About the Composer

So much has been written about Doctor Atomic now that I hope I can avoid being redundant. I am not a critic, or even much of a writer for that matter, so this may not be the most well organized set of thoughts, and I hope I can get my point across without seeming shrill or pontifical. Lisa Hirsch has a running list of reviews and blogs that cover the premiere, many of which are much more thorough than I intend to be, and so if you haven’t read anything about the piece yet, it might be a good idea to start there.

The long and the short of it is that Doctor Atomic is a thoroughly engaging and memorable evening, and I’m really glad I went, despite its major flaw. In fact, whereas normally I might have the urge to look at my watch at some point during a three-hour opera, in this case I didn’t do so until I was outside and couldn’t believe that it was after 11:00. I mention this in order to soften my overall tone, because as much as I did enjoy the piece, I was disappointed that this work did not live up to its potential.

An Unsuccessful But Worthwhile Experiment
Doctor Atomic did work for me in the sense that it held my slackjawed attention for the entire evening. The music is terrific, which I never doubted it would be. John Adams is a very skillful and sensitive dramatic composer, as he’s proven in the past not only with his previous operas, but with his concert works like Harmonium and The Wound Dresser. The lighting and set design, the costumes and staging in general are all outstanding, combining with the music to create the palpably tense atmosphere of what had to be one of the weirdest nights in history.

Unfortunately, while the piece sort of “works” if you accept it as outside the mold of a typical opera, I’m frustrated because it could have been so much better. The one glaring flaw is the decision to skimp on the libretto. Rather then including the input of a skilled dramatic writer, this opera is built upon a collage of “found texts”, assembled by Peter Sellars. So, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a matter of the libretto not working; it’s a matter of there being no libretto at all.

People go to operas looking for different things. Some are in it for the singing, some go for the music, and some go merely for the experience. When I hear an opera, I expect it to meet the same dramatic requirements as a straight play. No matter how good the music is, or the staging or the costumes or indeed the budget, if the libretto doesn’t work, the opera as a whole is in jeopardy.

To be fair, this found-text montage approach is an interesting idea, and it was worth trying. Sellars chose the material well, and it can’t have been an easy job, but in the end it’s the sort of thing that works really well on paper and not on the stage. The found texts consist of poems from such diverse sources as the Bhagavad Gita, John Donne and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as various books, transcripts and archived documents relating to the Manhattan Project. Combining texts from different sources works very well in concert works like the Britten War Requiem, Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem and Adams’ own El Ni�o, but in an opera we need to hear from the characters, and the use of these pre-existing texts strikes me as a way of avoiding the characters.

In the case of the poems, which are mostly used as arias, these are texts that were not written with staging in mind, and they’re too rich and oblique to really serve the characters on stage. They will work magnificently as art songs, and I’ll bet they’ll be excerpted as such for a concert piece. The problem with choosing poetry off the shelf is that poetry is often very nuanced and complex, and is meant to be read in as much time as desired by the reader, and reread if necessary, until the reader has ascertained its meaning or responded to its emotional thrust. Since an opera takes place in time, the audience simply doesn’t have time to sit there analysing the text as it flies by. So, the libretto needs to use as few words as possible, to let the music carry the drama, and those words need to be chosen very carefully.

Never Sing a Weather Forecast
The other sources are mostly used in the form of recitatives, and again, there are simply too many words. This is a problem I have with recitative in general. No word should be set to music that isn’t something to sing about. Here more than anywhere, words need to be chosen with extreme care and economy, and you can’t just take an excerpt from someone’s memoir and drop it into an opera and expect it to sing. Basically, you have guys standing around and talking, giving away very little in the way of character development. This is where the hand of a skilled librettist is needed, taking the content of that transcript and crafting it into something that sings. Lacking a librettist, it would have been a smart move to just have these lines spoken with underscoring. Fortunately, John Adams takes charge of these spots and usually succeeds in telling me what he wants me to know via the orchestra. A little more care put into the language would have made his job easier, and the outcome would have been even more effective.

Doctor Atomic lacks the very basic element needed for a dramatic work: a character, or characters, who want something, and either get it or don’t get it, or a character who learns something, or is somehow transformed. The title promises something about the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer, but what we really get is John Adams and Peter Sellars commenting on this man and what these events must have been like for him. All of the pre-opening articles and interviews spend a lot of ink on explaining who Oppenheimer was and what his problems were, but the opera doesn’t give you any of that, rather it comments on what we’re apparently supposed to have learned before arriving at the theater, and I find that a little self-indulgent.

There are so many moments where a good librettist could have had us on the edge of our seats, but are instead dry and dull. There’s a very disturbing discussion during Act II (well, what should be a disturbing discussion) about whether the bomb test would “ignite the Earth’s atmosphere”. (I did laugh out loud when Edward Teller said they were taking bets as to whether the test would “destroy the whole world, or just New Mexico”, because it’s such a Hungarian type of joke.) Oh, if only someone could have sat down in a room with John Adams to build the text of that scene so as to suit a musical treatment. Oh, if only�

Then there’s this bizarre moment later in Act II where General Groves worries that “high-strung” Oppenheimer is going to have a nervous breakdown. Why is this not depicted on stage? For that matter, why do I have to learn from reading the synopsis in the program that Oppenheimer is in an “extreme state of nervous exhaustion”? Yes, it is in the staging and the music, but the text addresses it too indirectly, as it does everything else. Instead of experiencing that with Oppenheimer, we get the authors’ commentary on it. I have to wonder how people responded to this who read not a word about it in advance.

Other Notes
It strikes me as odd that this is really more of an ensemble piece than the title and the hype seem to promise. Yes, Oppenheimer is clearly the central character, but others, like Edward Teller and General Groves are equally developed, if not more so. This is fine, actually, and maybe more interesting than if it were all Oppie all the time, but a title change might have been in order. If it had been packaged as such, I might have been somewhat less disappointed, because I might expect less characterization.

If there’s one criticism of the music, it would be that sometimes the orchestra is a little too busy, and competes with the vocal lines in certain recitative passages, particularly toward the beginning. Not only does that make those spots hard to follow, but it’s a dramatic problem in that he’s giving away too much too soon. In fact, there’s a moment toward the end of Act I, where the music becomes very agitated as the bomb emerges, only partly visible. This combination of staging and music was effective, but it would have been more so if Adams had reined in the burbling and pulsating earlier in the act.

But for it’s flawed approach to the libretto, which is a real dealbreaker for me, Doctor Atomic is a worthy piece, and anyone in a position to see it should do so. Peter Sellars’ staging is always interesting and germane, and I welcomed the use of dance, although I admit I don’t really understand what the dancers’ function was, other than to be entertaining. I must mention the lighting design, by James F. Ingalls, again, because it was exceptionally well done. A lightening storm is depicted brilliantly, and the use of lighting at the very end during the detonation is truly awesome, although more subtle than some would prefer, apparently.

You have to hand it to John Adams; he’s nothing if not loyal. He’s the first to admit that he’s not an “opera person”, and I can’t tell from his bio how interested he is in theater in general, so he’s really depending upon his collaborators to know what they’re doing dramaturgically. Here, as with Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, he brings the best out of a deficient libretto, and demonstrates his keen dramatic sense, and every detail of the score serves the libretto well, often masking its flaws. The arias are stunning musically, if dramatically problematic, and the whole piece soars during instrumental transitions and dance interludes. The device of stretching time during the final countdown is a stroke of genius, and if I may join the fray over whether we like the ending, I thought it was absolutely perfect.

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