The Good, the Bad, the Anticlimactic

Metropolitan Opera

               It was the perfect story for an opera. The drama and tension that is crucial to the success of the performance was inherent in the subject. Furthermore, one of the greatest composers of our time produced the music that tells the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Yet somewhere along the road from conception to performance, the opera Doctor Atomic fell apart. The final product was a discordant ensemble of operatic brilliance and stale segments.

              Gerald Finley, the baritone that has sung the part of J. Robert Oppenheimer since the debut of Doctor Atomic in San Francisco, was the shining and most consistent performer in the show. His arias were moments of emotional climax. As he sung the poem “Batter My Heart” by John Donne, Finley’s voice filled the opera house with the pain and self-doubt that Oppenheimer experienced as he got closer and closer to the creation of the atomic bomb. Similarly the music of John Adams aided in keeping the opera from being a complete failure. The music was riveting and emotional even though it incorporated many technical sounds. The use of these sounds, such airplanes flying and jackhammers working, helped to remind the audience of the time in which the opera took place – an era filled with the excitement of scientific discovery.

            Although there were moments when the opera seemed to be a masterpiece, these moments were often broken up by segments that were extremely static. The performances of most of the singers were unimpressive and forgettable. For example, Sasha Cooke, who sings the part of Kitty Oppenheimer, has a breath-taking voice, and yet the parts that she sung did not seem to fit her and this made her performance ineffective. This problem was probably due to the fact that John Adams had to alter the music to fit Cooke’s voice because it was originally meant for a much higher voice. However, singers for whom the composition was not changed also had difficulty. Eric Owens, who sings the part of General Leslie Groves, also had a great voice; however, his portrayal of Groves as an overweight and unconfident man made the character forgettable. The set helped add to the stagnant mood of the opera. Although it was original in its design, the constant changing from one set design to another made the audience restless. It was made worse by the excessive dramatizing of the changes, which were slowed down in order to fit the music.  
          

           The creation of Doctor Atomic began with the search for an American Faust. John Adams and Peter Sellars, the librettist, found him in the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer – the leading figure in the quest for the atomic bomb. However, now, it seems that the opera itself had become a more suitable example of an American Faust than the story of Oppenheimer. In its quest to capture the emotional tension that took place at Los Alamos in those days right before the explosion of the atomic bomb, it lost sight of the individuals that were there at Los Alamos – the people who were caught in the middle of this historic event. Instead of focusing on the tension between the people of Los Alamos, Doctor Atomic attempts to grasp the ungraspable tension between one man, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the entire world. This impossible quest is what has led Doctor Atomic to its downfall.