SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Adams, Doctor Atomic: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Lyric Opera of Chicago, Robert Spano (conductor), Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago 14.12.2007 (JLZ)

 

Production:

Stage Director: Peter Sellars
Set Designer: Adrianne Lobel
Costume Designer: Dunya Ramicova
Lighting Designer: James F. Ingalls
Sound Designer: Mark Grey
Chorus Master: Donald Nally
Choreographer: Lucinda Childs
Ballet Mistress: August Tye

Cast :

Edward Teller: Richard Paul Fink
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Gerald Finley
Robert Wilson: Thomas Glenn
Kitty Oppenheimer: Jessica Rivera
General Leslie Groves: Eric Owens
Jack Hubbard: James Maddalena
Captain James Nolan: Roger Honeywell
Pasqualita: Meredith Arwady
Lieutenant Bush: W. Patrick Dunham
Peter Oppenheimer: Aiden McGovern


On Friday, 14^th  December 2007 Lyric Opera of Chicago gave the premiere of the revised version of John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic, a powerful new work that deserves attention because of its timely and provocative content,  as well as the strength of its musical and dramatic structure. In using opera to revisit the Trinity experiment in summer 1945 - which preceded the completion and deployment of the atomic bombs in Japan -  Adams gives the public a chance to rekindle  debates about nuclear weapons, something which did occur during those critical months at the end of World War II. The positive response to this work and the discussions that emerge from considerations of it, demonstrate the viability of opera as a means of reaching an audience. The premiere at Lyric Opera of Chicago involved a broad demographic, which included members of the public who feel strongly about nuclear issues. At the same time, the audience involved those interested in new music, especially Adams’ music, which has a responsive following in Chicago.

Doctor Atomic is among the strongest of Adams’ always thought-provoking operas, which include Nixon in China (1985-87), The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), El Niño (2000), and The Flowering Tree (2006).  Completed in 2005,  Doctor Atomic was first performed in San Francisco in October of that year and received its European premiere in June 2007.  Doctor Atomic was revised by its composer for this Lyric Opera production and the version recently premiered  represents most up-to-date score.

The opera itself is a two-act work, with the first part concerning  the plans to complete the project that the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer called Trinity,  and the ensuing tensions between scientific and military communities in pursuing this critical experiment. At the core of the tension is the speculation about the success or failure of Trinity, either as a complete “fizzle” (to use a term found in the libretto) or as so phenomenally powerful that it would ignite the entire atmosphere, as Enrico Fermi once posited.  At the same time, the urgency expressed by  the military apparently shifted from the perceived competition with Nazi Germany to the war in the Pacific with Japan. At the end of the act, Adams brings in the human perspective by means of  an extended scene with Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, whose aria “Am I in your light?” is a striking piece of music that bears further hearing. This aria has a counterpart in Oppenheimer’s aria-soliloquy “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” with which the act ends:  a  number poignant for its staging in front of the bomb – Trinity – with the mechanical device atop “the Gadget”  resembling the monstrance used for Eucharistic worship.

Within the structure of the opera, the second act represents the culmination of work on Trinity as  weeks, days, and hours taper to the palpably eternal minutes before the atomic reaction occurs. As something which started as a lab-generated experiment becomes a military weapon, the ethical questions that the scientists raised in the first part find voice in the scenes devoted to Kitty and her native American maid Pasqualita. The implications of such power for future generations is clearly profound to these members of the community, whose reservations find voice in the opera, but who have no effect on what the audience knows will ensue with the deployment of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet the urgency to proceed with the testing, even within the heightened fears brought on by a fierce thunderstorm, obscures any second thoughts about execution, and the final scene brings out Oppenheimer's painful waiting with other scientists, who will see the bomb-work through to its profound conclusion.

With the successful testing of Trinity at Los Alamos, the world is transformed and enters the atomic age. However, the seeming miraculous power wrested from nature finds implementation first in the destruction of entire cities, with politics and statecraft using the technological wonder for military gain. As Sellars makes clear in his libretto, the wisdom of this was not lost on those working at Los Alamos, but any debate was contained. In fact, some of the documents that Sellars consulted were declassified only recently, and despite the distance of more than five decades, the questions raised in the opera are still timely. In creating this opera, Adams does not offer answers, but it may well be that the questions themselves, as Rilke once advised his young protégé, remain important enough, to ensure that  the ethics and morality of the atomic bomb return to the forefront of our culture. It may also be that the arts can promote such discussions when presented in such a persuasive opera as Doctor Atomic.

In relying heaving on documentation from the period, Peter Sellars’ libretto is relatively weighty with regard to text. At the same time, the perspectives on war and power offered by literature, including the Bhagavad-Gita and works by John Donne, Baudelaire, and Muriel Rukeyser are woven into the text. To present the libretto in music, Adams relied on sometimes lengthy declamatory passages often containing melodic fragments that allow certain ideas to persist long after the conclusion of various scenes. In this regard, the idiom Adams chose for Doctor Atomic resembles (in a way)  opera from the early seventeenth-century, in which  declaimed text reinforces its message. In setting the text, Adams was also careful to make it intelligible, such that the surcaps or any other graphic presentation of the text would be superfluous. This attests to the precise diction required of the singers, both principals and chorus.

As to the music though,   the work is essentially declamatory, with a colorfully scored accompaniment supporting the vocal parts. In this regard it resembles, in a sense, the  conversational style that François Poulenc used in Dialogues des Carmélites, in which its composer approached the text similarly. At times however, the vocal line moves from declamation to a more lyrical style, and this may be found in the first-act number given to the character Robert Wilson and sung by Thomas Glenn. In depicting the physicist Wilson, Adams gives voice to some of the more liberal perspectives of the scientific community present at Los Alamos, a viewpoint that was ultimately ignored if not, as suggested in the opera, actually suppressed. Glenn’s clear tenor voice sets his role apart from the other characters, who are generally represented by other, darker voice types. 

Similarly, Jessica Rivera portrayed the character of Kitty Oppenheimer well, not only in her extended scene near the end of the first act, but also in various parts of the second. Her voice is well suited to the role and her delivery suggests the subtle passion associated with Oppenheimer’s wife. In reflecting on the consequences of her husband’s work, Kitty is given the lines “Now I say that the peace the spirit needs is peace, not lack of war, but fierce, continual flame” – lines that stick in memory not only for their intrinsic meaning, but in Rivera’s delivery of them.

Yet it is the baritone Gerald Finley who defines the opera with his depiction of Oppenheimer. His conception of this “American Faust,” as the singer has referred to the character, gives the audience a real sense of the personal involvement that Oppenheimer brought to his work and its public application in the world-shattering atomic bomb. The caution and apprehension  Oppenheimer had about the project are part of Adams’ score, and Finley makes the character come to life with his phrasing, tone, and body language. His image of Oppenheimer endures past the final curtain, with his strong performance essential to the success of this fine, new work.

Other principals contributed to the overall effect of this work, with strong performances on all parts. As General Leslie Groves, Eric Owens was convincing, yet careful not to allow the sometimes obsessive character to become a caricature. Richard Paul Fink (as Edward Teller) and James Maddalena (as Jack Hubbbard) gave solid readings of their roles. Yet in conveying the reflective Pasqualita, Meredith Arwady was particularly memorable, with her evocation of desert blossoms prefiguring the mushroom clouds that would come with the testing.

The chorus was also effective in setting the tone at the opening of the first act, as it presented the text and also helped to establish the visual image of the period in which the action occurs. The choral number based on the Bhagavad-Gita, with its invocation of the god Vishnu was frightening because of the chorus’s shattering enunciation of   “At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous.” In addition, the orchestra, under the direction of Robert Spano, is to be commended for its fine handling of the details of Adams’ score. While  Doctor Atomic may be less familiar to audiences than many works in the current season, the precision and balance revealed in this performance is evidence of the fine ensemble involved with the opera.

The production itself was effective in its use of color and shading to enhance the scenes, with the depth of the Lyric stage used to fine effect for the crowd scenes and  in eliciting the expanse of the desert in the American Southwest. The lighting was particularly useful in accentuating the tone of the scenes, and the sound system of the Lyric Opera gave a realistic intensity for the pre-recorded, computer-generated sounds with which Doctor Atomic opens, as well as the similar passages later in the opera. Movement is also part of the opera, and it functions well in involving the crowd, especially in the passage that involves a description of the complex shapes of the atoms early in the work. Even so, the cadre of male and female dancers which recurred in various scenes did not always fit into the focus that characterizes this powerful work -  but this is a minor quibble in the larger context of a production that brought Adams’ well-crafted score to life so well. Moving at various levels, Doctor Atomic is a new work that uses opera to communicate the issues involved with its subject and  in  doing this, Adams has also demonstrated the ability of the artform to reach wider audiences effectively.


James L. Zychowicz 

(Those interested in this work will find further information at various websites, including http://www.doctor-atomic.com  Podcasts by Peter Sellars, Gerald Finley, and Eric Owens, as well as a Symposium devoted to Doctor Atomic are available at the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s website: www.lyricopera.org./podcast/index.asp.)