Is there a word for the opposite of synergy, the condition of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? “Antagonism” doesn’t quite do it.
Last night my wife and I saw Doctor Atomic at Chicago Lyric Opera as part of our regular subscription. Every couple of seasons there’s an opera about which my wife and I disagree and Doctor Atomic seems to be it for this season. My wife hated it; I though it was, barely, okay. It’s not that she doesn’t like modern opera, indeed, she generally likes it more than I do.
Doctor Atomic was composed by John Adams who wrote the much-acclaimed Nixon in China. It was written and directed by Peter Sellars. The opera revolves around the events leading up to the first test of an atom bomb in 1945, focusing on the Manhattan Project’s director, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Doctor Atomic’s music is quite eclectic. It’s basically a modern opera of the “continuous melody” variety i.e. no arias. The music includes influences of 20th century classical music, jazz, popular music, traditional music, recorded sounds, and electronic instruments. Quite a grab bag. It’s occasionally quite affecting and at others has a repetitive, dizzying effect not unlike a Bernard Herrman score of a Hitchcock movie. You probably won’t go out of the opera house humming the themes.
The libretto is eclectic, too, and IMO that’s its problem. It includes historical material like journal entries and interviews with the actual people, 20th century poetry, John Donne’s metaphysical sonnets, and the Bhagavad-Gita. They aren’t mutually reinforcing and it sounded very much to me as though Sellars were striving for profundity. You can’t strive for profundity. You either have something to say or you don’t and I don’t honestly think that Sellars had much to say. I found the whole of the libretto much less than the sum of its parts.
I liked the staging and production design. The opera is strongest when dealing straightforwardly with the events surrounding the development of the atomic bomband its first test. The events are dramatic enough on their own and quite suitable for opera in which everything is larger than life. It is weakest in the scenes dealing with Oppenheimer’s personal life. I think that the opera, stripped of its weak libretto, minus the home scenes, and trimmed to an economical hour and a half rather than its present total running length of three hours would make a dynamite ballet. As it is it’s the weakest opera we’ve seen this season.
Handicapping the season so far: Julius Caesar, Die Frau ohne Schatten, La Traviata, La bohème, Doctor Atomic. Advantage Julius Caesar.
The Critics
Anthony Tomasini at The New York Times is being kind:
CHICAGO — John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic†enjoyed a major success during its premiere production two years ago at the San Francisco Opera. Yet even among the work’s champions, the consensus was that this ambitious opera — about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who presided over the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs — needed some tweaking.
[…]
Once again “Doctor Atomic†came across as the most complex and inventive of Mr. Adams’s works, an engrossing operatic drama, even though very little happens. Yet by the end the entire world has changed forever.
[…]
The choristers are costumed mostly as support staff at Los Alamos: cafeteria workers, custodians, technicians, clerical aides. Mr. Sellars has devised some highly stylized and effective ensemble movements for the chorus members, as when they shuffle en masse across the stage, filled with anxiety. I still do not find that the dance elements by the choreographer Lucinda Childs add much. When the dramatic tension threatens to lag, eight dancers in T-shirts and khakis dash on to the stage and twirl around in the background.
I disagree with him on the dancing—I thought it lent more to the production than the singing.
Ambitious and probably too long, “Doctor Atomic” sometimes has a hard time making all of its disparate parts cohere (we could have done without much of the overly literal choreography). But when it works, it’s strangely captivating. Two musical highpoints come in Adams’ hypnotic choral writing (try singing a sentence like “The end of June 1945 finds us expecting from day to day to hear of the explosion of the first atomic bomb devised by man”) and in a gorgeous aria sung by Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty (Jessica Rivera) at the beginning of the second act.
But far and away the most riveting moment comes at the end of Act One, as Finley—with the life-size “Gadget” (as the scientists call the bomb) silhouetted like a grotesque moon against the sky—delivers Adams’ earth-shaking setting of John Donne’s poem “Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God.” The combination of Finley’s deeply felt performance, Adams’ soaring music, and Sellars’ ingenious staging create a feeling of enormous pathos: not just one man, but an entire civilization, looking at its deadly creation and asking, what have we done?
John von Rhein at The Chicago Tribune liked the opera a good bit more than I did:
Listen to Gerald Finley’s Oppenheimer deliver his great, John Donne-inspired showpiece that ends Act 1, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” a twisty and dense aria of fear and anguish Bach might have inserted in one of his sacred cantatas were he alive today. The Canadian baritone inhabits his role as the high-strung, chain-smoking hero, deeply torn between scientific duty and moral responsibility, with fierce understanding and commitment.
The opera’s two female figures, Rivera as the prescient Kitty and contralto Meredith Arwady as the Oppenheimers’ Native American maid, Pasqualita, pour out sad, singable lines that speak of a world defiled and bereft of peace. “Love must imagine the world,” laments Kitty, in heartbreaking phrases that drift over disconsolate strings. Both Rivera and Arwady are tremendous.
So, too, is the Lyric Orchestra, riding the nervous multiple meters and roiling crests of Adams’ scoring under Robert Spano’s vigorous yet precise baton. So, too, is Donald Nally’s chorus, sounding the elemental terror of the Bhagavad-Gita’s evocation of the Hindu god Vishnu while scientists and military personnel count off the minutes before the bomb is set off.
Sellars, working with his usual set designer, Adrianne Lobel, imagines the “Trinity” test site as an open, metaphoric space bathed in the primary colors of James F. Ingalls’ lighting and filled with constant activity that winds down in slow degrees as our anticipation of the blast grows. (Don’t worry; the effect works.) Lucinda Childs’ choreography has dancers encircling ground zero like a children’s game; supernumeraries mime the building of the bomb; poles and scaffolding and domestic set pieces move in and out.
The opera certainly invites other perspectives and will get an entirely different staging when it travels to the Metropolitan Opera next year. But because the Sellars production represents the current thoughts of its creators, it demands we take it seriously.
There is not a weak link in the cast. Although their roles are not fleshed out very much, bass Richard Paul Fink as the hawkish physicist Edward Teller, bass Eric Owens as the blustery Gen. Leslie Groves, and tenor Thomas Glenn (Robert Wilson), baritone James Maddalena (Jack Hubbard) and tenor Roger Honeywell (Capt. James Nolan) — as the voices of conscience among the project’s scientists and military personnel — are all excellent.
Don’t go to “Doctor Atomic” expecting a nice, comforting night at the opera. It’s not that kind of work. It’s not that kind of world. The opera allows you to make up your own mind as to what the issues it raises mean for the future of life on this planet. Be prepared to be moved to tears, not by easy operatic sentiment but by tough artistic truth.
The photo makes me think of Christopher Lloyd in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”