"Dr. Atomic' on video

I have just seen the telecast of the Metropolitan Opera’s Doctor Atomic, which gives the opera a different perspective than what I saw in an earlier live performance at the Met. I now feel greater admiration for the opera’s high spots but also greater annoyance with its shortcomings.

Movie theaters showed a high-definition live performance from the Met plus interviews with composer John Adams, a scientist and an historian. Clearly, this notable opera about an important historical event deserves additional discussion.

I’d like to evaluate the opera from the point of view of its creators, forgetting for the moment what I know about the real scientists who developed the atomic bomb in 1945. For that, see my earlier story on BSR, or this article on theoperacritic.com.

Immense musical impact

First, the pleasures. The music of John Adams creates immense impact in the finale of Act I, when physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer soliloquizes to the text of John Donne’s poem, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," and also in the stormy orchestral build-up to the explosion near the end of the opera. Adams’s insistent rhythms and catchy melodies work more effectively than anything he’s accomplished to date in any of his operas.

Gerald Finley continues to be sensational as Oppenheimer, with his smooth baritone voice and facial expressiveness. Sasha Cook as his wife is a good singer but not especially memorable, nor is her character as written by Peter Sellars. His libretto defines Kitty Oppenheimer as a conventional wife; we’re not shown anything that marks her as a special woman who would attract such a brilliant scientist. A romantic duet sung by Robert and Kitty is full of esoteric poetry but lacks communication between them or with the audience.

The boring choices scientists make

Dr. Atomic covers limited territory— only what happened during the final week of the multi-year effort to harness atomic energy— and it stretches this out excessively. Little action occurs onstage. The opera consists mostly of flights of fancy and long meditations on the choices the scientists face. Some of this is striking, some nicely lyrical, some of it boring.

Oppenheimer made a pact with the devil, composer Adams declared on Saturday’s telecast. Forget this debatable premise for the moment. Let’s just accept the notion that Oppenheimer is a Faustian figure and see how effectively this is presented.

Goethe, Gounod and Berlioz all portrayed the lighter and energetic side of their Fausts. Sellars and Adams don’t. There’s no contrast between Oppenheimer’s light and dark sides. The Oppenheimer in this opera is continually tense and nervous. His every utterance is cryptic, and his longer speeches are quotations from the Bhagavad Gita and John Donne sonnets. There’s little about him that’s recognizably human, to empathize with.

What did God want?

Now let’s debate the Faust analogy. It’s too much of a stretch to say that Oppenheimer’s participation in America’s war effort led him to make a fiendish trade-off. To call the splitting of the atom devilish is to presuppose that no good can come of atomic energy, and that God didn’t want humans to acquire such knowledge. (You know the counter-argument: Why, then, did God provide man with the necessary tools?) It also requires assuming that dropping the bomb killed more people than would have been killed by conventional bombing and an invasion of Japan.

Most people who lived through that period would disagree with the Oppenheimer/Faust analogy. Most people born after World War II may feel the bomb shouldn’t have been used, but that’s not the same as concluding that Oppenheimer allied himself with Satan.

A little more humanity, please

Aside from this debate, Dr. Atomic would be more dramatic if it showed a cordial Oppenheimer who was adored by his students and colleagues. It also would gain impact if it showed the scientists celebrating the destruction of Hiroshima by their bomb, complete with Oppenheimer clasping his hands above his head in triumph. Such a scene could be followed by the voice of a Japanese victim calling out for water. The Japanese voice is, in fact, the closing moment of the opera. But there’s no contrasting triumphant gesture by the protagonist, Oppenheimer. That would have been so powerful. (And it actually happened.)

The direction of the telecast was conservative. Unlike other Met HD transmissions, there were no camera shots from overhead and no traveling shots around and behind the players. What we saw in the movie house was almost identical with what we saw in the opera house, but with close-ups. A great tight shot of a wire being attached to the bomb made us want to shout, "Look out!" And the repeated use of low camera angles, shooting up toward the characters, suggested something sinister.

For a different version of the same opera, I recommend a DVD of an Amsterdam performance directed by Sellars himself on the Opus Arte label.


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