John Adams may be the world's
most fearless opera composer. Yet with his latest work, Doctor Atomic, he admits to feeling a new kind of anxiety.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has never been one to shy away from controversy. His previous operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, were both based on actual 20th-century events — the kind that tend to provoke highly charged political debates.
With his new opera, he's turned his attention to what many historians believe is the most significant event of the last century: the creation of the first atomic bomb. The opera's title character is J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who steered the Manhattan Project to its completion when the bomb was detonated in 1945 at the secret Trinity test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
In a recent interview, the Berkeley-based composer said he's never approached such a monumental subject.
"To me, the bomb is a watershed event," said Adams. "It's the historical dividing line of the human species on the planet. My greatest worry was that, given the enormity of the subject, I wouldn't be able to do it justice."
Adams may be feeling unduly modest, but his trepidation is easy to understand. The issues raised in Doctor Atomic are complex and still controversial, more than 60 years after the actual events took place.
Commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, the new opera features a libretto [compiled] by longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars. The work makes its world premiere in a San Francisco Opera production under Sellars's direction October 1 at the War Memorial Opera House; conducted by San Francisco Opera music director Donald Runnicles, it will run for 10 performances, with baritone Gerald Finley in the title role.
Like Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic is based on historical fact. In addition to Oppenheimer — who made his mark at UC Berkeley in the 1920s — the characters include Edward Teller, the Hungarian scientist often described as "the father of the hydrogen bomb"; Manhattan Project commander Gen. Leslie Groves; and Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty.
The libretto is drawn from a wide range of sources, including Oppenheimer's own writings, as well as memoirs, interviews, memos related to the project, declassified government documents, poetry and personal letters.
Adams received the Doctor Atomic commission from San Francisco Opera general director Pamela Rosenberg in 1999. The writing of the opera was difficult, Adams says. But it was the challenge of transforming the events into an opera — and, in the process, trying to make sense of history — that left him with doubts.
"It's the most important theme of my lifetime," he says. "I literally cannot think of a subject that has more potential devastation as a historical fact. Taking on something like this and trying to make a work of art out of it has been very daunting.
"The novels and the films that came out in the 1950s in the aftermath of the war tended to treat it sort of indirectly — films like Last Year in Marienbad and Hiroshima mon amour."
Adams worked on Doctor Atomic for the better part of five years. The finished score, with a running time of three hours, is his longest opera to date.
"It's his Götterdämmerung," says Rosenberg, referring to the apocalyptic final opera in Richard Wagner's massive Ring cycle. "John has taken this story to such a high artistic level. The score is wildly symphonic, but the underlying passion of the piece is very palpable."
Götterdämmerung depicts the end of a world populated by gods and mythical heroes, but, as Sellars points out, Doctor Atomic deals with real people and the events of a recent past. Like Adams, he initially found the prospect somewhat overwhelming.
"I was concerned that, in fact, the topic could not be given justice by art," Sellars explained in a recent phone call. "Like Auschwitz and Hiroshima, these are things that are in some way truly unspeakable. The one thing you don't want to do is trivialize them."
Sellars — who worked with Adams on
"It's grand opera," says the director/librettist. "It's what the art form calls for, and what the art form is capable of delivering."
Despite its grand scale, the opera's point of view is intensely focused. Set in the laboratory at Los Alamos, the Oppenheimers' home and the Trinity test site where the detonation occurred, most of the action takes place in the 24 hours leading up to the explosion. The result, says Sellars, is a heightened dramatic effect.
"The clock is ticking," he says. "At Zero Hour minus one minute, John has written four minutes of music. It's time inside time, and it's what's at stake for all of us inside every second."
In addition to the historical documents, Adams and Sellars incorporated poetry by Baudelaire. Oppenheimer, they discovered, loved poetry, named the project Trinity after a sonnet by John Donne and had a volume of Baudelaire's poems in his pocket on the night of the detonation. The libretto also sets texts by Muriel Rukeyser, the 20th-century American poet who was a schoolmate of the Oppenheimers.
"Her voice is really the spine of the opera," says Sellars of Rukeyser. "Of course, what women were saying or thinking does not appear on the public record in those decades. So when you need a person who will really say what no one is willing to say — who will actually give voice to what everyone is thinking but is not permitted to say — Muriel is an astonishing witness of that period."
Oppenheimer's literary interests may be hard to reconcile with his image as the architect of the bomb, but Adams says there are many aspects of the scientist, as well as the other larger-than-life characters in the opera, that he found surprising. For example, he learned that one of Teller's first acts upon arriving in Los Alamos was to request a piano in his quarters so he could play Mozart in the evenings.
"The physicists who came from Europe, many of them Jewish refugees, were people of immense culture," says Adams, who maintained an extensive correspondence with Teller's daughter during the writing of the opera. "They knew their Goethe, they knew their Dante and their Beethoven."
Adams sees Oppenheimer as an essentially tragic figure. After the war, the scientist became a target of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations of alleged communism among government officials ruined more than one career.
"All the pictures of him from that time look like a very deeply wounded man," says Adams. "He went to Harry Truman and said, 'We scientists have blood on our hands.' And he was destroyed. When McCarthy came to power and they decided that Oppenheimer was not good for the arms race, they looked at him as a serious threat to their plans, and they basically drummed him out of town."
Sellars says the opera doesn't just recount history; it delves into the fears and motivations driving the characters.
"The beauty of opera is that it's giving you two surfaces simultaneously," says Sellars. "One is the outside surface — what everything looks like, what you would have seen if you were there. The other thing is the aria in the middle of the night, that secret place where people's inner lives — their dreams, hallucinations, premonitions and hindsight — suddenly come into the foreground. Staging opera is always about the tension between the realistic and the more abstract, between the material record and the spiritual imprint."
That quality, he adds, allowed them to include dance (choreographed by Lucinda Childs) in the production. "In a movie about the atomic bomb," he says, "you'd never see a dance sequence."
Adams's score, says Runnicles, is "astonishing" — in addition to extended arias for the singers and large-scale writing for orchestra and chorus, the composer has written an overture for power tools and a prerecorded "sound design" incorporating bits of radio signals and 1940s jazz tunes.
It's a mammoth — and extremely intricate — score, and Runnicles, deep in rehearsals with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and Chorus, likens it to "a giant Swiss clock."
"It's intensely rhythmic," says the conductor. "There's a remarkable elemental drive to John's music."
Runnicles adds that both he and his orchestra have been affected by their work on the opera. "We are all thrilled to be part of it, and we are all intensely disturbed by the impact it's having on us. And I think that's an extremely healthy phenomenon. This is a very significant story, and it still resonates today."
As the time for Doctor Atomic's first performance draws near, Adams says he feels gratified by what he has produced.
"I think it's unique," says Adams. "Between the way Peter arranged things and the way I musically set them, what I've heard so far is just as riveting as anything I've ever done. There's a real, powerful, emotional exchange between the actors."
Still, it's clear that the composer hasn't entirely put the issues of the opera to rest. "Before the creation of the bomb, it was not realistic or within the human imagination to think that we could destroy the planet," says Adams. "We now know that this is possible — that probably, if all the nuclear warheads that are still in operation today were by some horrible event unleashed, it's quite likely that we could create the extinction of life on the planet.
"There's a moment in Act II when the scientists are sitting around, waiting for the rain to stop, and they start talking about the fact that they weren't entirely sure that this test might not ignite the Earth's atmosphere. Teller had even been given the assignment several years before to do the calculations to see if that might happen. Oppenheimer assured everyone that this wasn't likely. But just the fact that they might think along those lines is indicative of the kind of powers the human species is playing with."
The world premiere of John Adams's
Doctor Atomic
San Francisco Opera
War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco
October 1–22, 2005
$25–$235
1-415-864-3330; www.sfopera.org
For more news or to subscribe,
please visit
http://www.bayarea.com
