Doctor Atomic by John Adams
English National Opera
Directed by Penny Woolcock
The London Coliseum
Running until 20 March 2009

…

…

…

John Adams is America’s great hope for grand opera. He is among the country’s best-known classical composers and probably the only one to bridge the gap between critical and popular acclaim. His works, whether scored for string quartet or choral ensemble, are eminently dramatic, appealing directly to the emotions in a way that has long gone out of fashion. Adams’s music originates in minimalism, but finds inspiration in a wide variety of sources, such as Renaissance polyphony, the Romantic orchestral tradition and American folk music.

No contemporary composer is in a better position to commandeer the forces of a major opera house and produce a success that would achieve that elusive goal of operatic immortality: entering the standard repertory. Since World War II, such success has largely been limited to works that eschewed musical modernism and looked back to the grand tradition familiar to opera audiences. For better or worse, opera audiences seem to demand an expansive, accessible mode of expression, and this is precisely what Adams’s music offers.

Adams has essayed the genre twice before, with Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), both of which attracted loyal followings but never entered the mainstream. Doctor Atomic, premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 and currently running in a revised staging at the English National Opera, is his strongest effort to date. Created with long-time collaborator Peter Sellars, it tells the story of the atomic bomb’s first test, focusing on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic, cultured physicist and leader of the Manhattan Project. The subject matter—a turning point in 20th century history, remembered across the world with vehemence and passion—has huge dramatic potential. “These are Wagnerian topics,” Adams is quoted in the programme, “ideally suited to operatic expression.”

Doctor Atomic’s ambitions are, in their own way, no less grand than those of the scientists working in New Mexico in 1945. No homegrown American opera has entered the international repertory to date. Indeed, those that come closest (George Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess, Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 Candide and Philip Glass’s 1980s “portrait” operas Akhnaten and Satyagraha) were successful largely because they avoided the dramatic conventions and musical language of European grand opera. The Wagnerian ambitions of Adams and Sellars suggested that Dr. Atomic would confront the tradition head-on; the work, dubbed alternately an “American Faust” and “Prometheus” would be a contemporary, new-world Götterdämmerung.

Doctor Atomic is not the explosion it might have been, but it is nonetheless a stunning conflagration. Adams’s music offers some moments of gripping drama and is never less than engaging. Yet the effect of the piece as a whole is frustratingly uneven, as critics have remarked since its premiere. The English National Opera’s production, first seen at the Metropolitan Opera in October of last year, might have lain to rest lingering doubts about the piece. It is staged not by Sellars, but by Penny Woolcock, a British film director who has worked with Adams previously in film. The reasons for the change, particularly striking given that Sellars and Adams conceived and wrote the piece together, were made public when Peter Gelb, the general manager at the Met, said in a New Yorker profile that he had loved the music, but the production “wasn’t realizing its potential”. Though the music was an unqualified success, Sellars’s staging, Gelb said, was “undramatic”.

Gelb was right about the effect, but wrong about its cause. The opera, as the English National Opera’s production establishes, did not lack drama because of Sellars’s staging, but because of its structure and libretto. The only action of the opera consists in waiting for the bomb to be tested. The text, a patchwork of myriad sources—historical, scientific and literary—creates drama obliquely: the characters express themselves largely in highly stylised, artificial language. Where the original staging was conceived in the same alien idiom as Sellars’s text (unmotivated gestures, dance sequences unconnected to the narrative), Woolcock’s staging seeks to mitigate the work’s dramatic idiosyncracies. The change is well-intentioned, but it creates a sense of incoherence between words and actions, and makes the libretto all the more inscrutable.

Most troubling is the lack of structure in the piece as a whole. Carried by Adams’s compelling music, the expository scenes of the first act manage to eschew the problems of the opera’s dramatic structure. The vocal and orchestral scores are sensitive to the opera’s dramatic context, and frame each episode and encounter subtly. The act ends with Gerald Finley’s Oppenheimer, alone on stage for the first time, singing John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” The alien beauty of the words, the pounding orchestral accompaniment, and Finley’s lone, tortured voice combine in one of the most powerful moments I have ever experienced in an opera house.

In the second act, however, the opera’s structural deficiencies reveal themselves: there is little to do but wait. We can enjoy the variety of Adams’s music, but the narrative urgency of the first act is gone. The dramatic pace lags badly and we do not feel the tension the characters are experiencing. In these scenes, when the entire focus is on expression, the failure of Sellars’s libretto to confront emotion head-on is particularly frustrating. It is not until the final scene that the piece finds its footing again, as we and the characters wait anxiously for the explosion, unsure whether to hope for success or failure.

The ambivalence we feel waiting for the blast points to the difficulties of staging an opera based on so destructive an event in world history. Sellars and Adams are clearly attracted to the moral implications of the test. In the first scene, scientists discuss whether and how the bomb should be used after Germany’s surrender, and Oppenheimer repeatedly conveys his sense of awful responsibility (whether he felt it at the time is another question). The opera’s attitude, clear from the production notes as well, is a reflexive pacifism that judges the test of the bomb in light of its later use and condemns it unequivocally. But the treatment of guilt remains distressingly shallow, as if the test of the bomb were in itself an evil—which is not necessarily the case, even if one believes that the use of the bomb was a crime against humanity. This simplistic moralising might be excusable were it not an abject dramatic failure. Sellars and Adams do not portray the genuine moral conflict of the Los Alamos scientists, the aspect that might make their work a tragedy in the fullest sense: that in doing what they believe to be right, they unleash huge evil on the world.

The musical performance is a triumph for the English National Opera under the baton of Lawrence Renes. Stretched by a complex score in which no moment is like the last, the orchestra plays with passion and accuracy. The singing is excellent throughout, with special mention going to Edward Sherrat’s sinister Edward Teller and Met Young Artist Sasha Cooke, an astonishingly mature Kitty Oppenheimer. Gerald Finley has sung Oppenheimer in every performance of the opera since the premiere, and one can hardly imagine anyone else in the role, so commanding is his presence on stage.

Doctor Atomic leaves our hopes for Adams unfulfilled but intact, and even more urgent. One eagerly awaits the moment when his talent as composer fuses with the right libretto. Until then, we will watch like the Los Alamos scientists waiting all night for the test, wagering on the power of the blast. What have they created? When will they succeed? Doctor Atomic does not realise all its ambitions, but it provides moments of explosive drama, and leaves us anxious for Adams’s next experiment.

Joshua Billings is a doctoral student in Classics at Merton College, Oxford, where he is writing his dissertation on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800.

Photograph of John Adams © Margaretta Mitchell

The September 11 attacks spurred a debate about what America stands for. America’s response to the terrorists, from the operation in Afghanistan to the mobilization against Iraq, has provoked many critical reactions in the US as well as Europe. Some accuse the US of taking advantage of September 11 to achieve imperialist aims in the Middle East, while President Bush is using the war to divert attention from problems at home.

Disagreements hinge on whether the US is justified in waging its ‘war on terror.’ To determine whether America is worth protecting by such means, an investigation into American ideals is necessary. David McCullough’s John Adams provides an ideal launching point for exploring the values and way of life to be secured by a victory in the multi-front war.

McCullough’s biography is first and foremost a page-turner, short on intellectual history. Still, it details enough of Adams’s philosophy for the reader to appreciate his vision of America at its founding and to observe the construction of the world’s first liberal democracy. The generation that secured independence from Britain and framed the US Constitution succeeded in building a regime that would reflect and accommodate—not strive to change—human nature. The founders disagreed about many issues, but they shared a determination to root the American experiment in the principle of natural freedom and equality. Further, they understood their task to consist in designing a system of self-government that would endure despite the fact that ideals don’t motivate most people most of the time. As Adams wrote in his 1787 Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, ‘Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power.’

America’s founders believed that the dictates of self-interest rightly understood should guide politics in a self-governing state; this conviction merits close attention in this period of post-September 11 soul-searching and reexamination. The virtue of McCullough’s account is that it traces the evolution of Adams’s understanding of the connection between human nature and government—a concern that underlies the founders’ innovation in statecraft.

Born to a humble yet sturdy family in Braintree, Massachusetts, Adams first distinguished himself as a defense attorney before entering the world of politics in the 1760s, when outrage over the Stamp Act sparked the first flickers of independence in the colonies. From his days as a student at Harvard through his early years of public service—he was a surveyor of highways and then an elected selectman in Braintree before being chosen as a Massachusetts delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774—Adams was plagued by anxiety about his own character. Conscious of both his capacity and his ambition, he worried that his vanity would stunt his political growth.

His most important decision, he often remarked later in life, was his choice of bride. Abigail Adams, whom he wed after a five-year courtship in 1764 at the age of 28, was nine years younger but very much Adams’s equal in the marriage. Some critics have complained that McCullough pays inordinate attention to the devotion between husband and wife, but his exposition of the cooperative and loving spirit of their union sheds light on the development of Adams’s character. McCullough gained access to their private correspondence, and he in turn passes on this insider’s perspective. One representative letter, written after a brief period away from her, conveys Adams’s sense of dependence on Abigail:

My soul and body have been thrown into disorder by your absence, and a month or two more would make me the most insufferable cynic in the world… People have lost all their good properties or I my justice in discernment. But you, who have always softened and warmed my heart, shall restore my benevolence… You shall polish and refine my sentiments of life and manners, banish all the unsocial and ill-natured particles in my composition.

Abigail proved a soulmate who joined Adams in his fervor as an apostle of independence and supported him through the highs and lows of his career. She deserves her prominent place in McCullough’s biography—their correspondence demonstrates Abigail’s role in her husband’s continuing education in human nature.

By the time he traveled to Pennsylvania to participate in the First Continental Congress, Adams had settled upon certain relevant truths of human nature. McCullough quotes early journal entries in which Adams formulates his core principles: ‘Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike,’ he asserts, laying the foundations for the Constitution’s protection of equal liberty.

But Adams was not unrealistic about the extent of human equality. While maintaining that people are ‘equal and alike’ at birth, he also recognized the impossibility of a uniform distribution of aptitudes and wealth, glory and honors in a great country. ‘Was there, or will there ever be a nation whose individuals were all equals in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches?’ he wonders, before concluding, ‘the answer in all mankind must be in the negative.’

The government of the United States would have to respect the principle of equality at birth while recognizing the tendency of people to diverge in attributes and accomplishments.

Adams’s study of history, his reading of the classics, and his observation of the men around him afforded him another key insight into human nature. Thus he writes, ‘ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart,’ and, ‘the love of power insatiable and uncontrollable.’ McCullough captures how Adams’s recognition of universal aspects of character—natural equality and indomitable passion—guided his statecraft. In making the case for annual elections, for instance, Adams suggests that without the restraint of having to stand for office, ‘every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey’.

The necessity of holding regular elections, distributing authority among different branches of government, restraining the power of the legislative with a strong executive branch, and developing a strong military capability emerge clearly in Adams’s political texts. Among them, Adams’s 1776 Thoughts on Government and his 1779 ‘Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ decisively shaped the US Constitution, which was finally signed in 1787 while Adams was serving as ambassador in London.

These contributions are slightly overshadowed in the McCullough biography by lavishly detailed descriptions of life in the late eighteenth century. McCullough vividly and expansively narrates harrowing incidents on Adams’s transatlantic voyages, Abigail’s anxieties during frequent outbreaks of influenza and smallpox at home, and standards of living from Boston and Philadelphia to London, Paris, the Hague, and finally the White House. The author’s over-the-top Hollywood touches are hardly surprising in light of the adaptation of his last biography, Truman, into an HBO movie.

A handful of distinguished academics have offered a more substantive critique of McCullough, complaining that he overemphasizes Adams’s moral fiber while neglecting his shortcomings as president. These scholars also object to McCullough’s treatment of Adams’s friend and rival Thomas Jefferson, with whom he is favourably compared throughout the book. In the eyes of these critics, Jefferson’s commitment to egalitarianism and the possibility of self-improvement redeem his vices (which included slave-owning), while Adams, for all his strength of character, was blinded by his conservatism, failing to perceive the consequences of the post-Enlightenment extension of equality. As Sean Wilentz, an American history professor at Princeton, writes in his review in The New Republic, Adams

never really understood (as Madison did) that the Revolution had overthrown [his] way of thinking, replacing it with an ideal of popular sovereignty that permitted no permanent social classes in politics. America, the Revolution had decreed, would have a classless state; and this dispensation would be forever incomprehensible to John Adams.

Wilentz connects this failure to the lowest moment of Adams’s presidency, his endorsement of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which granted the president the right to expel any foreigner deemed ‘dangerous’ and criminalized all ‘false, scandalous, and malicious’ writing against the government. Rejecting the explanation proffered by Adams and defended by McCullough—that looming war with France rendered the acts necessary—Wilentz accuses Adams of unforgivable overreach in his restriction of civil liberties. Close readings of McCullough and of Adams himself, however, demonstrate the hollowness of Wilentz’s charge.

Although Adams’s commitment to equality was combined with an appreciation for the unequal distribution of virtues and vices in the population, he was nonetheless a firm believer in the wisdom of the people. His instincts were anything but aristocratic. His journal entries and letters, quoted judiciously by McCullough, reveal his curiosity about and respect for public opinion at all levels. Adams solicited the views of yeoman farmers and senior statesmen alike in the course of his public service career.

Adams’s commitment to equality led him to take care in devising a constitution that would honor and preserve it. It was Adams, not Jefferson, who first complained about the absence of a Bill of Rights from the Constitution drafted while they were both serving in Europe. He repeatedly affirmed that the end of government is to protect certain core rights.

For instance, he wrote in his journal, ‘Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people.’ Adams concludes, ‘There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all others, by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors, in the human hive.’ Government, in his mind, was truly of, by, and for the people.

Adams exemplifies the American founders’ commitment to popular sovereignty, a commitment tempered by knowledge of human tendencies and concern to build a regime that would last. A moral belief in the natural equality of all men, together with a realistic sense of the power of passions and self-interest in the human heart, inspired Adams’s contributions at the dawn of the United States, and the remnants of his spirit endure.

Thanks to the founders, American presidents lead a government conceived in harmony with, not in spite of, human nature.

The liberal democratic achievement of the US constitutional state is that it derives strength from the consent of the governed just as they are, without trying to purify or improve them via a state religion. In the face of the terrorist menace and threats from hostile forces across the globe, McCullough’s book offers an answer to the question of what America stands for—an answer that should both sustain and renew that nation’s resolve to defend itself against its enemies.

Jacqueline A. Newmyer, an MPhil student in New College, Oxford, studies political philosophy and military strategy.