Doctor Atomic
The Met Opera made its filmed 2008 production of John Adams’s and Peter Sellars’s Doctor Atomic—which I’d never seen in its entirety—free to stream last week, to coincide with the opening of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Of course this invites the obvious comparison, but I’m writing all this before I see the film, so I can at least attempt to approach the opera on its own terms.
The opera is not a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer; rather, it focuses on the weeks, days, hours, and minutes before the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. Sellars’s libretto is cobbled together from historical sources and, in Oppenheimer’s case, literary sources that had some significance to him. The first lines of Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink), about the grave moral compromises he’s made, are taken from a wartime letter; Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley) responds by blithely quoting Baudelaire.
The libretto is wordy, and Adams’s vocal writing, particularly when the characters are engaged in conversation (or technobabble), is somewhat undistinguished. The orchestral interludes are more musically interesting: churning motifs repeat at irregular intervals, evoking inhuman machinery and ratcheting up the dread. In the final scenes of the opera, it’s clear that what we are hearing is a countdown.
The musical highlight of the opera is surely Oppenheimer’s aria at the close of Act I, a setting of John Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” which supposedly inspired Oppenheimer to give the Trinity test its name. Adams sets the words “knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend” to a descending scale reminiscent of the Baroque lament bass, and Finley’s rendition of the line is riveting.
But all this artistry raises the question: What’s the point? The aria is an isolated set-piece, and essentially a non sequitur; in Penny Woolcock’s production, Oppenheimer delivers it while alone with the bomb at night, hours before the test at dawn. Donne’s sonnet, of course, has its own unity and coherence: the speaker invites a violent, erotic invasion by God into his soul. Dropped into the middle of an opera that is intentionally somewhat scattered, it doesn’t create productive ambiguity or tension so much as a puzzling void of meaning. Oppenheimer (in the opera, as in life) is spiritual but not religious. He is clearly not talking to God, and I don’t think he’s talking to the bomb or anything else so literal. Instead we witness an intense but vague yearning for spiritual purgation, if there is anything to be witnessed at all. Perhaps the ongoing war resonates uneasily in the martial language of the poem, but to no particular end.
Alex Ross in his review of both film and opera criticizes the tendency to mythologize the bomb and the people who built it. Indeed, there is no good reason to buy into Oppenheimer’s (self-)mythologizing. Naming the test site Trinity, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, what have you—none of it necessarily “means” anything. Opera can make meaning from poetry by setting it to music; in this case, I’m not sure we can or should make meaning out of Oppenheimer’s literary preoccupations.
In reality, the decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan was both evil and banal. “Once Trinity proved that the atomic bomb worked, men discovered reasons to use it,” Richard Rhodes concludes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Those reasons are the enduring post-hoc justifications we are all familiar with: that it was necessary to end the war, that it would save more lives than it took. The truth was that once the effectiveness of the bombs was demonstrated, their use was a foregone conclusion.
The ending of the opera gestures at the inevitability of the historical outcome. The detonation at Trinity, represented sonically by a block chord in the orchestra, is quiet, essentially abstract. After that, we hear no more from the singers, the scientists and military men; Oppenheimer’s poetic monologues are swept away. Instead, as the orchestra rustles and fades, we hear a Japanese woman’s voice, speaking. She is a survivor of Hiroshima, seeking water for her child. Music may be able to express what words cannot, but it was perhaps wise to forego music at the end. There is a threshold of horror that music cannot approach, either.
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