In his epic moral work about the dilemmas of nuclear scientist J Robert Oppenheimer in the countdown to Hiroshima, US composer John Adams challenges preconceptions about opera. But for Penny Woolcock, director of 'Doctor Atomic', this is what makes Adams's art important, writes HELEN MEANY
COMMISSIONED AS "an American Faust opera", John Adams's latest work, Doctor Atomic, cannot be so neatly summarised. Portraying the final weeks in the US military's secret development of the atomic bomb in July 1945, it raises the kind of moral questions that this audacious American composer has been drawn to in previous works. Here, as in Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1990), he favours multiple perspectives and interpretations of real historical events, breaking new ground in terms of what operatic form can encompass. Doctor Atomic focuses on the heated discussions that took place among the leading physicists of "the Manhattan Project", who were working at the test site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J Robert Oppenheimer.
For John Adams, once the idea of an opera about Oppenheimer had been proposed to him by the director of San Francisco Opera, it generated an urgent response that led to four years of research on the topic. He writes in a programme note: “The atomic bomb is the all-time American symbol of our darkest mythology – power, technology, science and, of course, the responsibility of having the ability to destroy the planet. For me these are Wagnerian topics, ideally suited to operatic expression.”
If there were questions, before its premiere four years ago, about the suitability of this complex subject matter to opera, the finished work gives the answer. In a new co-production between the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and English National Opera, it opened last week at the London Coliseum to the same audience acclaim that the original production received in San Francisco and in Amsterdam in 2007.
Its director, British film-maker Penny Woolcock, pinpoints the work’s fascination. “There is a ravishing beauty in destruction,” she says. “John Adams has composed a beautiful opera, and we’ve set out to create a production that captures the beauty and horror of its ambition.”
Working on the libretto with his long-term collaborator, Peter Sellars, who directed the San Francisco/Amsterdam production, Adams began by delving into the military and political archives, as well as memoirs and recollections of those who had worked alongside Oppenheimer.
Sellars's libretto is an elaborate mosaic. Verbatim documentary material – quotes from the scientists and army generals working at the test site in Los Alamos – is juxtaposed with extensive quotations from poetry, especially the poetry that the multilingual Oppenheimer knew and loved. The result is initially disorientating, as the characters and chorus proceed from detailed technical exchanges in the opening scene ("the 32 points are the centres of the 20 triangular faces of an icosahedron interwoven with the 12 pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron") to lyrical excerpts from Baudelaire and the Hindu sacred text, The Bhagavad Gita, delivered at moments of emotional intensity.
For Penny Woolcock, directing her first opera, the text, which included no stage directions, was daunting. “I worked from Sellars’s annotated libretto, which cited the documentary sources for every single line of dialogue,” she says. “I went off and read the original sources, letters and memoirs, everything I could get my hands on.”
Her most helpful background reading was American Prometheus, a recent biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, which helped her to understand why Oppenheimer was so determined to proceed with the testing of the bomb, when some of his fellow scientists were expressing misgivings. Many of them, especially those who were Jewish refugees from Nazism, had originally joined the project because they wanted to help develop atomic power before Hitler did. After his defeat, they were less convinced about the necessity of its use.
THE OPENING SCENEof the opera dramatises this moment, two weeks before the test in July 1945, when Germany had surrendered and the Japanese were already prepared to discuss peace terms.
“There was a real choice here, but Oppenheimer wouldn’t entertain it then,” Woolcock says. “As a secular New York Jew who had experienced anti-Semitism in earlier years, he had found it very seductive to be part of the political decision-making elite, to have the power to call the president at any time. ‘Isn’t it better that I have a voice within the government?’ he says, when he is challenged by one of the other physicists and asked to sign a petition against the use of the bomb.”
Yet he is also shown to have qualms and conflicting emotions, and, as performed by baritone Gerald Finley (for whom the part was composed), Oppenheimer becomes increasingly nervy in successive scenes in which the tension at the site is pitched to almost unbearable levels. The opera's expressive high point comes at the end of Act One as Oppenheimer is left alone with his thoughts after the deadline for the explosion has been set. He sings an aria, Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God, which is the full text of John Donne's Holy Sonnet of the same title. An exquisite solo, in which the falling and recapitulating melody increases in intensity, it captures his anguish in an unforgettable musical and theatrical moment.
“It’s a complex characterisation,” Woolcock says. “We know that Oppenheimer was discarded later, when he had served his purpose, and that was a tragedy for him. Yet 240,000 people were killed outright by the bombs in Japan, 90 per cent of whom were civilian – that’s a hell of a lot to have on your conscience. He had to believe that something good would come out of this creation, and that ultimately it had saved lives.
"Later, after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he went to see President Truman and said, 'we scientists have known evil'. Truman called him a cry-baby, and Oppenheimer quoted The Bhagavad Gita, saying: 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' But he never actually recanted or renounced it. I think if he genuinely had regretted it, he would have had to commit suicide.
“The opera tries to understand the context in which these men were working. Here was a group of extraordinary scientists, brilliant and cultured young people, who were being given the opportunity of their lives. At a very basic level, they wanted to see if their experiment worked. I’m talked to some of them who are still alive, and they are fascinating people. And they had a sense of omnipotence and excitement.”
The characterisation of Kitty Oppenheimer is one Woolcock is less comfortable with. The historical Kitty was a fascinating woman, a biologist and thrice- married former Communist Party member, who was wholly supportive of her husband’s work on the atomic bomb. The libretto portrays her through selections of densely symbolic verse by the American poet, Muriel Rykeyser, which express a Cassandra-like sense of foreboding. Drinking heavily at home in the Oppenheimers’ prefab accommodation, Kitty functions as an emotional barometer.
“I would have liked her to be more rounded, and more engaged with the world, as she actually was,” Woolcock says.
With ingenious set design by Julian Crouch, archive footage, and video projections of maps of Japanese cities and mathematical equations (by Fifty-Nine Productions), Woolcock’s production is starker and much less frenetic than Peter Sellars’s first production. Yet tension is sustained throughout by Adams’s enveloping, richly textured score, building to the final explosion with a succession of polyphonous ticking clocks and frantic choruses.
“So much is already given by the music,” Woolcock says. “The staging is about bringing the music alive. For me, coming from film-making, I had to get use to this. There could be no cross- cutting between scenes or changing the rhythm of the action at the editing stage. Everything had to happen on stage and was precisely timed by the score. So I simply couldn’t do it in a naturalistic way. I had to invent my way from one scene to the next, and invent things for the scientists to do on stage while they’re all counting down to the moment of the explosion.”
WOOLCOCK'S FILMversion of The Death of Klinghofferfor Channel 4 caused a lot of disquiet in its carefully even-handed portrayal of Palestinian terrorists and their Jewish victims.
“At one film festival, people queued up to insult me, saying ‘you are disgusting and your film is disgusting’,” she says. Yet, for Woolcock, this is the kind of art that is important to make. It’s not difficult to see why she returned to work with Adams on this thrillingly ambitious opera that is driven by an urgent, questioning impulse.
Doctor Atomic
runs at the London Coliseum until Mar 20. www.eno.org
