John Adams: Doctor Atomic
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Movie Reviews of John Adams: Doctor Atomic
Movie Review: Is it History or Opera?
Summary: 5 Stars
Thanks for the history lesson, Tom, but Holy Cow! If the only acknowledgment of the music you heard today is "While the score is certainly engaging and momentous at times.." and your best recommendation is to forget the opera and read a book chronicling the Manhattan Project, why did you spend the money to go to the opera? Like any theater piece, opera is at its best dealing with human passions and the conflicts which arise between people in relationship to each other. Words, music and visuals combine to create a vivid metaphor for the human condition, and perfect historical accuracy need not be part of the equation. The hopes and fears of the scientists as they struggle with creating a device they hope will save lives but may indeed pose the threat of annihilation; the personality conflicts between two scientists working toward the same goal while harboring different personal agendas; the costs that single-minded dedication to an urgent goal may exact on a precious personal relationship; the contrast between hard concrete left-mind science and mysterious, numinous native spirituality; and above all, the struggle of a sensitive and artistic temperament to reconcile his sense of beauity and love with the monstrosity he has created--these are the business of opera, and Doctor Atomic is a riveting exploration of those issues.
Adams' music reflects these struggles magnificently, flowing through them all, from love and passion to lurking menace and fear, like a river. I, too, was in the theater today for Doctor Atomic, and I was knocked flat by the electrifying scene at the end of Act I, as Oppenheimer, alone with his creation as it looms over him, writhes in an agony of conscience over what he has done. The historical record supports this idea, and you can see it there on his face in any portrait of the man even if he didn't really stand there alone in the moonlight. But even if it wasn't real fact, it is a perfect way for the artist to illustrate one of the major cosmic themes of the opera and of our day. Any viewer/listener with the equipment to allow the music, poetry, and images to work their triple magic on one's conscious and unconscious being would have to be struck dumb by the power of that scene. This is great theater--cosmic questions made real in the passions of human beings--so, who cares about history at a moment like that? On that level, Doctor Atomic is a work of genius which takes one's breath away.
I've read my World War II history as well, and it has enriched my experience of this opera; for example, I am inspired to revisit the historical record to see if my memory of the characters of Oppenheimer and Teller should be adjusted because of the surprisingly different angle on their personalities and conflicts which the opera presents. But that's only an interesting sidelight compared with the overwhelming emotional experience of surrendering to the sights, sounds and words of great human passions, illustrated as only a great opera can do.
If these live transmissions by the Met can help people learn to park their preconceived ideas at the door for a couple of hours and open themselves to such powerful experiences, they have done their job. Leave the history books next to your easy chair for some other cold day in front of the fire.
Movie Review: A Twentieth-Century Faust
Summary: 5 Stars
DOCTOR ATOMIC is a timely work of art that is at once crucial on both an artistic and a societal level. Adams's portrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer as a contemporary Faust character is perhaps more felicitous today than had the opera been written in 1946. While the connate drama associated with the idea of an atomic bomb is certainly obvious and embedded in the production, Adams and Peter Sellars (the librettist and director) ingeniously focus their dramatic attentions to the human drama of the characters at hand that is only natural given their participation in such a morally-rooted dilemma. As the opera progresses, the audience becomes witness to the emotional and intellectual struggles Oppenheimer endures as he tries to rationalize his scientific agenda with his moral obligations.
Act I ends with Oppenheimer's heart-wrenching aria ("Batter my heart three-personed God...") that is a setting of one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. It is with this aria that Adams most definitely makes an allusion to the historic Faust legend of a man who sells his soul to the devil in order to gain knowledge ("...but I am betrothed unto your enemy..."). Not only is Adams's setting of the text impeccable, but Gerald Finley's delivery and performance are among the greatest operatic achievements in perhaps all of music history. Adams mirrors this aria in Act I with a less-powerful but arguably more haunting aria for Oppenheimer ("To what benevolent demon do I owe the joy of being thus surrounded?")
Other highlights include the Act I, Scene II bedroom scene in which Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, make love to one another by reciting the poetry of Charles Boudelaire, and the transcendental arias for Kitty's maid, Pasqualita, which are sung very convincingly by the powerful contralto of Ellen Rabiner. And, of course, one cannot forget to mention the nebulous finale, which, with its clock-like pulses and inconclusive culmination, leaves observers both stunned and deep in thought as the voice of an ambiguous Japanese woman (feebly asking for a glass of water) fades into the silence of reality.
With DOCTOR ATOMIC, John Adams has created what is arguably the first important opera in the twenty-first century. In reading the other reviews that have been posted, I am somewhat discouraged to find that people are still categorizing Adams's music as minimalist and lacking of melodic or harmonic fluency. While it would certainly be foolish to argue that Adams has never written "minimal" scores, it is just as foolish to place that label on any of his works reaching as far back as NIXON IN CHINA. While motor-rhythms and repetition still permeate the music, Adams has also unearthed a new harmonic palette, that (in spite of not being "traditional") is both imaginatively novel and intrinsically functional. Even more conspicuous is Adams's obvious gift for melody. He has discovered a lyricism that is at once haunting and challenging, yet (to refute one previous reviewer) completely memorable and indelible enough that I often find myself humming the melodies from this opera quite frequently.
Movie Review: Superbly sinister
Summary: 5 Stars
The subject of the opera is tragically dramatic. Germany has capitulated. The first test of the atom bomb has not yet taken place. A handful of scientists work on the project cut off from the rest of the world. Roosevelt is dead and Truman is in the job. The scientists would prefer to postpone the test and cancel the use of this bomb. The military authorities and the political higher-ups want to imprint onto the world their absolute mark that they are number one and unchallengeable. The test will have to be done (at the end of the first act) and the real bomb will have to be dropped (at the end of the second act). Reduced to that the argument is light and yet politically powerful. But the opera is a lot more than that. It is showing the inside of the minds of these scientists, their doubts and their certainties. Their doubts that this bomb is of any use now the only danger in that line, i.e. Germany is off the killing ground. Their certainties that this bomb will be a weapon of such mass destruction that it should leave the world dead or at least dead silent. This bomb should not be used. This bomb was used and should not have been used. But the second act is by far more important in that tragic line because it centers on the women and the fear and awe they develop in front of the horror of this bomb. They sort of visualize the hundreds of thousands of dead bodies lying around anywhere with no warning whatsoever or so little. Kitty Oppenheimer and Pasqualita are admirable in their parts. A soprano and a mezzo-soprano that are so close and so different at the same time that their voices sound like the echo of each other, though Pasqualita is the echo of Kitty Oppenheimer soaring up from the depth of hell itself and Kitty Oppenheimer is the echo of Pasqualita roaming around in a complete and infinite waste land. They dominate and control the whole act and their silent unblinking faces at the end are the deepest and most ethical humane condemnation of what their men have just been doing. But it is an opera you will say. And it is. The stage directing is very empty, blank, nude. Just some props here and there and a few dancers in the background. The music is a beauty in its plainness and in its extremely somber sounds and very often or even most of the time un-melodious chiseling. The notes are often flat one after another and when there is a high dive or a deep jump it is always to express some kind of torn and tortured soul visited by the crimes that are going to be committed and that no one can stop or prevent. I would even say that John Adams wants his music to sound like gravel lamenting the murderous mind of men in a long dirge that will end up in silent on some kind of chaotic polyrhythmic percussion piece tolling away for who knows whom who ordered the massacre just for political and military convenience.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
Movie Review: A 21st Century Classic
Summary: 5 Stars
John Adams' "Doctor Atomic" is a classic in the making. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times calls it "grimly humane and musically intricate." These DVDs were recorded at the Netherlands Opera in June 2007, in a co-production with the San Francisco Opera (which premiered the work in October 2005) and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. The Met staged and recorded "Doctor Atomic" in October 2008. New Yorker critic Alex Ross has written a highly informative article about "Doctor Atomic," which can be found on his website, therestisnoise.com.
The cast of this video largely duplicates that of the premiere--
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Gerald Finley
Kitty Oppenheimer: Jessica Rivera
General Leslie Groves: Eric Owens
Edward Teller: Richard Paul Fink
Jack Hubbard: James Maddalena
Robert Wilson: Thomas Glenn
Captain James Nolan: Jay Hunter Morris
Pasqualita: Ellen Rabiner
Musical Director: Lawrence Renes
Stage Director: Peter Sellars
Finley, Owens, and Fink will also appear in the Met production. The DVD includes a detailed, helpful synopsis of the plot and an interview with director Peter Sellars.
The opera focuses on the personal and ethical dilemmas faced by the characters preceding the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945. Sellars prepared the libretto for the opera, which is compiled from various sources, including writings of atomic scientists and government officials; poetry by Baudelaire, John Donne,and Muriel Rukeyser; and the Bhagavad Gita. The result is profoundly thought-provoking and moving. Adams' music always fits the texts, whether scientific, political, romantic, or philosophical. The choreography features the gestures that we have come to expect from Sellars (although less distracting than in, say, his production of Handel's Theodora). The video "refines yet further the director's vision," writes Ross, "with close-ups giving emotional focus to those whirling tableaux" The singing and acting are first-rate. Overall, the production and its recording are musically and dramatically riveting.
The Met's production, directed by Penny Woolcock, is new and different but lacks the urgency of Sellars' original. My recommendation is to buy this recording right away.
Movie Review: A MASTERPIECE, FLAWED.
Summary: 5 Stars
As far as I am concerned John Adams and Peter Sellers are THE most important creators of total theater in this young century. Adams' music is breathtaking, and Seller's libretto and direction are beyond compare. Why is it a flawed masterpiece? The dancing, which helped at first and then became distracting. And, after the Vishnu episode, which should have introduced the explosion, one had to wait forty five minutes of wasted time (and wasted, gorgeous music) for it to take place . . . and it fizzled. But Findlay's rendition of Donne's poem must be the most dramatic moment of my operatic life. So what if, as one reviewer said,Oppenheimer was Jewish? Jews feel the burden of submission to their Sadistic God just as Christians do. I played it twice and howled in pain throughout. One last thing. Those wide eyes, making the singers look like lemurs. On the other hand, I was could share their visions! What absolutely magnificent singing of a most difficult score! Wait, I just changed my rating from four to five. This opera points a finger to those who initiated the atomic age, and why this country is so afraid of it. It might just reap what it sowed.