Doctor Atomic
GREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET launches its third season on PBS with the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Doctor Atomic, John Adams’ powerful portrait of the physicist presiding over the creation of the atom bomb, Monday, December 29 at 9 p.m. ET.
Canadian baritone Gerald Finley stars as the Faustian J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Father of the A-Bomb.” Alan Gilbert conducts.
Here’s an excerpt of an interview that WNYT conducted with composer John Adams:
You’ve said before that you still don’t know whether dropping the bomb on Japan was the right thing to do, but the final sounds in Doctor Atomic — the voiceover, spoken in Japanese, of the mother asking for water for her child — viscerally reminds us of the human cost of using the weapon. And yet the opera does not feel like anti-nuclear propaganda.
Was it a challenge to keep the opera from becoming didactic? How did you set out to accomplish this?
I didn’t “set out” with any moral or ethical issues to promote. My intentions couldn’t be further from those who want to use art to promote social goals. The original sketch for the ending of Doctor Atomic was a kind of coda, an actual transcript of a phone conversation that General Groves had about two weeks after the Nagaski strike with a US Army doctor. The conversation was about press reports coming back about the horrific suffering that radiation victims were experiencing. It appears that Groves was incredulous about these reports and even suggested that it was just more Japanese propaganda. I didn’t want to close the opera with this. I felt it was too ironic, too freighted with implied criticism of the US position on the war. So I looked around for something that expressed my own admittedly confused emotions (I couldn’t articulate anything more than raw emotion), and I found those very short phrases that a Japanese mother had been heard speaking in the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima blast. All she asks for is water and that someone help her find her husband. She doesn’t really know what has happened yet. I found her words to be powerfully expressive of the final result of all the technology and warfare that had been brought to bear on these helpless civilians. I think it proved to be the right way to end the opera. How else could I have done it?
Here’s a three-minute-plus trailer produced by The Metropolitan Opera: