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

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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

Siegfried by Richard Wagner
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Director: Keith Warner
Music Director: Antonio Pappano
2, 7, 10, 14, 18, 22 October 2005

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by Gerald Barry
English National Opera
Director: Richard Jones
Conductor: Andre de Ridder
From 16 September 2005

Much has been made of Keith Warner’s new production of the Ring cycle, and justifiably so. His is a jejune retelling, abrasively gimmicky and filled with crass over-attention to detail commingled with blindness to the resulting silliness.

In fact, for a latter-day parable of frail gods and heroic men, Warner’s production is redolent with the frailties of man. Hubris and sycophantic populism collide in its design, mingling a futuristic minimalism—lots of steel and white, and oddities like a downed Messerschmitt whose propeller fuels the bellows of the forge—with an infantile insistence on actualizing every last symbol (hardly necessary given Wagner’s own proclivities). The Woodbird not only appears onstage but skips about (rather laboriously) dragging a bird-shaped kite; Mime’s final scene sees him clad in a rat’s head straight out of Toad Hall; leitmotifs drop with the delicacy of anvils. The absurdity climaxes in the dream sequence, when two children appear on stage covered in flour and wheeling a life-sized white plastic stag glued to the top of a gurney. Siegfried then clambers onto it and hugs it like a rich girl does her first pony. Overall, it is a condescendingly literal staging—except when it is not: Siegfried’s discovery of Brünnhilde occurs behind a stage-sized white panel with a small door, leaving his narration to come when he throws himself in vaudeville shock-horror back into the flood-lit portal. An odd device, given this moment’s dramatic potential.

With last spring’s Die Walküre, superb musicianship easily transcended such ridiculous staging. With Siegfried, however, we’ve no such luck. The role of Siegfried is physically exhausting, demanding that the singer be on-stage for the better part of four hours. Unfortunately John Treleaven as the eponymous hero had neither the vocal stamina nor the charisma to carry it off. Act One’s interminable forging scene is supposed to be a show-stopper, but for all of its accompanying pyrotechnics Siegfried’s triumphant cry of ‘Nothung!’ was feeble and noticeably flat. In fact, Treleaven’s tuning throughout was unreliable. More so his acting, which turned the naïve narcissism of Siegfried into loutish idiocy, leaving little sympathy for his exploits. And though the orchestra was serviceable, it was also a bit messy, imperfectly tuned and with the horns—important for all of those fanfares—often out of sync.

Fortunately, the other principals picked up some of the slack. Phillip Ens’ Fafner was darkly resonant and Lisa Gasteen’s Brünnhilde was every inch the Valkyrie. And even his Gandalf costume couldn’t interfere with John Tomlinson’s interpretation of Wotan: he sung magnificently, bringing a disillusioned, decaying maturity to the role captured so energetically by Bryn Terfel earlier in the year. But that the slapstick Mime (a brilliant Gerhard Siegel) so easily stole the show hardly cemented the gravitas of Siegfried’s epic premise.

Although a Greek tragic mask occupies a prominent space on stage, the premise of the English National Opera’s recent The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is pointedly anything but epic. Usually celebrated/derided for its accessibility, this time the ENO has attempted a more adventurous tack by staging Gerald Barry’s dissonant score of Rainer Warner Fassbinder’s 1973 play. So text-dense that the Coliseum employed supertitles, Petra is a black comedy of the Abigail’s Party mold, stuffed to the breaking point with the banality of love, materialism, and middle-class pretensions.

Unlike Abigail’s Party, however, there’s no dramatic progression—no massive fall, and certainly no transformation or redemption. It’s merely a snapshot of middle-aged haute couture designer Petra von Kant (think Eva Peron meets Norma Desmond) and her love for vacuous redneck-cum-model Karen. They flirt, Petra breaks down, they shag a lot, Petra obsesses, Karen leaves, Petra remains drunk. Fassbinder’s script is appropriately colloquial and everyday. The two biggest laughs, for instance, come from an apathetic ‘Go fuck yourself’ (amusing, I suppose, simply for the venue in which it was sung?) and Petra’s bored inquiry into her daughter’s latest crush: ‘Let me guess: tall, thin, blonde and looks a little like Mick Jagger?’ Of its much-vaunted lesbianism, Petra doesn’t say much—as the playwright said about a former film of his, it could as easily have revolved around heterosexual love affair. In fact, the script doesn’t say much about anything: its point is the mere chronicle of bathetic hysteria, the tedium of a diva doing the diva thing.

The nominal lesbianism does, of course, permit an entirely female cast, which in turn allows for a registration that glibly slips into the intended shrillness. The score must be a challenging one for musicians: because it is so verbose, there is lots of recitative; because it is histrionic, there are no grand themes and many subtly-changing dissonances. Overall, it’s brassy and frantic, full of chromatics and jagged vocal lines. There’s no relief, either, no moments of contrasting gentleness: the poor, bored strings are practically non-existent; the orchestra’s dynamic remains at a rather distant, reedy forte; and there are certainly no arias. Petra’s blustery personality dominates throughout—the only other character with a noticeable theme is her secretary/slave Marlene, whose oboes, clarinet and flute peer out occasionally and then are squashed by the horns of her mistress. There are a few laughs in the music: after Karen emotionally relates her parents’ darkly comic deaths, the score camps it up, ascending chromatically into squeaky breathiness long after she’s finished. Mostly, though, the music operates by contrast. Dramatic and jarring, its operatic clichés—marching music during quarrels, fanfare during toothbrushing—reminds us again that this ain’t exactly the stuff of myth.

For the most part, the production itself was superb. Stephanie Friede as Petra stumbled across the stage with conviction, and managed to add nuance and pathos to a vocal line lacking any. Rebecca von Lipinski as Karen was a better actress than she was singer—even from a few rows back it was difficult to hear her, and while she excelled at capturing Karen’s listlessness, some of her more impassioned musical moments fell a bit flat. The other highlight was Linda Kitchen as Marlene, Petra’s personal assistant, whose perpetual silence (infuriating for a trained opera singer, surely) and deadpan expression inspired more sympathy than all of Petra’s frenzies. Director Richard Jones’ staging was entertaining: calling in a man named Ultz as set-designer, it featured a television and record player used, respectively, for comedic non sequitur (flashes of adverts, a documentary on the Masai’s tribal dance) and for a kind of meta-tedium (orchestra echoing LP echoing orchestra). The aesthetic was fun as well—the stage was meticulously mod (bare wood, bubbled patterns with space-age aspirations, greens and browns and oranges predominant), and the costumes were empire-waisted and, appropriately, none too flattering.

However, the unfortunate problem of the score, as with the play itself, is that the depiction of banality is, ultimately, banal. Appreciating its ironies and wry cultural critique only diverts for so long. In the end, the monotony of both plot (another fight, another shag, another hangover) and score (chromatic, jagged, loud—yeah, we get it) made it easy to loose attention: after a few measures of ‘Fetch me another gin and tonic’ jumping between the first and the fifth repeatedly (har.), you start thinking about Christmas shopping. And while there is something kind of charming about a desultory ‘Yeah’ sung by a resonant mezzo at full concert-hall volume, the joke wears thin rather quickly. Unlike with Siegfried, the company and the director do as best they can with a limited subject matter, but at the end of a long two hours, there’s little worth remembering. Whether Barry and Fassbinder’s invocations of Wagner (Karin’s stay at the down-at-heel Hotel Rheingold, Wotan’s hunting call during sips of tepid coffee) are employed to trivialize Wagner or to trivialize their heroine (I suspect both), Petra is very much the flip side of Covent Garden’s rusty coin.

Kristin Anderson is a DPhil student in English Literature at Exeter College, Oxford.