to push the buttons in New York The cult American “post-minimalist” John Adams has the knack — like Janacek, say, or even Andrew Lloyd Webber — of choosing intriguing subjects for his work in the theatre. At Houston Grand Opera in 1987, he wowed the opera world with the premiere of his first large-scale work, Nixon in China. I was there, and Nixon remains, for me, Adams’s most successful theatre piece to date, much performed in the original staging by his longtime collaborator Peter Sellars. Nixon in China is a pioneering work, a docu-opera with comic and often touching elements, set to a score of dizzying virtuosity and theatrical energy, enhanced by an important dance element (the original choreography is by Mark Morris, then, like Adams, on the threshold of international celebrity). The Adams/Sellars/Morris “real life as art” formula was much replicated, not least by Adams and his collaborators, less successfully perhaps, in The Death of Kling- hoffer (1991), a controversial music dramatisation of the hijack of the cruise liner Achille Lauro and the murder of the wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists. Adams’s more recent Doctor Atomic opened on Monday night in a new production at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, just over three years after the world premiere in San Francisco. Sellars’s staging has been seen in Chicago and Amsterdam, but the Met’s supremo, Peter Gelb, in collaboration with English National Opera’s John Berry, opted for a new production by the British television director Penny Woolcock, whose acclaimed film of Klinghoffer is widely credited with salvaging the work and laying to rest the smears of anti-semitic partisanship that have dogged its progress in the world’s opera houses. Sellars, the librettist of Doctor Atomic, has enjoyed less than adulatory responses to his recent work, so Gelb and Berry were clearly hoping that Woolcock could work her alchemical magic again, this time in the theatre. Alas, it wasn’t to be, and the problem, I fear, remains Sellars’s libretto — a lethal concoction of banality and pretension that renders the story of J Robert Oppenheimer and the trial explosion of his atom bomb in the New Mexico desert a dry, overextended sequence of static tableaux morts. In New York, the first-night audience’s response seemed muted after 3½ hours during which very little happens as the characters wait for the bomb to go off and muse on its consequences. Adams claims not to be political, but his recent work has been buttock-achingly preachy and politically correct. His message, inevitably, is that the invention of the atom bomb was A Very Bad Thing — its creators, Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, realise this too late, of course — and that the destruction of Hiroshima was a crime. The final five minutes are certainly climactic, as a wall-shaking electronic rumble reverberates through the auditorium and the orchestra crescendos to an agonising scream, followed by a numbed pulsing, with the voice-over of a Japanese mother begging for water for her child. This is the only moment that truly tugs at the heartstrings, but it is way too little, way too late. Certainly, Adams’s score is no mere rerun of his rippling, Jacuzzi-like comfort-bubbling in Nixon and his more accessible concert works. The harmonic language is grittier, more dissonant and less lushly orchestrated, and each of the two 90-minute acts is preceded by apparently random radio noise, as if switching stations on an old-fashioned transistor. Apart from a rapt soliloquy for Kitty Oppenheimer (the lustrous sounding and good-looking young mezzo Sasha Cooke) and a low-lying mantra for her Native American maid, Pasqualita (the booming Meredith Arwady), the vocal writing is instantly forgettable. Gerald Finley sings and acts with his accustomed dignity and charisma as the atomic bomb’s painfully self-questioning inventor, and there is decent support from Richard Paul Fink (Teller), Earle Patriarco (Frank Hubbard) and Eric Owens (General Groves). Alan Gilbert, the new music director of the New York Philharmonic, gets brilliant playing from the Met Orchestra, but even he, and they, can’t cover up the lazy repetition that is an indivisible component of Adams’s post-minimalist style. Woolcock’s work — and that of her set and costume designers, Julian Crouch and Catherine Zuber — is solid but hardly earth-shattering. Saddled with Sellars’s nonstarter of a libretto, it probably couldn’t be.

Mark Swed, LA Times, 28 October 2008 [Extract] http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-et-notebook28-2008oct28,0,240493.story Words from the past, insights for today Old American thinking in ‘Lecture on the Weather’ and ‘Doctor Atomic’ has lessons for modern-day U.S. …Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Opera was in the midst of presenting the New York premiere of John Adams’ recent “Doctor Atomic,” which I saw Saturday night. These are strikingly timely works in which past American thought provides acute insight into our country’s present situation. In both, weather is the central dramatic device.
…”Doctor Atomic” follows the last 24 hours in the creation of the atomic bomb in New Mexico at the end of World War II. Hitler’s Germany has fallen, but war continues in the Pacific. Nuclear might is America’s ticket to becoming the world’s first superpower. Truman is about to meet with Stalin and Churchill, and he demands the bomb. The first test must progress in the desert on schedule, despite forecasts of rain that could create a radioactive catastrophe.
…Adams’ opera uses a constructed text. Peter Sellars arranged documentary materials from recently declassified papers, allowing the scientists in question to speak their own words. He also put poetry into the mouths of the morally conflicted leader of the top-secret Manhattan Project hidden away in the Southwestern desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his wife, Kitty.
Through the lyrics of John Donne and lines from the Hindu spiritual work the Bhagavad-Gita, Oppenheimer confronts the world-changing meaning of the moment. The New York poet Muriel Rukeyser is Kitty’s voice.
At the beginning of the second act, Kitty warns of dreams converted into “a resting place among the flight of things.” A storm brews in the orchestra, along with the sound of rain. The Oppenheimers’ Native American maid, Pasqualita, holds the couple’s baby and sings of thunder, lightning and cloud-flower blossoms in a voice deep and dark that sounds as though it comes from below the soil. The test proceeds. Time slows down to allow more than one voice to be heard, more than one meaning to be considered, complexity to occur. The 20-minute countdown to detonation lasts an almost unbearably meaningful 45 minutes on the stage.
The Met production, unfortunately, is utterly dry. The company, in its first attempt at an Adams opera, rejected Sellars’ original production for San Francisco Opera, which premiered “Doctor Atomic” three years ago. That production went through extensive revisions when it was subsequently mounted by the Netherlands Opera and Chicago Lyric Opera and can now be seen on an extraordinary DVD, directed by Sellars, in which every word uttered, every emotion expressed has riveting immediacy.
The Met, instead, imported Penny Woolcock, a British film director with a penchant for the violent and sexually tawdry sides of the British underclasses. Her previous operatic undertaking was a grippingly naturalistic film of Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer.”
That affinity for raw realism appears to be a cinematic talent. For the Met production, Woolcock relies on a movable prosaic set by Julian Crouch in which characters and chorus members stand and sing. Uninteresting films, say of rainfall, are projected to suggest the weather and the landscape, unlike the electrical-storm tension brilliantly evoked in the Sellars production with effects very similar to the ones that Cage used in “Lecture.”
Some cast members from the earlier productions — Gerald Finley (Oppenheimer), Eric Owens (Gen. Groves), Richard Paul Fink (Edward Teller) and Meredith Arwady (Pasqualita) — are compelling performers, but they all seemed uncomfortable on the Met stage. Sasha Cooke’s Kitty was well sung but blandly operatic. Her words couldn’t be understood. Amplification, which Adams calls for, amplified the chorus’ stiffness of utterance. Alan Gilbert conducted with surety and a feeling for orchestral beauty, but he did not match the tension or passion of Robert Spano’s performance in Chicago.
The Met’s rendering of the Manhattan Project is not one of its current attempts to connect with Manhattan Modern art. Sellars, by contrast, employed the hyperactive choreography of Lucinda Childs, which translated the excitement of scientific discovery into dazzling movement. That immediately brought to my mind Experiments in Art and Technology, the ’60s project in which avant-garde New York artists and Bell Laboratory scientists worked together. Childs was involved in E.A.T., as was Cage.

Thomas May, playbillarts, 26 Oct 2008
http://www.playbillarts.com/features/article/7794.html Metropolitan Opera: Poetic Device Opera inevitably deals with characters caught in larger-than-life emotional or political turmoil. But in the case of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic – which had its Met premiere on October 13 – the subject matter is particularly compelling.
The opera, in a new production by acclaimed filmmaker Penny Woolcock, conducted by Alan Gilbert, dramatizes a modern-day event of truly epic implications: the inauguration of the nuclear era with the first atomic bomb test during the tense final summer of World War II. “The manipulation of the atom, the unleashing of that formerly inaccessible source of densely concentrated energy, was the great mythological tale of our time,” Adams writes in his recently published memoir, Hallelujah Junction. With the bomb’s successful explosion, “the relationship between humans and the planet they inhabit changed unalterably.” Adams, one of today s most successful and frequently performed composers, has developed a reputation for mining the tremendous mythic and symbolic potential of contemporary stories and events. At the same time, his colorful and sensuous music appeals to audiences in a way rarely achieved by a 21st-century composer—a combination Woolcock finds particularly stimulating: “I feel like the luckiest person in the world working on this, because John’s music is so beautiful, and the subject is so thrilling and important.” Doctor Atomic is the fifth of Adams’s six stage works to date, and with its focus on the resonance of figures and events familiar from contemporary American history, it follows the example Adams established in his first opera, the 1987 Nixon in China (which considered the clashing ideologies of the Cold War). In physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his quest for the bomb, Adams found a modern figure who seemed custom-made for his high-stakes approach to opera. Oppenheimer, one of the most brilliant minds in 20th-century science, oversaw the climax of the Manhattan Project to develop and test the first atomic bomb in the remote New Mexico desert, at a site designated “Trinity.” “For me, the key thing is this feeling of excitement,” says Woolcock, who is making her Met debut directing this production. “You have the cleverest people in the world all locked together in the most beautiful place in the world, in Los Alamos, and they’re working at pushing the boundaries of knowledge, connecting with the essence of the universe.” Also remarkable, she adds, was the relative youth of these scientists (Oppenheimer himself was only in his early 40s at the time). “I think they lost sight of the fact that what they were dealing with was death and destruction.” Oppenheimer, certainly, was a highly cultured and immensely gifted genius who saw the order of physics mirrored in his profound love of poetry, music, and painting. An accomplished linguist, he endlessly quoted Baudelaire in the original French and even learned Sanskrit to read the Bhagavad Gita. Yet he was fated to harness this humanist sophistication for the purposes of managing the development of an obscenely destructive weapon. Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who plays Oppenheimer at the Met, created the demanding role in the 2005 world premiere at San Francisco Opera and sang it in subsequent productions in Chicago and Amsterdam. For him, the physicist’s combination of scientific and artistic insights creates an irresolvable conflict. “He is challenged by his supreme gift as a human being, both intellectual and spiritual,” Finley explains. “That’s the one thing he wrestles with. What makes him such an interesting character is that one or the other of those sides of him rises up and tries to justify the other. And then, because of his critical, scientific mind, he also realizes he’s a weak human being in terms of his own moral fiber.” This profound tension and sense of moral contradiction, a key element of Doctor Atomic, is reflected in the unusual nature of its libretto. In place of realistic dialogue, Peter Sellars — Adams’s long-term operatic collaborator who directed the American and European premieres of Doctor Atomic — wove a mélange of “found” texts, all from preexisting material. His libretto juxtaposes chilling memos and meeting minutes from government documents that were only recently declassified with memoirs and the poetry Oppenheimer uses to express his most intimate thoughts. Working with Woolcock in bringing Doctor Atomic to life on the Met stage are designers Julian Crouch (sets), Catherine Zuber (costumes), and Brian MacDevitt (lighting), with video projections by Fifty Nine Productions and choreography by Andrew Dawson. The opera’s setting entails a dramatic confrontation of perspectives. Anyone who has visited Los Alamos knows the breathless beauty of the high-desert landscape. Doctor Atomic contrasts the technical prowess that fashioned the bomb with the attitude toward nature represented by the ancient traditions of the native Pueblo Indians. “The Indians are no less rational,” says Adams, “but rather than being actors in this drama, they are the observers. They know that if they listen carefully enough, the rocks may reveal other secrets that science is powerless to explain.” Woolcock is especially interested in the awareness of a “disruption to the natural order” that the opera’s female characters (Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, and their Tewa maid, Pasqualita) experience while the men congregate on the desert floor to conduct their experiment. Together with Crouch — the designer and associate director of last season’s stunning Satyagraha — Woolcock says that her staging aims “to create a space that is easily transformable and able to shift from desert to lab to domestic interior.” After making a personal visit to the original New Mexico locations, she realized that one challenge of their visual concept would be “to create something very beautiful, even though the opera is probably about the darkest, most dreadful subject you could choose.” The outward drama that Doctor Atomic recounts is a story whose outcome we of course already know. But Adams’s music generates a momentum of present-tense anticipation through its ingenious manipulation of rhythmic energy and richly colorful orchestration (including an electronic soundscape). Among the complex score’s many challenges is sustaining the hallucinatory sequence that threads through the final act, as the countdown dissolves into the musical equivalent of relativity. “The great thing about writing for the stage,” says Adams, “is that it prods you to come up with musical ideas you would never have thought of otherwise.”

El Porvenir, 9 November 2008 [Spanish] http://www.elporvenir.com.mx/notas.asp?nota_id=263844

Carlos Paul, Jornada, 8 November 2008 [Spanish] http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/11/08/index.php?section=cultura&article=a07n1cul

David Shengold, Gay City News, 6 November 2008 http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20190594&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=592781&rfi=6 Modern Visions John Adams and Peter Sellars’ intriguing “Doctor Atomic” premiered in San Francisco in 2005, with later performances in Chicago. Dissatisfied with Sellars’ staging, Peter Gelb opted for a new one by first-time opera director Penny Woolcock. It scored at least a succes d’estime at the Met, thanks especially to the remarkable generosity of a donor underwriting $30 orchestra seats for thousands of patrons, including many students.
The evening’s dramatic weaknesses (October 25) mainly resulted from the uneven quality and nature of Sellars’ “assembled” libretto, in equal parts moving and pretentious. It is distancing, despite Adams’ beautiful scoring of their nocturnal scene, to have the Oppenheimers converse mainly in quoted poetry; furthermore, both Kitty Oppenheimer and the other female character, the Native American Pasqualita, sing a great deal of vocalise, as if Womankind in the piece’s world were some kind of inchoate, inarticulate Sensitivity. The reductive treatment of the Native American characters is as shamelessly racist as chez Belasco and Puccini’s Wowkle and Joe, despite the creative intentions being steeped – drowned? – in political correctness. Pasqualita’s repetitive phrases about nature, motherhood, and ritual denied any kind of real subjectivity; worse, as the bomb blast approaches she is surrounded by mute, feathered-attired warriors deployed entirely as symbols.
Both in the libretto and the production, some elements just seem like padding; but, in the second act, Adams sustains the tension by means of rhythm and canny orchestration.
Julian Crouch’s set proved a mixed success. A heavy scrim depicting the Table of Elements as of 1945 obscured the initial images of a white multi-topped tent figuring as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains – and, finally, as the mushroom cloud – and a kind of a Calder mobile of exploded material that hung above the proceedings, as, later, did the bomb itself.
The scrim lifted to disclose a three-tiered structure across the stage for the chorus – exactly as in the recent “Orfeo” and “Peter Grimes”; one fears that this device, which limits the playing space and slants stage action towards the oratorio-like, has become the visual signature of the Gelb regime. The scientists – the “elements” of the Manhattan Project – each had a cubicle.
The set later opened and rotated to produce different spaces, but confinement in the boxes exacerbated some of the distortion inherent in Adams’ having written this massive, generally impressive score with the presumption of microphone-enhanced singing.
Gerald Finley’s Oppenheimer, magnificently sung and acted, proved inspiring. Very strong holdovers from 2005 include Eric Owens’ blustering general, the excellent light tenor Thomas Glenn as an idealistic young scientist, and Richard Paul Fink bringing his Alberich-like cynicism and capacious voice to the complex figure of Edward Teller.

Sasha Cooke, a fine young recitalist, disappointed as Kitty – too many problems with intonation and hard-edged ascending intervals. Meredith Arwady’s earthy contralto sounded splendid in Pasqualita’s largely melismatic writing.
The instrumental playing was not spotless in this fourth performance, but debutant Alan Gilbert- newly appointed chef of the New York Philharmonic – makes a welcome, capable addition to the conducting roster.

Wayne Myers, Oneida Daily Dispatch, 3 November 2008 [extracts] http://www.oneidadispatch.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20186625&BRD=1709&PAG=461&dept_id=92780&rfi=6 Now how exciting would it have been if the Metropolitan Opera had staged, on the double-huge occasion of its 125th anniversary season and its first premiere, on Monday, Oct. 13, of a John Adams opera in its history, the Peter Sellars-directed version of “Doctor Atomic” that already had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Oct. 1, 2005? That was followed by stagings by the opera’s co-producers at Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam and Lyric Opera of Chicago. The Met, just as it should have, went its own way with this momentous work. Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb is a person who looks at what everyone else is looking at but sees something different. Which is why his decision to opt for a new production, in collaboration with English National Opera, of “Doctor Atomic”-rather than the Sellars staging-so soon after the opera’s world premiere should not have been a surprise… …Also not surprising was Gelb’s hiring of British television and film director Penny Woolcock, who directed the 2003 television adaptation of Adams’ second opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” to helm the elegiac “Doctor Atomic,” with a libretto Sellars manufactured from declassified Manhattan Project documents, memoirs and poetry. The Met continues to sign a widening gallery of today’s top directors, including Mary Zimmerman, Bartlett Sher, John Doyle, Mark Morris and Adrian Noble, better known for their work in other performance mediums than opera, with eye-grabbing, if not always successful, results. When he announced in August 2007 that Woolcock would direct “Doctor Atomic,” Gelb said, “In the case of ‘Doctor Atomic,’ I believe this monumental work by John Adams is of such merit that it deserves a production created uniquely for our [the Met and ENO] two stages.” …I was on hand for the Met’s Oct. 25 performance of “Doctor Atomic” and expect the worldwide “Live in HD” showing to be just as riveting. The sloppiness of life with its mix of art and the mundane as zero hour approaches in the New Mexico desert at the makeshift Los Alamos base camp was summed up no better than in Gen. Leslie R. Groves’ remarkably trivial recitative about his failed diet and calories, sung by Eric Owens in his long-overdue Met debut. The paunchy general says goodnight and Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, as urbane nuclear physicist and Manhattan Project head J. Robert Oppenheimer, in a custom-made suit and wearing his pork pie hat, unleashes his grave fears and doubts that he carefully conceals from everyone, including his wife, Kitty, his intellectual match, in “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” a musicalized John Donne sonnet, alone in the dead of night at the Trinity test site, as the wire-enmeshed “Gadget,” the spherical plutonium implosion device, dangles like some monstrous, fatal pendulum nearby. It is an extraordinary, fearsome aria. In the double-meaning Act 1 duet “Am I in Your Light?” mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke as Kitty Oppenheimer, with pleasing tones in her first big Met role, tenderly delivers verses of New York poet Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry to her husband, who responds with Baudelaire in this brief romantic interlude he allows amid his single-minded pursuit. Finley and Cooke’s performances fill the house. Kitty grows increasingly isolated in the ensuing hours of uncertainty and is left to ponder the awesome changes at hand in the aria “Easter Eve 1945,” while Pasqualita (Meredith Arwady in her Met debut), her Tewa Indian maid, sings songs and lullabies from the ages. Set designer Julian Crouch’s Los Alamos base camp is a visual depiction of compartmentation. Manhattan Project personnel cram the cubbyholes. Most of the personnel are under severe pressure, and the stress begins to tell as they struggle with moral ambiguity and crises of conscience. A massive mobile of irradiated metal shards, an explosion almost frozen in time, slowly twists and turns, propelled by desert zephyrs, in the mountain background. The incessant drenching rain, personified by dancers in the Sellars staging, that threatens the A-bomb test becomes projected rain in the Woolcock version. But the rain gradually transforms into an animated version of something akin to Japanese “floating world” woodcuts. It is an unsettling effect. Costume designer Catherine Zuber’s three-piece suits, the dress code of government bureaucracy, contrast starkly with the western and Native American dress of the locals. New York Philharmonic music director-designate Alan Gilbert, timely making his Met debut, conducted beautifully from the Amsterdam performance score.

Jörg Königsdorf, Sueddeutsche, 5 November 2008 Translated by Petra Habeth http://www.sueddeutsche.de/558388/002/2617333/Gleissende-Wellen.html Glistening waves 3 years ago the hopes of the American nation were lying like a lead weight on John Adams when he presented his fifth opera. His Dr Atomic should become nothing less than the outstanding American national opera and the surtitle of the piece, “an American Faust”, showed that the composer wanted to meet the claim. The world premiere at San Francisco was not able to resolve sufficiently whether this opera, about the first test-firing of the atomic bomb, really is the longed for masterpiece. Peter Sellers, the director and librettist, possibly simply lacked the necessary distance from his own text. Now America’s greatest opera house has embraced the forthcoming production. At New York’s Metropolitan opera the Argentine film-director, Penny Woolcock, who already produced the film-adaption of Adams’ “terrorist-opera” the death of Klinghoffer, finds powerfully suggestive images for the events in the Los Alamos desert and imprisons the frustrated, blinkered, bomb-builders in a row of solitary cells. Degenerate characters – for whom cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be wiped out as easily as formulae on the chalkboard. The atomic bomb is, therefore, simply the logical consequence of an out of touch society. It is a pity that the opera debutant only saw the bigger picture but has neither the tools nor the feeling for the smaller details. The human beings are trapped in their trivial, everyday routines. For the huge feelings which live in Oppenheimer’s breast ([played by] Gerald Finley), Woolcock finds only striking gestures. But the high pressure which is created by Alan Gilbert in the orchestra pit rises above this. In his Met debut Alan Gilbert, the designated director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, conducts Adams’ opera as a masterpiece, and gives the glistening sound-patterns, with which Adams portrays the error in the structural controlling system of the American society, the dramatic wave effect of an Verdi opera. The Americans can be content.

Irene Backalenick, Jewish-theatre.com http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=3062 J. Robert Oppenheimer Explodes on the Met Stage
Several notable Jews have played critical roles in this modern era. Consider Freud, Marx, Einstein. But, at the very heart of the atomic age stands J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed up the Manhattan Project, the top-secret World War II program which developed the first atom bomb. What better choice of an anti-hero for the stage? What better topic, with its epic proportions, for an opera? And now indeed composer John Adams makes Oppenheimer the key figure in his new, striking opera, “Dr. Atomic.” The spotlight focuses on Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, New Mexico, at a crucial moment in his career—the period just prior to the explosion of the first atom bomb. (Adams is given to focusing on critical moments in modern history. Consider his track record, which includes “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer.”) The score for “Dr. Atomic” is appropriately mystical, ominous, reflecting both Oppenheimer and his project. It is music which leaves one decidedly uncomfortable, particularly those of us more partial to such melodic traditional operas as “La Boheme” or “Tosca.” The opera had its debut at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 (with Adams’ score and libretto by Peter Sellars). Now its New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera is an equally striking production under direction of Penny Woolcock, a British filmmaker. Julian Crouch’s set is brilliant, giving the story the epic proportions it is meant to have. Scenes with Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, and her concerns over the project, add a human and contrasting element. In one scene Kitty waits it out with her maid Pasqualita, and later the maid sings a lullaby to the Oppenheimers’ child. Gerald Finley, as Oppenheimer, is in fine voice, and Sasha Cooke gives a moving portrayal of Kitty. It is a chilling theme. One can never consider the atom bomb, and its emergence, without considering subsequent consequences—the demolition of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender. And the dangers of a nuclear age. Should the bomb have been used to annihilate, not only enemy targets, but human beings? Should a new era which might well destroy all of civilization have been set in motion? Hence Oppenheimer would become a controversial figure—both for his role in nuclear development and, on a lesser note, for his left-wing views. Initially lauded for his leadership role, ultimately he would be reviled, in the intensely anti-communist McCarthy era, as a communist sympathizer, with severe consequences for his career. And always there would be the part he played in launching the atom bomb. But Oppenheimer’s life and outlook would be loaded with contradictions. An acknowledged genius in the world of science, at the same time he had a philosophic bent with an interest in Eastern religions and languages. He was well aware of what he had set in motion. On seeing the first test explosion, he found himself quoting a passage from the Hindu sacred test, the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Yet he had come out of a middle-class Jewish background (the son of Julius Oppenheimer, a wealthy textile importer, and Ella Friedman Oppenheimer, a Baltimore artist, and grew up comfortably in New York. But genius makes its own way, and Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and moved on to get his doctorate in Gottingen, Germany, in 1927. He would return to the States to teach at Cal Tech and University of California at Berkeley and make significant contributions in theoretical physics. But the contradictions would remain for this student of Sanskrit and eastern philosophies. So, too, are the contrasts posed in “Dr. Atomic” in its music, staging, libretto—dark against light, horror against hope, yin versus yang. In all, “Dr. Atomic” will not be to the taste of every opera-lover. But it does take on one of the central issues of our time—bringing a time-honored art form into the 21st century.

John Allison, The Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 2008 Breaking most rules about the viability of new opera, John Adams composes works that get widely performed. He is also unusually lucky with productions. At Monday’s opening of Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, everyone on stage worked hard to disguise some fundamental weaknesses in Adams’s portrait of J Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atom bomb’. They almost succeeded. Making her opera house debut, the British director Penny Woolcock – who rehabilitated Adams’s controversial Death of Klingluffer on film – takes a radically different approach to the work’s librettist, Peter Sellars, who directed the San Francisco Doctor Atomic world premiere three years ago. Sellars’s production buried the story under stylised ritual. Woolcock stresses the human element and the moral dilemma of those who worked at the bomb’s Los Alamos test site in 1945. Sellars helped Adams make his operatic reputation – his staging of Nixon in China (1987) was in no small part responsible for the opera’s ‘modern classic’ status – but he seems an increasingly cranky figure. His libretto here is amish-mash of’ found’ texts, ranging fiom dry scientific documents to the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita. Some of these texts reflect the scientists’ cultivation, but phrases such as ‘We’ll kickstart the reaction with a modulated initiator’ don’t exacdy lend themselves to music. And in dealing with the inauguration of the nuclear age rather than Oppenheimer’s later remorse and fall from grace, Sellars is one-dimensional. The same can be said of Adams’s score. Making his Met debut, the conductor Alan Gilbert marshals everything with authority, yet there is no disguising the manufactured feel of Adams’s music. His ‘maximalist’ writing is clogged with mediocre ideas, moving predictably between the hyper-kinetic idiom that has long been his trademark and a newer style exemplified in some flashy yet superficial love music. Once in the three-hour score, and to stunning effect, Adams comes up with something equal to the subject matter. Oppenheimer’s soliloquy at the end of Act I draws on John Donne’s ‘Batter my heart’, and in music of searing gravitas, Oppenheimer contemplates the cosmic implications of his terrible creation. The baritone Gerald Finley repeating the  role written for him, sings it magnificently. The cast also includes memorable portrayals from the bass-baritone Richard Paul Fink as Oppenheimer’s conscience-stricken colleague, Edward Teller, and the young mezzo Sasha Cooke, who as Kitty Oppenheimer gives notice of an exciting, bigtoned new voice. Julian Crouch’s design is stark and simple. Taking the periodic table as his visual leitmotif, he fills stacked cubicles with people and covers them with projections. The bomb dangles ominously alongside a giant mobile of floating debris. But neither Crouch nor Woolcock finds a way round the strangely anticlimactic countdown on which the work ends.

Renaud Marchart, Le Monde, 16 October 2008 Le décevant “Doctor Atomic” Translated by Jane Garratt http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2008/10/16/le-decevant-doctor-atomic_1107709_3246.html The deceptive Dr Atomic The operas of the American John Adams (born in 1947), the most frequently performed by a living composer of learned music, were all conceived with his compatriot the movie director Peter Sellars, the author of the libretto of Doctor Atomic (2004-2005). The fifth of the six of Adams’ lyric works narrates the last hours before the first ignition of the atomic bomb invented by the scholar Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) which hit Hiroshima in August 1945. Although the former “enfant terrible” of lyric production had never worked at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (” The Met “) and although his production of Doctor Atomic, created by the San Francisco Opera in 2005, will be presented this autumn in the legendary Lincoln Center hall, which he criticized recently for its conservatism, his visit was delayed once more. Certainly Sellars will bring back Nixon in China (1985-1987), which was the first work of the legendary duo he forms with Adams, in the course of the 2010-2011 season at the Met but, according to the New York Times of October 12th, disagreements about Doctor Atomic could not be solved. His production was appreciated in different ways at its creation, notably because dancers made gazelle jumps right in the centre of servicemen and scholars, during the interminable wait for the test in July 1945 at Los Alamos in the New – Mexico. (The production, filmed at the time of the return of the Amsterdam Opera in 2007, was produced on DVD by Opus Arte.). Peter Gelb, the managing director of Met, therefore preferred to call upon the British woman Penny Woolcock – suggested by Adams – known for documentaries and of socially engaged films. [She is also known for] for the extremely successful film version (2003) of The Death of Klinghoffer (1990-1991) (1 DVD Decca), the opera conceived by Adams, Sellars and the librettist Alice Goodman around the tragic hijacking of the Achille-Lauro by a Palestinian commando unit. As the look of Sellars is imaginary, stylized, at the risk of being sometimes unintelligible and systematic, so that of Penny Woolcock is realistic and practical, as she confided to the New York Times. But result is discouraging because it really does not distance itself from that of Sellars: Penny Woolcock also filled the emptiness with symbolism. This impression of similarity between both productions is aggravated by the fact that the cast is the same that that of San Fransisco and Amsterdam (Le Monde, September 5th, 2005 and June 15th, 2007) and dressed identically: the excellent Gerald Finley (Oppenheimer), Eric Owens (General Groves) and Richard Paul Fink (Edward Teller), rejoined by Sasha Cooke, in the role of Mrs Oppenheimer, less moving and emotional than Jessica Rivera in Amsterdam. The clumsy treatment of the chorus underlines the British woman’s lack of experience, she has never worked on the stage, further more she had never seen an opera before they offered her the staging of Doctor Atomic. Much rested on the shoulders of Sellars: the length of the work, which is nevertheless endowed with wonderful pages, the absence of a climax at the end of an unending act. In spite of some musical revisions, one is very bored again after the interval, and infinitely more so than in Amsterdam in 2007. The feeling of expectation and temporal expansion is one of the most perilous which exists in Opera. The great names, such as Tchaikovsky in the night scene, between bedtime and daybreak, of Tatiana’s letter in Eugene Onéguine, know how to give the illusion of a u-turn of feeling in only twenty minutes. John Adams himself magnificently achieved this in The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), El Niño – created in Paris in 2000 – and in his last opera, the wonderful A Flowering Tree, created in Vienna in 2006, which appears on disc at the beginning of November (2 CD Nonesuch). The conductor Alan Gilbert (the next musical director of the of New York Philharmonic Orchestra) seems on top of his game, but the result lacks sensuality and poetry. The Met Orchestra, very good but not very used to this, rhythmically very difficult, type of music seems to walk on eggshells. Let us assume that the musicians of New York will show a more persuasive strength in this work after several performances than the French will discover on big screen during a transmission in HD, on November 8th, direct from the Met. Photo: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

Steve Paul, The Kansas City Star, 15 November 2008 [extract] http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/story/889924.html “Doctor Atomic” and powerful jazz sax man are a riveting weekend combo I frequently subscribe to the wild-hair school of weekend time-management. That’s as good an explanation as any for why last Saturday I found myself revisiting our nation’s atomic history at an opera in Kansas City and Sunday afternoon contemplating the future of jazz in Columbia. The theater, at Cinemark Palace on the Plaza, was surprisingly uncrowded at noon Saturday for the live, high-definition, digital broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Doctor Atomic,” John Adams’ recently launched work about nuclear scientists on the brink of changing the world. It was surprising, because my first experience with one of these Met broadcasts was a sold-out show in the suburbs, and here was a chance to experience an important new opera from a (the?) leading American composer of our day. Oh well. I settled into the arena seat and shared the auditorium for the next three and a half hours with perhaps 75 people. Let me testify to the advantage of watching an opera unfold live on a modern movie theater’s big screen, compliments of the latest digital technology. There was only one of those very brief pixelated hiccups deep into the show. The sound was generally crisp and bright. You get the added features of backstage interviews at intermission, including, in this case, a few minutes with our old Kansas City friend and most prominent atomic-bomb historian Richard Rhodes. The camera work brings you up close and personal to the performance in a way you could never experience in person. And the spit stays within the screen. But how was the opera? In a word: riveting. “Doctor Atomic” portrays a brief slice of time in the New Mexico desert. It’s the hours leading up to the first test explosion of a nuclear weapon in July 1945, just a few weeks before bombs were let loose on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The central character is the nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose conscience is in turmoil as the historic mushroom-cloud moment approaches. His imperious military boss, his argumentative colleagues, his lonesome, boozy wife and their symbolically spiritual Indian housekeeper all buffet Oppenheimer’s anxious journey. Adams’ post-minimalist, occasionally celestial score seemed fitting and stirring. Peter Sellars nimbly and brilliantly cooked up the libretto from a mix of documentary sources (letters, memoirs and the like) and poetry ranging from John Donne to Baudelaire to Muriel Rukeyser to the Bhagavad Gita, which provided Oppenheimer his famous reaction to the first nuclear-bomb event: “I am become death.” The poetry, of course, sings better than some of the dialogue, though, I suppose, lyrics with words like “icosahedron” are no less true to the tale than some of the dewy doggerel that appears in the European operatic canon. Baritone Gerald Finley was superb as Oppenheimer, and soprano Sasha Cooke was radiant as his wife, Kitty, especially voicing Rukeyser’s poetry in the first-act aria “Am I in Your Light?” The supporting cast was generally impressive, as was the stagecraft (including the bomb) and occasionally surreal choreography. More good news: You can catch an encore HD broadcast of “Doctor Atomic” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at one of several area movie theaters.

Photo: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

F. Plotkin, Opernglas, December 2008 Translated by Petra Habeth https://www.opernglas.de/ Performance on 13 October After their world premiere most contemporary operas vanish normally from the playing schedule. There are modern works like “Dead man walking” from Jake Heggie which are replayed around the world but this is the exception. Against this background it is a remarkable decision of General Manager Peter Gelb to launch a new production of “Dr Atomic”, the opera of John Adams which had its world premiere in 2005 in San Francisco. It was the first opera by John Adams to be performed at Met. In the season 2009/10 “Nixon in China” will follow. “Doctor Atomic” tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who was leading the “Manhattan Project” from which in summer 1945 the atomic bomb emerged. In respect of content it has beautiful artistic and human aspects side by side with awesome science. Without the terror, beauty would not be so fascinating. Oppenheimer was very literate and loved poetry. The boldness of new scientific discovery, including the potential to change the whole world, intoxicated him. Oppenheimer was so fixed on this Manhattan Project that he probably lost sight of the social responsibility. Goethe might have recognized the character of his Faust in him. Psychological reflection is not always beneficial if you look for the effect on stage. John Adams and his librettist Peter Sellars have decided to let the opera finish with the moment when all those involved await the testing of the bomb for the first time. Whereas in Schönberg’s melodrama “Erwartung” a 20 minutes wait works, it is less effective in an opera 3.5 hours long. The world premiere of Doctor Atomic at the San Francisco opera was directed by Peter Sellars and he developed a fairly abstract production. With some modifications this production was later shown at Amsterdam and Chicago. For its new production the Met engaged Penny Woolcock, a British director who was producing an opera for the first time. Together with her colleague Julian Crouch who designed the sets, she tried to show the scientific aspects of the story less abstractly, for instance by projections of the periodic table of elements as it looked in 1945 with the newly detected plutonium. After the rise of the curtain, the stage is seen to be divided by three walls and in these are imbedded boxes in a kind of living display of the periodic table. The soloists and the chorus embody the individual elements in 42 boxes overall. The walls were used in other scenes for different film projections. Unfortunately this visual element seemed more to block the action, as the soloists were strongly handicapped by it. As Woolcock has no experience in arranging action on stage, several dramatic details stayed unnoticed because they took place at the edge of the stage. Catherine Zuber with her costumes that underlined the characters of the individuals, created more dramatic art than the direction.
Gerald Finley, who like Eric Owens as General Leslie Groves the government delegate for the Manhattan Project had already participated in the world premiere in San Francisco, displays a brilliant, complex and moving portrayal of Oppenheimer, resulting from his talent and his obvious intelligence. Both his charisma and his wonderful singing showed Oppenheimer in a better way than the real Oppenheimer or the direction should have allowed. Sasha Cooke, a hopeful young mezzo-soprano with a magnificent voice, trook on the role of Kitty Oppenheimer and revealed in her singing and acting a great amount of empathy. With its static composition the opera appears more like an oratorio. Maybe this will be the future of Dr Atomic. On the musical side it is really a masterpiece. The orchestra describes all possible emotions but on stage too little happens. You hear bewitching lyrical melodies, haunting descriptions of the desert of New Mexico, timeless mysticism of the American red Indians – Meredith Arwady displays as Pasqualita, a Tewa red Indian, a kind of American Erda – and the dreadful threat of the atomic bomb. Each of the markings in the score showing an aspect of beauty and fascination was revealed to the audience thanks to the excellent efforts of the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera under the direction of the American conductor Alan Gilbert who was makiing his Met debut. Gilbert who basically made his career in Europe, mainly Sweden, is the designated Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, and will succeed Lorin Maazel who will yield this position in summer 2009. After this performance, New Yorkers may look forward to him.

Photo: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

F. Paul Driscoll, Opera News, January  2009 , vol 73 , no.7 The introduction of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic to the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera on October 13 represented a remarkable act of faith: few contemporary operas have been treated to a second staging within a few seasons of their world premieres. This ambitious work, which contains some of the composer’s most glorious music, was first presented at San Francisco Opera in 2005 — and subsequently at De Nederlandse Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago — in a production by Peter Sellars, who also devised the Atomic libretto. For the Met premiere of Doctor Atomic, general manager Peter Gelb decided to invest in a brand-new production.

In her first-ever opera staging, director Penny Woolcock — best known in the U.S. for her 2003 film of Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer — showed taste and imagination in her work with set designer Julian Crouch and video designers Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer but was less successful in her deployment of the immaculately prepared Met chorus, whose serried ranks too often suggested oratorio rather than opera. And despite some interesting work with the principals — the antihero aspect of Oppenheimer’s rival, Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink), registered with more clarity than in the opera’s first staging — Woolcock failed to find consistent dramatic tension in Sellars’s semi-linear libretto, which is unwieldy and (in Act II especially) verbose enough to hamstring any stage director. Sellars’s telling of the story of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the first test of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos via a variety of “found” sources makes a marvelous concept but an incoherent narrative that is short on any kind of conventional character development. Many of the moments in the text that are distilled from poetry — the Act I closing solo for Oppenheimer, inspired by John Donne; the scene in the Oppenheimers’ bedroom, which draws on the poetry of Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser — work brilliantly; the Act II weather reports and the meanderings of the calorie-obsessed General Groves need trimming badly, as does the dramatically muddy scene between Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, and her Tewa Indian maid, Pasqualita.

Conductor Alan Gilbert, in his Met debut, missed some of the muscularity that Robert Spano brought to the work at Lyric Opera of Chicago, but realized what is probably the lushest, most perfectly colored reading of the score to date. The Met Orchestra played for him with a commitment that approached ferocity. It was fitting that the long-overdue Met debut of America’s greatest living opera composer be given a performance so rich in musical splendor.

Gerald Finley’s Oppenheimer — ruthless in attack, pellucid in delivery — remains one of the truly great opera-house performances of the past decade. The vivid General Groves of Eric Owens has grown somewhat more hectoring since the San Francisco premiere, while Thomas Glenn’s earnest Robert Wilson has gained in unaffected beauty and clarity. Contralto Meredith Arwady was suitably magisterial as the implacable Pasqualita. Sasha Cooke, a talented young mezzo now in her third year in the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development program, sang Kitty Oppenheimer with great sensitivity and point, but as yet she lacks the experience as an actor to make much of this cruelly underwritten role.

The chief glory of Doctor Atomic — whatever the production scheme — is Adams’s score, which is disciplined, intelligent and beautiful. Because Adams is capable of challenging his audiences without condescending to them, he allows — perhaps even expects — his listeners to respond to his music viscerally. One of the unforgettable moments of the Met’s Doctor Atomic was the feeling of growing anticipation within the audience itself as the end of Act II brought the detonation of the bomb closer, second by second: it was the sound of quiet intensifying into black, uneasy silence.

Photo: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

Neal Hayes, Virginia Law Weekely,   21 November 2008, Volume 61, Issue 12 [excerpts] http://www.lawweekly.org/?module=displaystory&story_id=2287&edition_id=105&format=html The Opera Comes to Charlottesville in HD The new “Metropolitan Opera HD” series is so wild it makes Feb Club seem like Sunday school. In its first installment, a frenzied teenager made love to the severed head of John the Baptist. In the second, a brilliant but conflicted scientist quoted John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, and even Hindu Scripture while he created atomic weaponry that had the power to destroy human civilization. …In the Met’s second production, Doctor Atomic by John Adams, a man took center stage. That man was J. Robert Oppenheimer as played by the Canadian baritone Gerald Finley. Oppenheimer was the director of the Manhattan Project, and Adams’s opera focuses on the events leading up to the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico. Finley’s performance bolstered the opera. He delivered the words of an occasionally unwieldy libretto with passion and conviction. In the middle of the opera, he sang the words, “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV in a show-stopping aria. Even more compelling than Finley’s voice was Adams’s orchestral score, which was directed by soon-to-be conductor of the New York Philharmonic Alan Gilbert. John Adams is one of the most famous and skillful modern American composers, and his score is colorful and vibrant. A child of the ’60s, he blends repetitive instrumental patterns with the rhythmic vitality of jazz and rock. Unfortunately, the success of an opera depends on more than the composer’s talent. The librettist, Peter Sellars, attempted to portray Oppenheimer’s inner struggle through the words of the scientist’s favorite poets, including Donne and Baudelaire, but the resulting poetic mishmash was occasionally awkward and confusing. The production of the opera was also questionable. Penny Woolcock, who has directed film versions of Adams’s other operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, produced her first opera in Doctor Atomic, and her staging often seemed too cluttered. The Metropolitan Opera deserves credit for scheduling an opera that was written only three years ago, but most people involved with staging the work seem to be still struggling to fully grasp Adams’s difficult new piece.   Photo: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

Paul E. Robinson, Scena Musicale, 21 November 2008 http://www.scena.org/blog/2008/11/j-robert-oppenheimer-as-operatic.html J. Robert Oppenheimer as an Operatic Character in John Adams’ Dr. Atomic
I went to the Met HD Live at the new Cinemark complex in Cedar Park, one of Austin’s northern suburbs. Only ten people showed up for John Adam’s Dr. Atomic. Perhaps not surprising for a contemporary piece with no big names in the cast, but cause for concern about the future of this project. More about that later.

Timely Topic: A World in Crisis & the Question of Morality
Whatever else one may say about the Dr. Atomic it served the admirable purpose of reminding us that we live under the shadow of the atom bomb and that nuclear annihilation is only an irrational finger on the trigger away. Adams’ opera deals with the first test firing of the bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico July 16, 1945. J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Manhattan Project which developed the bomb and his anguish about the morality of the project is the focus of the opera. The leading characters in addition to Oppenheimer are his wife Kitty, their American Indian maid Pasqualita and another scientist even more troubled than Oppenheimer, Edward Teller.
But while the subject matter is very timely – concern continues to rise all over the world about possible development of nuclear weapons in Iran, the sanity of Kim Jong Il in North Korea and the shaky political situation in Pakistan – I am not convinced that Adams and his librettist Peter Sellars made the right choices. To bring to life the tragic figure Oppenheimer really was it is necessary to follow his life after the development of the atom bomb. That’s when doubt and remorse set in and his behavior and questionable past even led Washington politicians to destroy his reputation. He died essentially a broken man. There is plenty of evidence that Oppenheimer associated with members of the communist Party. What’s more both his wife and brother were members. Nonetheless, Oppenheimer was chosen to head up the most sensitive wartime program involving national security. In Dr. Atomic we get only a partial view of the man and not enough of him to carry the opera.
Dr. Atomic? Not Enough of Oppenheimer’s Life in this Opera!
Looking at the story from another point of view, it could be argued that it is hardly fair to blame Oppenheimer and his colleagues for the development of the bomb and for the horrors that followed when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Adams and Sellars clearly take sides in this matter by using the Los Alamos badge photos of all the scientists involved as the equivalent of police mug shots to vilify them. But the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were basically ordered by the President and the Congress to develop an atom bomb and to do it as quickly as possible. If anyone is to blame for the bomb and how it was used, it is the politicians from Truman on down. And yet there is not a single politician in the opera, nor does anyone seem to be in contact with one. Very strange.
Natural Bedmates: Politics & War Conceive Atom Bomb!
What was the motivation for the development of the bomb? Why did they do it? After the Nazis had been defeated in Europe early in 1945, the world turned its attention to defeating the Japanese. But this war was much more uncertain and most politicians believed that it could drag on for years and that many more people would lose their lives. If it could be ended quickly many of those lives would be saved; hence, the haste to develop the bomb. This issue is hardly touched on in the opera. Instead, the opera focuses on the creation and use of atomic weapons as a difficult moral issue. But to my mind, whether that can be done without touching on war strategy or the role of the politicians is doubtful.
Operatic Style, the Meaning of it all, and Some Inspired new Arias
Dr. Atomic is not primarily a political or philosophical treatise or even a documentary; it is a work of art. Adams and Sellars draw on diaries kept by some of the participants but they rely more on poetry by Donne, Beaudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser as well as lines from the Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita.
In operatic terms much of the discussion between characters onstage is on the level of everyday speech, recitative-style, but when the characters are alone they tend to be given extended arias with poetic texts. With this procedure Adams takes the “story” out of place and time into a more abstract and universal milieu. The characters are seen ruminating not about the tactical use of nuclear weapons to win the war nor even about the use of nuclear weapons generally but about the meaning of it all, the ultimate philosophical questions.
Fair enough. Development of weapons capable of wiping out civilization as we know it easily gives rise to such questions. But from an artistic point of view, what does the borrowing of lines from Donne, etc. do for the success of the opera? The answer is a great deal in some instances. Adams’ setting of Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three person’d God” at the end of Act I is surely one of the great set pieces written by any composer in the past twenty years. But elsewhere, especially in Kitty Oppenheimer’s “arias” I felt that the composer had lost his way.
Full Effect of Atom Bomb’s Aftermath Diminished by Artistic Choice
It is surely a major fault of the opera that nearly the whole of Act II seems to be about the weather. Characters talk endlessly about the storm interfering with the test. It is obviously getting on their nerves. And ours too. In an opera about big ideas – very big ideas – it makes no sense to spend so much time discussing the weather.
But am I missing the point? Surely the weather is a metaphor for the war, the troubled minds of the scientists and the military men, etc. It is also a device to build tension. Early on opera composers learned that there is nothing like thunder and lightning on stage to bedazzle the public. It is such an old and hoary device one is amazed that a composer as experienced as Adams would be caught using it.
To my mind we can only let Adams get away with it if there is a real payoff. In this case, it has to be the test itself, the explosion of the first atom bomb, immortalized in film footage we have all seen over and over. But the site of that monstrous mushroom cloud surely remains as frightening as it was the first time we saw it. But wait. This iconic image is not used in the opera. We don’t even get a blinding flash of light. Instead, while Oppenheimer and his colleagues wearing goggles and other protective gear stare out at the audience/test site we get words being spoken in Japanese, presumably by some of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we see projected translations. The connection is made between what Oppenheimer and his team created at Los Alamos and how it was used. We are left to ponder the Faustian connection between ultimate knowledge and soul-selling.

But as I mentioned earlier, Oppenheimer and his work had a context in which his country was engaged in a life and death struggle, and in which many Americans in elective office were agonizing over the use of nuclear weapons. And if one chooses to concentrate on the role of one man – J. Robert Oppenheimer – in this project, we need a far more comprehensive picture of the man than Adams and Sellars provide.

Fine Voices, Good Conducting, and More Technical Problems
For the record, Canadian baritone Gerald Finley sang very well indeed as Oppenheimer and Alan Gilbert making his Met debut was in total command of the complex score. The young American conductor takes over next season as music director of the New York Philharmonic.

Technical problems continue to be an issue at these Met broadcasts. In two different theaters I have had to go in search of a technician to turn up the volume, on another occasion to turn down the house lights, and on yet another to reset the satellite receiver when the broadcast was interrupted. The problem is that in multiplex theaters there is no projectionist in each theater so there is no one on site to rectify problems. And in spite of all the hoopla about surround sound in these theaters the audio quality for the Met broadcasts is awful. Voices come across quite well but the orchestral sound lacks weight and depth. EMI is now releasing some of the Met broadcasts from last season. I will be interested to hear if these DVDs provide better sound than we heard in the theaters.
A ‘Good Thing’, But Will it Last? The Met HD Live project is a wonderful innovation but it is not where it needs to be if it is going to be of lasting artistic value. It worries me that so few people were in the theater for Dr. Atomic. I heard that at a repeat showing of Salome at one of the Austin theaters – with Karita Mattila giving a performance of staggering quality – hardly anyone showed up. The technical problems need to be addressed but much more needs to be done on the marketing side too. When the novelty wears off – and that appears to be starting to happen – there is work to be done at the local level to raise awareness and interest. In my experience, there is no signage for Met HD Live showings in the theaters themselves, let alone any local advertising. That is a recipe for disaster down the road.

Photo: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

Marc Shulgold, Rocky Mountain News, 28 December 2008 http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/dec/28/adams-televised-opera-lacks-magic/ Adams’ televised opera lacks magic. Composer John Adams’ latest historical piece packs drama but lacks magic. The American composer John Adams is credited with inventing a new genre: CNN opera. Curiously, he seems to be its only practitioner, having fashioned works based on real people and events – Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, etc. Maybe it’s time to move on. With Adams’ latest, Doctor Atomic, the novelty of famous historical figures singing away has worn off. Instead, we are subjected here to turgid action, unflattering music and an overwrought text that oozes poetic loftiness. It’s a shame, since the subject matter of the opera – whose Met production airs tonight on KRMA-Channel 6 – packs plenty of built-in drama. The opera is set in New Mexico in 1945, as physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller oversee preparations for the first test of the A-bomb. Aware of the ramifications of releasing the power of this “gadget” (as they called it), the two men deal with the morality of their project in different ways. Oppenheimer is here wracked with a conflict of conscience, while Teller seems more businesslike as the moment of truth draws near. As the countdown continues, there is the threat of bad weather and the fear that the explosion might ignite the atmosphere in an unstoppable chain reaction. For more angst, we have scenes with Kitty Oppenheimer, the physicist’s neglected wife. All of these elements are placed in a visually stunning world, created by the huge sets of Julian Crouch, starkly effective lighting by Brian MacDevitt and period costumes and wigs by Catherine Zuber. So, why does this ambitious undertaking disappoint? There are several culprits to blame: Adams for his surprisingly uninteresting score. As demonstrated by Nixon in China, he is capable of spinning out catchy tunes and supporting them with dynamic, captivating music. Though the Met orchestra (led brilliantly by Alan Gilbert) makes an impressive noise, nothing sticks to the gut – apart from some tense drips and drabs at the end. Vocal lines jump all over the place, sounding quite generic. Adams’ magic touch is missing. Librettist Peter Sellars (who also directed the premiere in San Francisco), who gave his characters flowery things to say, with little concern for making these people seem genuinely human. On the eve of the test, for example, Oppenheimer sings an extended aria built on a sonnet by John Donne (”Batter my heart, three-person’d God”). Yes, the real “Oppie” was a fan of poetry, but this is no substitute for what his real thoughts might have been. On the flip side, Sellars has Gen. Leslie Groves prattle on endlessly about his diet. Stage director Penny Woolcock, who allowed things to drag – literally. Principal characters were constantly puffing on cigarettes, even the Oppenheimers as they rolled around on their bed. Everything unfolded in slow motion, and the only moments of real drama came as the final seconds ticked off before the white light of the explosion. Vocally, it’s hard to fault the cast. Gerald Finley is terrific as Oppenheimer, as are Richard Paul Fink and Thomas Glenn, portraying fellow physicists Edward Teller and Robert Wilson, respectively. Sasha Cooke made easy work of Kitty’s acrobatic aria, and Meredith Arwady, as Pasqualita, also impressed.

Jörg Königsdorf, Opernwelt Translated by Petra Habeth Force of destiny The end belongs to the victims. Whereas the opera-folk on stage wearing black safety glasses remain under the spell of the first test ignition of the atomic bomb, the last minutes of “Doctor Atomic” prepare for the leap through time and space. Only the tentative voice of a Japanese woman who asks for some water for her child sounds out of the loudspeakers of the Metropolitan Opera House as if the music in the face of the catastrophe of Hiroshima abandons the claim of being actually able to describe human agony. As happened during the world premiere at San Francisco 3 years ago the New York audience remains silent for minutes in their seats after the fading of this oppressively succinct sentence – the most obvious demonstration that the message of John Adams has been received. America’s greatest composer has set himself a nearly unsolvable challenge with his 5th opera and focused his view on this point of history in which the destruction of the earth became a real future possibility. Nearly unsolvable also because there were no heroes or world-moving tyrants who were responsible for the beginning of this age in the desert of Los Alamos but little, alarmingly trivial existences who are occupied with their small every day problems: Kitty Oppenheimer for instance, the frustrated wife of the scientist, who seems to emanate from an Edward Hopper painting. Or General Owens who sings his weight problems off of his soul. Or the eponymous hero himself: the physician Robert Oppenheimer, in the subtitle apostrophised as an American Faust, reveals not until the end of the first act in his great aria “batter my heart” a consciousness – albeit without effect –  for the historic consequences of his doing. From the beginning, Adam’s music with its rhythmic orchestral sounds and its massive chorus movements, makes clear that these isolated neurotics might rebel but would not be able to stop the tide of events. The frictional force with which Adam’s develops his laminated patterns, one on top of another, advances the action in “Doctor Atomic” regardless of individual interests, and the atomic bomb is therefore only the consequence of a society which went out of joint. The weakness of the characters, against which Adams cuts the stoical nature of the Indian natives, is also the weak point of the opera. In order for these small human beings to become open to compassion Adams’ music would need help through sharpening of the characters. The direction of the world premiere (meanwhile also performed at Amsterdam and Chicago) of Peter Sellars, who also wrote the libretto, allowed the small to become too small. The Argentinian film director Penny Woolcock and her stage designer Julian Crouch who were able to borrow a large part of the cast from San Francisco, have at the Met an aloof view of the piece. Taken on its own, the multilevel shelf unit filling the breadth of the stage imprisoning the choristers in solitary cells, is a suggestive picture: Woolcock who also did a film arrangement for Adam’s terrorist opera “Death of Klinghofer” shows guinea pigs who have lost every bit of social consciousness and for whom Nagasaki and Hiroshima are just points on a map who can be as easily wiped out as formulas on a slate. It was a pity that these graphic images were undermined by clumsy handling of the performers. Like all film directors who are also opera debutantes, problems occur with all the things that are solved in a film by camera and cutting: entering and leaving the stage, creation of intimate atmospheres on a huge stage. That the opera does not lose the suspense is up to Alan Gilbert. The New Yorker who will succeed Lorin Maazel next year as head of the New York philharmonics presents himself in his Met debut as a stirring opera conductor and sets the signs on storm. The huge ensemble scenes conglomerate like heavy thunderclouds loaded with electricity, the fanfares of the brass quiver like lightning out of the orchestra pit – Gilbert creates a positive pressure, a lasting overall feeling that stays present for the whole piece like a raven-hued firmament. The rhythmic basic character on the contrary possess an inflamed wave action as if “la forza del destino” is being performed. And in a certain way that is quite true.