The only theme more operatic than the atomic bomb’s effect on the lives of millions of people is the tragedy the atomic bomb caused in the lives of a few people. John Coolidge Adams’ new opera, Doctor Atomic, is a character study that focuses on the last few days at Los Alamos prior to the test payload’s detonation. Gerald Finley stars as conflicted, hyper-literary genius J. Robert Oppenheimer, Eric Owens plays General Leslie Groves, and Sasha Cooke plays a mean Kitty Oppenheimer.
But how does Adams go about dramatizing his problematic yet pruriently promising subject, the atomic bomb? As the surprisingly young audience settles down, the periodic table as it would have appeared in 1945 is projected against the curtain. The curtain rises to reveal a series of dystopian cubicles, bringing to mind Brazil or Patrick Stewart’s Bolshoi production of Macbeth last spring.
The opera commences with a post-apocalyptic howl from radio footage, but the overture proper begins with a more traditional romantic fanfare of terror. It’s obvious from the beginning that the score is going to be a lot more conservative than expected, and Adams’ sound-world owes a lot more to Stravinsky and Shostakovich than it does Reich and Reilly: it is tonal, with abrupt and constant shifts in meter, and there are string tremolos, murmuring woodwinds, celeste glissandi, muted cymbal clashes, and occasional outbursts from the brass against one-note timpani ostinati. All are expertly controlled by conductor, Alan Gilbert.
Adams, who has accrued enough critical and commercial success to be denied tenure by the Columbia music department, is not always on his musical A-game here—but few composers ever are, especially in opera. The music is at its best when it needs to be at its best. Mostly, though, it just provides a backdrop for the libretto by Peter Sellars (not to be conflated with Peter Sellers, mastermind of another cultural icon about the a-bomb with “Doctor” in the title). The entirety of the action is set in the middle of the New Mexico desert—with not a single scene in the basement of Pupin, regrettably—and the characters muse about love, death, and those other operatic tropes.
The music grows more conservative and the language more poetic as the subject becomes more apocalyptic and the second act nears its conclusion. The voices, the acting, the orchestra, and the set are all terrific up until the end, when the very foundations of the Met rumble with distant reverberations and the bomb bursts silently in a flash of light. The last minute, with nothing aside from recordings of Japanese asking for help and water, is unexpected, inorganic, and inexcusably bad. I kept waiting for Finley to ascend the scaffolding and proclaim: “I have become death, destroyer of worlds!” But he never did.
If there’s any cause for complaint in Doctor Atomic, it’s the libretto. Its chief conceit is its compilation from a variety of sources—U.S. Army memoranda, memoirs. Oppenheimer quotes Baudelaire, and Leslie Groves reprises the very words he spoke in his autobiography. As the first act of Doctor Atomic moves past a plodding exordium to a euphonious love duet and then a tragicomic close, the libretto holds together well, but by midway through the second act, the device begins to degenerate into gimmick. “Unlike anything the opera world had seen before,” writes John Adams in the program notes. There must be a less overdetermined way of portraying Oppenheimer’s obsessive literacy, and a more direct way of portraying his existential angst.
In spite of all this, though, no amount of maudlin moralizing could deny the cast, the composer, and the conductor the standing ovation that they got and so richly deserved.
Doctor Atomic is playing at the Metropolitan Opera, located on Broadway between 74th and 75th Street. The show is playing through Nov. 13, and tickets range from $15 to $275.
