Power tools, storms and an atomic opera
29 September 2005

Chloe Veltman sees John Adams’s portentous work

American composer John Adams

On the night before Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team prepared to detonate the world’s first plutonium bomb in the New Mexico desert, a freak electrical storm erupted. For the stressed scientists, the sudden outbreak of wind and rain was highly unseasonal and -- as the bomb had already been hoisted up on the scaffolding for detonation -- very dangerous.

For American composer John Adams, however, the dramatic climate change that night signifies something larger: “There’s something mythic and portentous about a storm of this magnitude suddenly appearing right as the world’s first atomic bomb was about to explode,” said the neo-minimalist maestro in a recent interview.

A sense of the mythic and portentous surrounds Adams’ Dr. Atomic, a new opera developed with longtime collaborator, director and librettist Peter Sellars, about the events leading up to the first nuclear test on July 16, 1945. It’s not just to do with the current global preoccupation with weapons of mass destruction, or the fact that 2005 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the first atom bomb test and its subsequent use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The weightiness is in the work itself: the libretto combines texts as varied as the Bhagavad Gita, declassified Government documents, and poetry by John Donne, Muriel Rukeyser, and Baudelaire. Meanwhile, a short excerpt of the musique concrète-punctuated orchestral score featuring power tools and lashing rain, heard in preview a few weeks ago at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House where Dr. Atomic is receiving its world premiere on October 1, suggests a landscape as physically hostile as it is morally complex.

Dr. Atomic represents Adams and Sellars’ first full-scale opera since the controversial The Death of Klinghoffer (1991,) which was condemned for romanticizing terrorism and being anti-semitic. As with Klinghoffer and the duo’s earlier collaboration, Nixon in China (1987,) Dr. Atomic handles enormous ethical questions – in this case, the rectitude of destroying a country that had essentially already surrendered to the US and its allies. As the American nuclear physicist Edward Teller puts it, both in the opera -- as personified by baritone Richard Paul Fink -- and in an actual letter written by Teller to his colleague Leo Szilard in 1945: “First of all let me say that I have no hope of clearing my conscience.”

Dr. Atomic receives its world premiere at The San Francisco Opera on October 1 before traveling to Amsterdam, Chicago, and London.