Doctor Atomic

The story of the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, is not necessarily a subject for an opera. And yet composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars dared to write and stage one about a scientific drama.

In fact, the opera has no dramatic plot; instead, it features many dialogues about scruples, ambition, fears about life, doubts, and the search for redemption. Doctor Atomic is the father of the atomic bomb, Robert J. Oppenheimer, who was not only a brilliant scientist but also well-educated in literature and philosophy.

Typical Oppenheimer with his hat and pipe (©SWF)

Robert earned his doctorate in theoretical physics at the age of 23 in Göttingen in 1923 under Max Born, who was full of praise for his student, who, in turn, recalls his time in Göttingen, “The work here is dizzying. You live in a state of constant mental excitement.” Indeed, “In those years, physics was not developed—it erupted, Born remembered.”

The opera begins in the style of a Greek tragedy with a choir dressed in black, which, however, does not sing darkly about fate, but informs the audience about some trivialities of physics.

We believed that
"Matter can be neither
created nor destroyed
but only altered in form.“

We believed that
”Energy can be neither
created nor destroyed
but only altered in form."

But now we know that
energy may become matter,
and now we know that
matter may become energy
and thus be altered in form.

Oppenheimer leans against a wooden frame
representing the temporary shanty town of Los Alamos (©Theater Freiburg).

The first aria, sung by the American Faust, reflects his unconscious confession, "I cannot stop this Trinity test. Someone or something must stop me."

"Batter my heart, three person'd God; For you
As yet, but knock, breathe, knock, breathe, knock, breathe
Shine, and seek to mend;
Batter my heart, three person'd God;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, break, blow, break, blow, burn, and make me new.*
*The text is borrowed from John Donne's “Holy Sonnet XIV.”

Robert, without his attributes, pipe, and hat, is grilling his steak (©Theater Freiburg)

There is no God in Doctor Atomic. Only mechanisms, deadlines, and momentum, and on-stage glowing grills with lots of meat and a pile of beercans.

With the help of beer cans, Edward Teller ponders
the most effective arrangement of uranium blocks to achieve a critical mass (©Theater Freiburg).

The countdown is imminent. Hope comes from Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, and her fictional Native American housemaid, Pasqualita. While Kitty invokes in vain her all-encompassing love as a counterforce, Pasqualita is stylized as a high priestess of reconciliation with divine nature.

The second act starts with a refrain sung by Pasqualita. The text is taken from a traditional Tewa lullaby song, and subsequent reiterations repeat the text with the direction changed to west, east, and south:

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.

Indeed, the rain threatens to delay the test explosion.

Even though the ignition and explosion of the atomic bomb would have made for a spectacular musical apotheosis of the opera, Adams deliberately refrains from this expected and thus trivial conclusion to his opera. Instead, he composed an extended orchestral countdown with a multitude of ticking or striking clocks, unnaturally stretching time.

In the composer's own words: "When the countdown finally comes into view, time slows down on stage. The characters lose themselves in their own visions and fantasies. The closer the moment of detonation approaches, the more time and space begin to blur."

"I wrestled for months with the question of how to treat the explosion. I finally decided on an extended orchestral countdown, a palette of clock sounds, some ticking, others hammering like pile drivers, each at its own tempo. Underneath this clock polyphony lies a bloodcurdling roar from loudspeakers."

©Theater Freiburg

"I created this sound from a sampled drum roll, which I played in an endless loop and processed with heavy sound filtering. At the climax, I added a cluster of recorded baby cries that cuts through the theater space like a sound meter, tearing through the darkness. As the roar subsides, all that remains is a light shower of clock strike fragments played by harp, celesta, and tuned gongs."

"As they fade away quietly, we hear the voice of a Japanese woman. She repeats sentences from Hiroshima survivors that I found in John Harvey's famous report on the immediate aftermath: 'I can't find my husband,' and, speaking to her little boy, Kasuo, 'come here.' 'Mr. Tanimoto, please, help us.' 'Please, can we have some water?'"

©Theater Freiburg

The bones of the summoned dead later end up in a mill. Oppenheimer grinds them to dust and sprinkles them over the model of the skeleton house during the countdown.

The first atomic bomb detonated on July 16 in the Jornada del Muerto (The Path of the Dead) desert in the US state of New Mexico: “We knew the world would never be the same again. A few people laughed, others cried, but most were simply silent,” Oppenheimer later recalled. He, the father of the atomic bomb, quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, “If the brilliance of a thousand suns were to explode in the sky at once, it would be like the brilliance of the Almighty.”  “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

©IMAGO/Pond5 Images

Contributors to the Manhattan Project, Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer in a white hat and General Leslie Groves, in uniform, at the detonation site of the Trinity atomic bomb test. On the right edge of the photo is Robert Wilson, later the director of Fermilab near Chicago, where Red Baron met him.

In his lifetime, Oppenheimer did not regret his leadership of the Manhattan Project, but rather said, “Our work has changed the conditions of human life, but what happens with these changes is the problem of governments, not scientists.”

And so Max Born rightly laments, “Science has given man tremendous power, but no guidance on how to use it.”

**