Opera at home

CDs

Doctor Atomic

ADAMS

Nonesuch 7559793107

Doctor Atomic, John Adams’ 2005 opera about the development of the first atomic weapon, makes a powerful CD debut with this issue. This is helped by that fact the piece is almost more oratorio than opera with very little action required. So little, that Peter Sellars’ original production was staged the same way he deals with oratorios: with lots of stylized movement for the chorus and the introduction of dancers. There are definite advantages to having the music without the distraction of the visuals.

Much of Act I is spent on scene-setting at Los Alamos. At times the libretto, largely drawn from archive sources by Sellars, is prose-heavy. It leaves you wishing that frequent Adams collaborator, poet Alice Goodman, had continued to work on the project instead of quitting it after two years. That said, the interplay of themes and moods—the morality of the project (indeed of nuclear science), the “world of men” versus domesticity, bureaucratic doggedness—play out effectively. The Act closes with the one real vocal showstopper in the piece; a blistering setting of John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-personed God.”

Tension builds in Act II as the countdown to the nuclear test continues despite deteriorating weather. Oppenheimer increasingly retreats into an inner world, while Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Edward Teller survives through black humour. At home, Kitty Oppenheimer turns to poetry to convey longing for peace, while the Tiwa maid, Pasqualita, expresses increasing distress at the desecration of her people’s land in the language of dreams. The tension, not only matter, but time and space, disintegrate and we find ourselves no longer in New Mexico but in the rubble of Hiroshima.