After seventy minutes of swirling musical and theatrical activity—jabbing atonal chords, barked arguments, breathless hubbub—a single man stands alone on the stage, in the shadow of his monstrous creation. The aria he sings—with words by John Donne, “Batter my heart, three-person'd God,” and a memorable, weeping tune reminiscent of John Dowland—is a moment of great musical and dramatic power. It concludes the first act of John Adams's Doctor Atomic, an opera that charts the political machinations and moral quandaries that J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project colleagues faced in the days leading up to the first test of the atomic bomb in 1945. The Donne sonnet was Oppenheimer's inspiration in naming the bomb test Trinity, and this baritone aria's musical restraint and emotional force make it as much a coup de theatre as any Shakespearean soliloquy.
“Oppie” is the beating heart around which librettist/director Peter Sellars and composer John Adams have built their imposing theatrical edifice. The operatic Oppenheimer was originally conceived to be a Faust-like character: a liberal intellectual who, having made his deal with the government, is now asking himself difficult moral questions. Baritone Gerald Finley, in quite spectacularly beautiful voice, gives dark shadows to this complex man.
To balance the politically driven scientists of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer's troubled, alcoholic wife, Kitty, and her Native American maid, Pasquelita, become Cassandra-like characters, sharing their apocalyptic visions of a dawning nuclear age. Kitty's final lines sum up this prophetic apparition: “In the flame-brilliant midnight, promises arrive, singing to each of us with tongues of flame. . . .We are hopes, you should have hoped us, We are dreams, you should have dreamed us.” Jessica Riviera throws herself into her part, giving a Lorraine Hunt Lieberson–like intensity to a role originally written for the late mezzo soprano.
Sellars assembled the opera's libretto from “original sources,” including memoirs by those involved in the Manhattan Project, recently declassified documents, books about atomic bomb making, and the elusive, seductive poems of Donne, Charles Baudelaire, and Muriel Rukeyser. These components help define the opera's “public” and “private” worlds. Almost half of the opera's length is taken up by chaotic, reportage-like public scenes, where scientists deal with the technical issues surrounding the bomb test, barking syllabic prose at each other over the shifting accents of the orchestra's minimalist strumming. The dynamic, breathless nature of these scenes is accentuated by Sellars's frenzied staging, where dancers, chorus members, and supernumeraries dash and dart across the stage.
In complete contrast is the “opium-fueled haze” of the aria-like, private, intimate scenes that form the still, quiet center of the work. The perfumed lyricism of this musical haze, with echoes of Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy, captures perfectly the poetic worlds of Baudelaire and Rukeyser. Oppenheimer and Kitty sing melismas of their love and loneliness in the act 1, scene 2 bedroom scene, spinning ever-rising roulades above an alternately throbbing or shimmering orchestral carpet. Later, in act 2, as she slowly drinks herself into a visionary stupor, Kitty pours out her arching, aching paean to peace in a setting that is akin to the affecting mezzo soprano arias in El Niño, Adams's powerful end-of-century Messiah rewrite.
Each of Adams's operas consciously inhabits its own unique musical world: Nixon in China is all pulsating triadic Glassian minimalism; Death of Klinghoffer explores a diverse musical landscape and, inspired by J. S. Bach's passions, makes effective use of choral “commentaries” and obligato arias; I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky offers up Adams as a Broadway-wannabe; and A Flowering Tree surprises as a work of velvet-upholstered lushness and Sibelius-ravaged beauty.
Doctor Atomic too is unique. In a short interview in the DVD extras, the composer reveals that it was science-fiction “doom and gloom” film music that provided early inspiration for his opera. This musical impetus is obvious at the opening, as massive, dark brass chords and thick, tangled string clusters are assaulted by the portentous beat of timpani strokes. Combined with the oppressive sounds of occasional air-raid sirens and grinding machinery, the work opens up an almost “opera noir” sound world. Adams's development of an organic, free-flowing, linear approach to musical form—in what the composer calls his “post-Klinghoffer” language—delivers plenty of wonderful music in Atomic. Earlier works, however, such as Nixon in China, Klinghoffer, and El Niño are more successful dramatic statements because of their structural constraints: They are essentially tightly organized, effective “number operas.” Without this theatrical “straightjacket,” Adams's music in Atomic has an unfortunate tendency toward long-winded rambling, as if the composer set the text to music not because of a dramatic necessity, but simply because Sellars had given him words to set.
One thing that has remained constant throughout Adams's oeuvre (back to the shimmering layers of Shaker Loops and continuing in the show-offy City Noir) is the difficulty his writing presents for orchestra, chorus, and soloists, making the success of this Netherlands Opera DVD, recorded during Atomic's second run (following the San Francisco Opera premiere), even more astonishing. Under Lawrence Renes, the members of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra handle the dangerous, edge-of-the-seat unpredictability of Adams's irregular orchestral ostinatos with aplomb. The technical brilliance of the singers, who negotiate the work's unwieldy melodic lines with ease, is matched by their ability to cope with the complex choreographic demands while still losing themselves in the drama of the work. (Gerald Finley lays out the work's challenges with typically self-effacing honesty in Wonders Are Many.) If there is a weakness in the cast, it would be Ellen Rabiner's focused but visibly uncomfortable Pasqualita.
Sellars directs his own opera productions for TV. This practice is unique in the world of filmed opera, where “specialist” directors such as Brian Large give noninterventionist interpretations of opera directors’ work. In contrast, Sellars lives dangerously, bringing the cameras so close that the intimacy can be confronting, even suffocating. Whether it is in his powerfully moving Glyndebourne Theodora, his hyperactively unhinged Pepsico Don Giovanni, his seductively love-drunk Salzburg L'Amour de loin, or his recent gritty take on Zaide in Aix-en-Provence, this up-close-and-personal style seems perfectly suited for the small screen. Sweat drips from brows, eyes strain maniacally, the subtlest glances become magnified, and even the imperfections of the seemingly improvised camera work take their own role in the drama. Sellars's directorial style, revealed in both the Atomic DVD extras and Wonders Are Many, is intense and detailed, as he asks the actors (and they do feel like actors, not just singers) to bring every fiber of emotional potency to each moment, both in rehearsal and in performance.
There has yet to be an opera DVD that includes a director's audio commentary track, but until such a thing becomes the norm, Atomic's extras are interesting enough: appropriately named “mini-documentaries” on cast, crew, composer, and director, with plenty of rehearsal extracts, and an extensive interview with the articulate and passionate Sellars, seemingly shot in an underground bunker.
The title of John Else's consummately crafted documentary Wonders Are Many comes from Sophocles's Antigone and deals with man's terrible power to alter and disrupt the natural world: “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.” The film, geared toward general audiences, ambitiously weaves two stories into a single narrative: the circumstances surrounding the first atomic bomb test in 1945 and the lead-up to the premiere of Doctor Atomic in 2005. To accomplish this linkage, Else brings together a wide range of material, from archival video and photography (much of it seen for the first time) to extensive rehearsal footage. We learn that—as many of the young scientists were fathering children during the project—creation and destruction went hand in hand. We learn of Oppenheimer's love for poetry but his distaste for opera. We watch as a principal singer is unsubtly fired from the project, for reasons that remain a little unclear. We see Sellars visibly moved at the first music rehearsal as Kristine Jepson brings to life Kitty's first entrance, “Am I in your light?” We hear the nerves and stress in Adams's voice as he tells us that he doesn't yet know how to end the opera.
The only real blunder is Else's use of the operatic bomb's construction in the props studio of the San Francisco Opera as a symbol for the creation of the bomb itself. Going shopping for odds and ends in local junk shops to build a hollowed-out replica of the first atomic bomb seems an unfortunate oversimplification of the struggles and trials of these scientists.
This DVD also includes a director's commentary, in which Else talks about the long time span of making the documentary (four years), as well as the labyrinthine process of rights clearance. He mentions with regret some of the scenes, interviews, and footage that had to be edited or cut for reasons of length and natural flow. At 160 minutes, the fascinating but over-long Doctor Atomic could have benefited from more of the same effective self-editing.
