Saw Dr. Atomic, written/directed by Peter Sellars and composed by John Adams, screened in a movie theater in Woodland Hills this morning as the matinee was being performed live at the Met. The ending, so softly humanizing. Rather than startle you with the impact of the inevitable explosion this entire opera is leading up to, it brings you inside Oppenheimer’s intellectual and emotional dreamscapes.
As the team at Los Alamos gets closer and closer to the actual test, the dreamscapes bleed together. Something terrifying and inevitable is moving towards them which they have no more control over than they do the desert thunderstorm.
I’m going to try and assemble some of this, to try and give a sense. Of course, I didn’t get the full experience myself because I saw it in a movie theater and not at the Met. Hopefully, at some point, Dr. Atomic and I will find ourselves in the same city at the same time. In the meantime, I’ll post photos and text since I can’t say much beyond what the opera itself says.
Much of the text from the opera was adapted from declassified U.S. government documents and communications among the scientists, government officials, and military personnel who were involved in the project. Other borrowed texts include poetry by Baudelaire, John Donne, and Muriel Rukeyser, the Bhagavad Gita, and a traditional Tewa Indian song. Marvin Cohen, head of the American Physical Society, has criticized some parts of the libretto for not being strictly scientifically correct, in particular the opening lines (below). [1]
The opening chorus is an incomplete excerpt from the 1945 Smyth Report:
“Matter can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form.
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form.”
Act I concludes with an aria sung by Oppenheimer with text from Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV:
Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason yhour viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous,
Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies,
Terrible with fangs, O master,
All the worlds are fear-struck, even just as I am.
When I see you, Vishnu, omnipresent,
Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow,
With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring-
All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.
Act II is peppered with a repeated refrain from Pasqualita, the Oppenheimer’s Tewa Indian housemaid. The text comes from a traditional Tewa song:
In the north the cloud-flower blossoms
And now the lightning flashes
And now the thunder clashes
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.
In the west the cloud-flower blossoms
And now the lightning flashes
And now the thunder clashes
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.
One of the only scenes of actual connection (though still full of loneliness and longing) is Baudelaire’s “A Hemisphere in Your Hair” is used verbatim in the scene w/ Kitty Oppenheimer:
A Hemisphere in Your Hair
Long, long let me breathe the fragrance of your hair. Let me plunge my face into it like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and let me wave it like a scented handkerchief to stir memories in the air.
If only you knew all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages on its perfume as other men’s souls on music.
Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and sails; it holds seas whose monsoons waft me toward lovely climes where space is bluer and more profound, where fruits and leaves and human skin perfume the air.
In the ocean of your hair I see a harbor teeming with melancholic songs, with lusty men of every nation, and ships of every shape, whose elegant and intricate structures stand out against the enormous sky, home of eternal heat.
In the caresses of your hair I know again the languors of long hours lying on a couch in a fair ship’s cabin, cradles by the harbor’s imperceptible swell, between pots of flowers and cooling water jars.
On the burning hearth of your hair I breathe in the fragrance of tobacco tinged with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the sheen of the tropic’s blue infinity’ on the shores of your hair I get drunk with the smell of musk and tar and the oil of coconuts.
Long, long, let me bite your black and heavy tresses. When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair I seem to be eating memories.
The best You Tube clip I could find was from the Amsterdam performance so the subtitles are in Dutch. The stage at the Met was more impressive (in my opinion) in the vertical dynamics. Is nevertheless worth checking out this clip, to get a sense..
