“The Emperor’s New Opera- John Adams’s Doctor Atomic and the Future of Classical Music”...

“The Emperor’s New Opera: John Adams’s Doctor Atomic and the Future of Classical Music” Robert Fink UCLA

And to the most damaging charge that the culture levels at classical music, its inability to renew itself, opera gives the lie. Music must generate an expanded repertory that will arouse critics and attract audiences; opera is doing this.1

- critic Joseph Kerman, 2006

Exciting stuff, then: Faust, Oppenheimer. What material for trans-formation into tragic operatic art! Or so one would think, until one actually sees Doctor Atomic or, as I think of it now, the Em-peror’s New Opera.2

- author Ron Rosenbaum, 2008

And so we have come to the end.

We have come to the end, at least, of the historical narrative that, however loosely, structures this

handbook. We would, of course, come to some kind of ending simply by bumping up against the

present; the work whose contemporary reception I will take as my case study, John Adams’s Doctor

Atomic, made its New York Metropolitan Opera premiere on October 13, 2008, a mere 267 days

before this sentence was written. (The piece was actually a little over three years old on that night -

as we shall see, the Met production was not the first – but the point remains.) But there is another,

more Wagnerian ending looming over a chapter like this. The story of opera at the turn of the

1 Joseph Kerman, “Opera and the Morbidity of Music,” in Opera and the Morbidity of Music. A New York Review Collection (New York: New York Review Books, 2008), p. 15. 2 Ron Rosenbaum, “The Opera’s New Clothes: Why I walked out of Doctor Atomic,” Slate, October 24, 2008. Accessed at http://www.slate.com/id/2202878/.

Fink OUP essay draft 2

twenty-first century takes place during the gathering gloom of what seems more and more like an

extended twilight of Western art music: can contemporary music-drama really escape a more gen-

eral Kunstmusik-Götterdammerung, if one is truly in the offing?3

Joseph Kerman, whose Opera as Drama set the high bar for American operatic criticism over

fifty years ago, is still peppery on the subject, and openly impatient with arguments to “the morbid-

ity of classical music,” which he labels a metaphor gone bad, “a tired, vacuous concept that will not

die.”4 Kerman’s optimism is partly epistemological (classical music is not a unitary organism with a

single “lifespan,” but a complex, ever-renewing negotiation among cultural elites) and partly com-

mon-sensical: casting his mind back to the threadbare operatic culture he found when he came to

the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1960s, and contrasting it with the vibrant, scrappy contem-

porary scene, in which dozens of small companies are busily producing historical rarities and con-

temporary experiments, he finds the idea that opera is “dying” to be absurd. In fact, for Kerman, op-

era, not the symphony, is the hybridized “lifeline” of classical music, a hardy species of musical thea-

ter whose total disappearance, unlike instrumental concert music, is inconceivable. (Opera, he says,

has “world history” on its side.)5

Kerman, who has written thoughtfully on the idea of canon in Western art music, is well

aware that much of what is presented under the rubric of “opera” these days has little to do with the

canonical values of classical music; a lot of it is, by those standards, rubbishy stuff. (Jerry Springer:

The Opera?) But, as he reminds us, it always was – and a healthy thing, too. Opera has the rude vi-

3 The so-called “death of classical music” is, of course, a controversial trope. My own position on the question was staked out relatively early, in Robert Fink, “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon,” American Music 16-2 (Summer 1998): 135-179. A more recent and sanguine view may be found in Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). A very timely summary of classical music issues and data is perennially updated by journalist, consultant, and blogger Greg Sandow at http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/. A muckraking investigatory attack criminalized the death; see Norman Lebrecht, Who Killed Classical Music? Maestros, Managers, and Corporate Politics (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1997). 4 Kerman, “Morbidity of Music,” p. 7. 5 “View opera, the bonding of music and theater, in the broadest terms (The Persians, The Play of Daniel, thirty settings of Metastasio’s book for La clemenza di Tito, Parsifal and Pelléas, Phantom, Passion) and the spoken theater is recognized as a golden but passing phase in the long history of drama…just as the classical symphony…is a passing phase in the history of music.” Kerman, “Morbidity of Music,” p. 19.


tality of the amphitheater, the market fair, and the circus; it may not fit comfortably in a sober

canon defined by Germanic symphonies, but it might well outlast them. One might add that opera

has, at least since the rise of the “classics” in the early nineteenth century, also been spurned as too

messy and real, too redolent of the economic, racial, and political parochialisms of its time, to pro-

vide the properly abstract (and thus transcendently universal) uplift we ought to derive from “pure”

symphonic music. There is a line of thinking about artistic canons that sees their construction inher-

ently predicated on the banishment of living creativity to the (dead) past; by this light, opera will

survive precisely because, with a few carefully-argued exceptions (mostly German), its practitioners

never really made it into the classical music canon, their well-loved works popular enough to be in-

corporated into vaudeville and ragtime, but not the imaginary museum of musical “masterpieces.”6

If one takes a longer historical view, though, the notion that opera is not “classical” can

hardly be sustained. In the West, early seventeenth-century opera was the first secular style to chal-

lenge church music as serious public art, justifying itself by explicit recourse to the civic theater of

ancient Greece (the “Classics”). As it spread across Europe, lyric tragedy made non-liturgical music

intellectually respectable, giving vocal melody an important new job (the imitation of emotionally

heightened speech), and linking the craft of musical composition to newly-revalued Classical ideals

of rhetoric and ethics.7 As Kerman is well aware, for much of Western music history, composing an

operatic tragedy was a serious intellectual endeavor, while instrumental music, however carefully

crafted, was considered frivolous, a mere “playing with sensations,” as Immanuel Kant famously re-

6 The notion that “art history” (as style history) and its entailment of an authoritative canon of great works presupposes the “end” or “death” of art can be traced back to Hegel, and behind him to the founder of art history, Johann Joachim Winck-elmann. See the excellent discussion of Winckelmann’s Greece in David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Mod-ernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 16-51. The metaphor of the imaginary musical museum is Lydia Goehr’s; see The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, rev. ed. (Oxford University Press, 2007). Joseph Kerman’s magisterial survey of the idea of “canon” in musicological criticism can be found in his collection Write All These Down (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), as “A Few Canonic Variations,” pp. 33-50. The indis-pensible guide to the popular appreciation of opera in nineteenth-century America is Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 7For a good overview of the “classicism” of the Florentine Camerata and its influence on subsequent operatic aesthetics, see Richard A. Carlton, “Florentine Humanism and the Birth of Opera: The Roots of Operatic ‘Conventions’,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 31-1 (June 2000): 67-78.


marked. Sonatas and symphonies had little to do with deep thought or big ideas; they were agree-

able space and time fillers, more likely to fade into the background than challenge the mind.8 Such a

view may seem antique, even topsy-turvy, to devotees brought up, like many of us, on the supremacy

of the German instrumental canon; but at the dawn of the post-classical era, old habits and hierar-

chies do reassert themselves.

This truth was brought home to me one afternoon on a stalled freeway, as I turned for solace

to my satellite radio receiver. I had a choice of two classical music channels: one with vocals, one

without. “Symphony Hall” was indeed broadcasting a symphony, a rarity from the 1780s by Ignace

Pleyel, who is now more noted for his later success as piano manufacturer than as the very popular

orchestral composer he once was. The orderly bustle was relaxing…but, distractedly checking out

my options over at “Metropolitan Opera Radio,” I was riveted by a snatch of bel canto, the heart-

rending Mad Scene (“O rendetemi la speme”) from Bellini’s I puritani, re-broadcast from a historic

1991 live performance.9 The gorgeous voice of Edita Gruberova pulled me in; but I stayed for the

whole scena, an aesthetic experience in every way more consequential, more serious – and more

“classical,” in the sense of embodying the canonic values of “serious” art music, than the amiable

pattern-making of Haydn’s most talented pupil.

Let us accept then that opera has two contradictory opportunities at the twilight of classical

music. Thanks to its adaptability and popular touch, it might rescue, by undoing the nineteenth-

century’s sacralizing turn, the tight-lipped musical canon from which it has mostly been excluded.

At the same time, its dramatic intensity and emotional depth could keep the fading idea of music-as-

art intellectually salient in contemporary culture, even as erstwhile monuments of instrumental mu-

sic fade into its soundscape as a species of high-end interior design. Some contemporary observers

would explain my experience of Pleyel’s symphony as part of a fundamental shift in the way classical

8 “[Musik]…bloß mit Empfindungen spielt…” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, II, § 53. 9 Vincenzo Bellini, I puritani, Metropolitan Opera live broadcast of 30 March 1991.


music is consumed, marked by “a proliferation in our culture of recordings that may legitimately be

tagged as interior design.” This argument does not necessarily exempt opera; but it does imply that

popular vocal music, thanks to “the old ideology of direct emotional communication by the per-

former,” is less amenable to ambient deployment.10 Like arena rock, the grandest of opera can be

quite pragmatic in the ways it compels a modicum attention from even the most distracted and self-

absorbed bystanders. (Recent musicological research accordingly reads the elaborate da capo aria

forms of eighteenth-century opera seria as carefully calibrated “templates for interaction rituals” that

presuppose “an intuitive sensory familiarity with formal and semantic cues, allowing participants to

tune in and out without missing the prime vertices of the event.”)11

Opera as flexible interaction ritual might well outlast the rigidity of the classical music

canon. On the other hand, some of the highest-profile operatic ventures in the post-classical world

have foundered on a contradiction between the inclusive values of opera and the self-reflexive ideol-

ogy of classical music that is not as easily resolved as Kerman’s prospectus might imply. Simply put,

it is not possible for serious opera to save classical music without, in some sense being classical music;

and if opera is to be classical music, then its sense of itself as “serious” can hardly escape being in-

fected by the solipsistic ideology of the Western musical canon, in particular that most fundamental

belief encompassed in the premise of Salieri’s famous operatic burlesque, prima la musica, e poi le pa-

role. If, as Kerman argues, opera’s unquenchable, saving essence is the bond between cultivated art

music and the endlessly renewable vitality of theater,12 its greatest threat is decaying fallout from the

nineteenth-century explosion of “absolute” music. First, the music. The idea has had a long half-life,

10 See Adam Krims, “Music in the Design-Intensive City,” in Music and Urban Geography (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 157-161. The centerpiece of Krims’s discussion is a 1997 Harmonia Mundi release of Christine Schornsheim and the Akademie für Alte Musik performing C.P.E. Bach’s Concerto for organ, Wq. 34. It is precisely the type of “ambient” in-strumental music one can hear on Sirius/XM’s Symphony Hall channel at any time of day or night. For a technological, his-torical, and critical discussion of how barococo music came to function as aural wallpaper, see the present author’s “A Pox on Manfredini,” in Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 169-207. 11 Martha Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 42, 13. 12 Kerman, Morbidity of Music, p. 19.


but, outside a small coterie of classical music insiders, the generally negative reception of John Ad-

ams’s and Peter Sellars’s Doctor Atomic shows what happens when a contemporary composer and

director presume on its continued power. In one striking case, cultural journalist Ron Rosenbaum, a

novice enticed into the opera house by the topicality of the subject, was so appalled by the opera’s

abuse of language that he questioned whether English words should be set to music at all. Doctor

Atomic did not justify the ways of classical music to this man; as we’ll see, his scabrous attack re-

vokes almost two centuries of canonic thinking, reviving anti-musical sentiments more reminiscent

of London in the 1720s than of twenty-first century New York.

Tossing a lifeline out to the classical music canon, it seems, is not without significant risk.

§ § §

From an early age I was inspired by great composers, writers, chore-ographers and painters who could say something immensely im-portant, yet also reach a lot of people. Those 19th-century giants – Beethoven, Tolstoy, Dickens, Wagner, Zola - had enormous audi-ences...13

- composer John Adams, 2009

A cultural chain reaction

The impulse to create a new serious opera on the subject of Robert J. Oppenheimer and the

Manhattan Project did not come from John Adams, nor did it spring, like many new operatic ven-

tures, from a desire to annex the popularity of a pre-existing movie, play, or novel. The idea oc-

curred to Pamela Rosenberg, the ambitious general director of the San Francisco Opera, who imag-

ined Oppenheimer as “an American Faust” in “the Goethe mode.” Evidently, she hoped to lure a

famous composer back to the opera house with the promise of a commission that would engage

world-historical questions, and whose dramatic armature could draw on perhaps the most powerful

13 Richard Morrison. “The man who put a bomb under opera. He gave us Nixon and Mao, and terrorism at sea. Now John Adams goes nuclear with Doctor Atomic. Richard Morrison meets a composer re-inventing opera.” The Times of London, 14 February 2009.


theatrical trope of modernity, the Faustian “quest for ultimate knowledge.”14 To choose Goethe’s

Faust as a model for a new opera is to evoke a problematically avant-garde near-miss (Busoni) and a

genuine, if slightly tacky, blockbuster (Gounod), but it also discloses a German Romantic view of

“serious” music that leads away from the theater and back to the concert hall: most music lovers

encounter the Faust story in late-romantic orchestral guise (Liszt’s “Faust” Symphony; the second

half of Mahler’s titanic Eighth), or at a rare concert performance of Berlioz’s unstageable “dramatic

legend,” La Damnation de Faust.

Arguably the most influential musical readings of Goethe’s Faust were the ones imposed di-

rectly onto the canonic symphonies of Beethoven by Wagner and other nineteenth-century German

critics;15 it is hard to escape the notion that Rosenberg hoped to entice the man she considered the

“greatest composer alive,” a successful orchestral composer badly burned by the critical rejection of

his previous opera, back into her house by offering him a high German-speaking theme worthy of

Beethovenian symphonic Sturm und Drang, a subject which would allow him to indulge his canoni-

cal ambitions on the largest possible scale while she secured an equally big premiere. Approached in

early 2000, Adams demurred, saying he “had no more operas in him,” but eventually his desire to

“say something immensely important, yet also reach a lot of people” made San Francisco’s commis-

sion for an American Faust irresistible.16

14 Matthew Gurewitsch, “The opera that chooses the nuclear option,” The New York Times, 25 September 2005. This out-break of what in 1920s Germany was called Literaturoper (“literature opera”), where the cultural prestige of the source material is the prime guarantee of an opera’s “seriousness,” could itself be the focus of a useful synoptic essay. From the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Harbison, The Great Gatsby) to Tennessee Williams (Previn, A Streetcar Named Desire); from Elie Kazan, who directed Streetcar, to horror auteur David Cronenberg (Howard Shore, The Fly), the subjects of recent American operas have been sold to impresarios and audiences as “instant masterpieces,” musical treatments of stories and characters so familiar and successful that the operas based on them couldn’t miss. The fact that many of them did fail is, in its own way, reassuring. 15 Reading Beethoven symphonies, especially the Ninth, through Goethe’s Faust was a powerful trope of romantic musical hermeneutics. Wagner actually organized the program note for his own 1846 Dresden performances of the Ninth around key excerpts from Goethe’s drama. See the present author’s historical discussion of the “Faustian” Ninth in “Beethoven Anti-hero,” in Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, Andrew Dell’Antonio, ed., (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 116-119. 16Rosenberg’s view of Adams is noted in Alex Ross, “Countdown. John Adams and Peter Sellars create an atomic opera.” The New Yorker, 3 October 2005; Adams’s response to her is quoted in Gurewitsch, “The opera that chooses the nuclear option.” In this same interview, Adams disavowed that his work actually was the American Faust that Rosenberg wanted: “I didn’t want this opera to come into the world loaded with that baggage.” But the trope appears, nonetheless, in almost every review


Adams took on the commission in 2002 with his long-time operatic collaborators, director

Peter Sellars and poet Alice Goodman, the creative team responsible for his breakthrough success

Nixon in China (1987) and its more controversial follow-up The Death of Klinghoffer (1991).17 At

some point before September of the next year, Goodman withdrew from the project for reasons not

entirely clear, leaving the composer and director without a librettist. Rather than find a replace-

ment, Adams and Sellars chose to assemble the opera’s text themselves from pre-existing material, as

they had done with the Bible stories and political poetry that made up Adams’s Nativity oratorio, El

Niño (2000). (I’ll have more to say about the ramifications of this decision below.) Abandoning the

wide-angle view of the original American Faust, which would have followed Oppenheimer into the

1950s and his battle with Edward Teller over the hydrogen bomb, Sellars immersed himself in the

historical minutiae of Los Alamos: transcripts of wartime meetings and military orders; memoirs,

interviews, and letters written by the participants; detailed diagrams and photos of the spherical

“Gadget” itself, dripping with wires, destined to be the centerpiece of the stage set; and, most sensa-

tionally, reams of newly-declassified documents from the Manhattan Project itself. The chronology

of the opera shrank to just the few days before the first atomic test on July 16, 1945, and the goal be-

came to create a documentary mosaic of journalistic immediacy within which, as The New Yorker

admiringly reported, “almost every line could be checked against a source.” Sellars’s research pro-

vided a ready stream of urgent, rat-a-tat recitative; the collaborators fashioned lyrical arias from

equally “authentic” contemplative poetry, favoring passages from authors whose words the hyper-

literate Oppenheimer habitually used in writing and conversation (Donne, Baudelaire, the Bhagavad

Gita). The liberal use of declassified documents allowed Sellars to designate the radically pruned

of the work. See, for instance, Anthony Tommasini, “Countdown to the eve of destruction,” The New York Times, 2 Octo-ber 2005. 17 A timeline of the first Doctor Atomic production can be found at the San Francisco Opera’s dedicated and exhaustive web-site, www.doctor-atomic.com, and I follow it here – although as an official, ex post facto account, it passes over many details, of great interest to critical posterity, that must be sourced from journalistic accounts. Adams and Goodman were both listed, along with Peter Sellars and conductor Donald Runnicles, when the commission was announced to the press in December of 2002. See, for instance, Lawrence van Gelder, “Footlights,” The New York Times, 24 December 2002.


story as a moral fable, even though it shied away from representing either the “sin” of Hiroshima or

the eventual downfall of its Faustian scientific protagonists. The libretto would be the chassis of an

abstract yet powerful vehicle for healing through recovered memory:

And [now we] ask these artists to go into an area of such deep toxicity, and out of that bring something of beauty – of lasting beauty – which is why the libretto con-sists of classified documents that were meant to be buried alive forever. And now that very thing that President Truman was not allowed to read – because the secu-rity apparatus kept it away from the President of the United States – is being sung in the clear light of day by chorus and orchestra…which again offers some hope for the world.18

The creation of a “memory space” around a holocaust-like event, rather than direct engage-

ment through representational storytelling, was a change in strategy strongly validated by the 2003

Pulitzer Prize awarded to Adams for On the Transmigration of Souls. Written to commemorate the

attacks of September 11, 2001, this work for chorus and orchestra avoids all but the most symbolic

representation of that day’s events, and like Sellars’s libretto for Doctor Atomic, assembles its “found”

texts into an abstract meditation on transgression and loss.

It was thus clear by 2004, as Adams began to compose, inspired by the bombast of 1950s sci-

ence fiction soundtracks and the craggy modernism of Edgard Varése, that Doctor Atomic was, to put

it in slightly crass terms, going to be a tough sell. Audiences would not get operatic tragedy in the

full-blooded mode of Faust: they would not hear the hubristic Oppenheimer exult “I am become

Death, destroyer of worlds”; they would not see the bomb drop on innocent civilians; they would not

18 Alex Ross, “Countdown.” Matthew Gurewitsch, op. cit., reported a working copy of the libretto in which every line was literally footnoted. Peter Sellars remarks are from a transcript of the San Francisco Opera’s Doctor Atomic Workshop, 30 Oc-tober 2005. He was speaking impromptu – but the sentiment was not uncharacteristic. In Alex Ross’s New Yorker profile, Sellars takes as his model Kenzaburo Oe’s novel A Personal Matter, in which “the word ‘Hiroshima’ occurs once.” (The same is true of Doctor Atomic.) Sellars implies that a documentary-collage style is uniquely suited to subjects like Hiroshima and the Holocaust because the bathetic failure of representational artifice is an unacceptable risk. This allergy to “artiness” in Holo-caust art is a well-worn trope (see Harold Bloom, ed., Literature of the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004) for some key literary discussions); but musicologist Amy Wlodarski’s recent work on the mediation of recorded Holocaust survivor accounts by Steve Reich’s Different Trains shows how complex the notion of “documentary authenticity” in music theater can be. The inherent complexity of collaborative art – and the slipperiness of concepts like “the real” in the minds of work-ing artists – is evidenced by the way John Adams takes precisely the opposite position in a 2008 NPR interview: “Opera is a very strange art form now. When we go into the theater and the lights go down, we are in a very unreal world, and part of that unreality allows us to address subjects and themes that other art forms are really sort of unable to do in quite the same way.” (Interview with Ira Flatow, 17 October 2008.)


watch with mounting pity and terror as nemesis, in the form of Edward Teller and the twin furies of

anti-communism and the arms race, drove Doctor Atomic to his final disgrace. Pamela Rosenberg’s

American Faust was turning out as a dissonant symphonic poem harnessed to a documentary. Given

the end-of-the-world subtext of atomic war, Peter Sellars imagined Doctor Atomic as a “Götterdäm-

merung for our generation…with nothing being a metaphor and everything being a reality.” But the

static, foreshortened book Sellars constructed was nothing but metaphor (and metonym): he re-

fused on aesthetic principle to represent the moral and physical devastation of an atomic blast, a re-

alistic theatrical coup Adams also flinched away from, agreeing that it would have been “clichéd on

arrival.” Unlike Nixon in China this opera did not archly restage iconic televised events as postmod-

ern pastiche; nor, like The Death of Klinghoffer, would it provoke divisive battles over Palestine and

anti-Semitism within the American musical intelligentsia. The last serious controversy over the

dropping of the atom bomb on Japan, which led to the closure of the 1994 “Enola Gay” exhibit at

the Smithsonian, was spearheaded by the American Legion and the Air Force Association, veterans’

groups unlikely to be drawn into a debate over a modernist opera in which no explosions are seen,

no Japanese appear, and the word “Hiroshima” is uttered only once, in passing, during a dry listing

of possible target options. A trenchant observer once usefully summed up the history of classical

concert promotion in America as the perennial struggle between commercialized puffery and quasi-

religious uplift; given the grim tone of Doctor Atomic, ballyhoo was not an obvious option.19

19An excellent overview which reproduces several key documents of the Enola Gay controversy and considers its implications for the practice of public history, appears in a special issue of The Journal of American History 82-3 (December 1995): 1029-1144. On Nixon in China as postmodern media simulation, see Peggy Kamuf’s brilliant deconstruction, “The Replay’s the Thing,” in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 79-105. For a detailed analysis of the critical reception of The Death of Klinghoffer, see the present author, “Klinghoffer in Brooklyn Heights: Opera, Anti-Semitism, and the Politics of Representation,” Cambridge Opera Journal 17-2 (July 2005): 173-213. On “uplift” and “ballyhoo,” see Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: A Social History of American Concert Life (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1994), pp. 17-42. Interestingly, Horowitz’s history puts opera in a pivotal role, mediating the two dialectically-opposed traditions of American concert life: “Italian opera gravitated towards ballyhoo, German opera towards symphonic sobriety.” The identification of Adams with Wagner thus marks his music as sober and uplifting. For an at-tempt to consider some general implications of Horowitz’s analysis at the turn of the twenty-first century, see the present author, “Elvis Everywhere,” pp. 138-44.


Certainly no effort or expense was spared to create an explosion of publicity, a “cultural

chain reaction,” around Doctor Atomic; as one jaded critic noted, “New operas are always big events,

but the hype surrounding this one went off the scale.”20 What was needed was uplift as ballyhoo, a

concerted attempt to embed the premiere(s) in a general outpouring of intellectualized excitement.

In San Francisco, the opera was positioned as part of an interdisciplinary consideration of history,

science, morality, and aesthetics, and its launch was accompanied by a flotilla of ancillary cultural

events involving the Bay Area’s major universities, the San Francisco Exploratorium, the Pacific Film

Archive, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Metanexus Institute, the Left Coast Ensemble, and the

American Physical Society (see Table 1). The Doctor Atomic push in New York was even stronger, a

veritable Manhattan Project of arts management built around a new production by Penny Wool-

cock, the British director who had made a controversial 2002 film of The Death of Klinghoffer. As

The New Yorker’s online blog admiringly noted, Peter Gelb, general director of the Met, “promoted

the heck out of” Doctor Atomic, using foundation money to put a bevy of academic humanists, physi-

cists, and playwrights at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in dialogue with

the creative team, cast, and director of the production, veterans of the A-bomb project, political his-

torians, and other public intellectuals at Lincoln Center. (Even the fact that the Met’s conductor,

Alan Gilbert, was of Japanese-American heritage was grist for the publicity mill, motivating a presen-

tation at the Japan Society of New York, an audience one might assume would be allergic to Hi-

roshima-inspired hype.)21

With the release of Sellars’s DVD version of the original San Francisco production of Doctor

Atomic in the summer of 2008, and the Metropolitan Opera premiere that fall, Adams, who often

mused in interviews on the insignificance of a contemporary classical composer in the face of the

20 Steven Winn, “ ‘Atomic’ sets off cultural chain reaction,” San Francisco Chronicle, 29 September 2005; Mark Swed, “An explosive premiere,” Los Angeles Times, 3 October 2005. 21 “Promoting the heck out of it” was a phrase used in “New Paths,” The New Yorker’s online blog, on 3 October 2008, the day before the first event. Much of the activity at CUNY was underwritten by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.


mass audience of late capitalism, came as close to the ubiquity of Tolstoy or Dickens as any 21st-

century opera composer could get.22 Such an important cultural event deserved the largest possible

audience, so Gelb’s Metropolitan put the full force of its national media connections behind Doctor

Atomic. The opera was broadcast four times over the XM/Sirius satellite radio network and

streamed over the Internet from the Metropolitan’s website; on Saturday, November 8, a matinee

performance of Doctor Atomic was simulcast in High Definition video to movie theaters in major cit-

ies around the globe. Back at Ground Zero, in a gesture that Gelb hailed as a blow struck on behalf

of “the democratization of art,” a pair of wealthy opera patrons bought up $500,000 dollars worth of

premium orchestra seats and announced they would resell them to the public for just $30.23 Call it

uplift or ballyhoo – no expense would be spared to spread Doctor Atomic’s fallout across the land-

scape of American arts, letters, and science.

The opera’s public reception between 2005 and 2008 thus affords us an excellent data-set

with which to test the Kerman hypothesis: could Doctor Atomic, transforming the Manhattan Pro-

ject into a quasi-Faustian meditation on apocalypse, into “the ultimate American myth” with music

by America’s most famous living composer (and the canny backing of America’s most powerful cul-

tural institutions), justify the inheritances of nineteenth-century classical music to the educated

bourgeois audience of the twenty-first century?

Would the Gadget actually go off?

§ § §

22 “I have very dark days. Being a contemporary classical composer in this particular culture is just a useless activity. I feel that what I do, even if I am one of the most performed contemporary living composers, just doesn’t show on the cultural radar screen in this country.” John Adams quoted in Dominic Maxwell, “A legend out of his own time,” The Times of London (Online), 26 January 2007. 23 Sean Michaels, “Opera sponsors buy £250,000 worth of tickets,” The Guardian, 9 October 2008. The Guardian was nota-bly unimpressed by the reverse scalping, noting caustically that Karl Leichtman and Agnes Varis were “very lucky to be so marvelously rich.”


“Art-Science?” hissed an anonymous opera-loving artist and dean at the City University of New York, when I asked if she would be go-ing to see the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Doctor Atomic. “Science will only dilute true art. I expect it to bomb. I’ll read the review to confirm,” she snapped.24

Some kind of masterpiece

The San Francisco premiere of Doctor Atomic was an international cultural event, covered

across the United States and Western Europe; subsequent premieres in Chicago and Amsterdam

received less attention, but the New York premiere inspired another massive burst of press coverage.

(See Appendix A for a listing of key notices and reviews, 2002-2009.) The overall tenor of its recep-

tion justifies David Patrick Stearns’s retrospective observation that “few major operas enter the

world with so little critical consensus as Doctor Atomic.”25 It is not that the reception didn’t focus on

the same aesthetic issues; in fact, collective analysis of the opera’s strengths and weaknesses has re-

mained relatively consistent over the years. But except for a few unequivocal admirers who ac-

claimed Doctor Atomic as a total success, a twenty-first century Gesamtkunstwerk, critics could not

agree on whether their admiration for Adams’s music or distaste for Sellars’s libretto should be deci-

sive.26

Partisans of contemporary music, predisposed to admire Adams’s development as a com-

poser, tended to render a positive judgment on the opera as a whole. The San Francisco Chronicle’s

Joshua Kosman, a long-time supporter, hardly hedged his bet in 2005, anointing Doctor Atomic

“some kind of masterpiece”; Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times, while noting intimations of back-

stage disarray, hastened to assure his readers that “Make no mistake, ‘Doctor Atomic’ is a magnifi-

24 Talia Page, “ ‘Dr. Atomic’: doomed to bomb?” Talking Science (blog), 21 October 2008. 25 David Patrick Stearns, “ ‘Doctor Atomic’: The Met’s Manhattan Project,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 16 October 2008. Even Alex Ross of The New Yorker, a strong supporter of the work, characterized its reception in 2006 as “all over the map.” (Interview with Lianne Hansen, NPR, 1 January 2006.) 26 Janos Gereben, “ ‘Doctor Atomic’ batters heart, mind,” San Diego Magazine, 1 October 2005. Mark Swed has been one of the very few critics who conspicuously praises Sellar’s libretto as “a brilliant work in its own right.” See “In opera, print takes a tragic turn.” Los Angeles Times, 7 December 2008.


cent achievement…It contains music of unearthly splendor and gorgeous lushness.”27 This lushness

was news: Adams was lauded for definitively “transcending” his minimalist roots (“[the] sound lan-

guage is more subtle, more advanced than ever, completely authentic, and flattering to the voices;

minimalism is now only a coloration”), and for manipulating a post-Wagnerian orchestra and gener-

ous admixtures of dissonance to overwhelming effect: “As a musical experience – a sensory experi-

ence – Doctor Atomic is awesome. Especially from an orchestral standpoint, it’s almost physical in its

impact. The pit was crammed with 71 players, including a fearsome array of percussion…”28

But an odd disconnect shadowed this praise; although a few critics imagined the massive or-

chestra as a force for dramatic characterization (“The apocalyptic material of “Doctor Atomic” has

inspired [Adams] to instrumental writing of genuinely Wagnerian multiplicity, roiling with all the

emotions the characters ignore, gloss over, or suppress…”), most responded to the “radioactive”

power of instrumental sound for its own sake:

Whole spans of the orchestral and choral music tremble with textural density. Stacked-up clusters and polytonal harmonies have stunning bite and pungency. Skit-tish instrumental lines come close to sounding like riffs from a serialist score… When he needs to propel the music forward, Mr. Adams, true to form, creates a din of pummeling rhythms, fractured meters and jolting repeated figures: call it atomic Minimalism.

Rapid caffeinated figures dart around the orchestra like hyperactive electrons. Strange, darkly glowing woodwind chords hover like a vapor. Low brass notes rattle ominously as if marking the edge of an abyss.

Spacious washes of sound create a harmonic backdrop, suggesting both barren desert and wide-open possibility - with random twinkling effects from the upper wood-winds and the occasional glissando of a coyote howl. Rhythms have a way of sud-denly multiplying, as if trying to jam themselves into a microscopic space. Symmetry

27 Joshua Kosman, “Using a trinity of unconventional drama, haunting score, and poetry, S. F. Opera confronts our age’s most terrifying topic,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 October 2005; Mark Swed, “An explosive premiere,” Los Angeles Times, 3 October 2005. 28 “Adams Klangsprache ist subtiler, avancierter denn je, ganz eigen, schmeichelt den Stimmen; ist farbig, nur noch mit minimalisti-schen Einsprengseln,” Manuel Brug. “Die Bombe über der Wiege [The Bomb over the Cradle]: (K)ein amerikanischer Faust: ‘Doctor Atomic’ von John Adams und Peter Sellars in San Francisco,” Die Welt, 4 October 2005; John Fleming, “Explosive opera,” St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, 21 October 2005.


is constantly obstructed and interrupted by hostile incursions from other instru-ments, as if a hole is ripped in the universe.29 In a telling reverse synecdoche, “Adams’s music” refers mainly to his use of the orchestra,

imagined here as a force of nature operating at the sub-atomic level; the vocal writing, with its direct

link to the human story acted out on stage, does not really figure into its workings. In this vein, Alex

Ross inadvertently revealed a large fissure in classical music ideology when he described Doctor

Atomic just before its San Francisco premiere as “a three-hour symphony of dread.” In the world of

the classical canon, there can be no higher praise for an opera than mistaking it for a symphony, as

conductor Robert Spano confirmed in November 2008, evoking the most canonical symphonist of

all as inspiration for his concert performances of Doctor Atomic with the Atlanta Symphony: “The

formal structures are so big that ‘Doctor Atomic’ is almost Beethovenian in that way. All the small

parts refer back to the big overarching idea. The structure is always right there.”30

§ § §

A libretto is not a program note

Spano was right; Doctor Atomic is indeed very carefully put together. But, as Kerman reminds

us above, the enduring cultural power of opera lies not in structural, but dramatic integrity. And as

music drama, the new opera was not well received. Critics, well aware that the text was the work of

a director moonlighting as a writer, attacked Sellars’s literary shortcomings at every level, deploring

the libretto’s ideological preachiness, its lack of sustained character development or structural ten-

sion, and especially its long stretches of lumpy, prosaic borrowed language. Many recoiled from the

perceived “banality and pretension” of Sellars’s “lethally self-conscious” anti-nuclear symbolism, in

29 Gurewitsch, “Nuclear option”; Tommasini, “Countdown”; Jeremy Eichler, “An opera that hovers on threshold of the nu-clear age,” Boston Globe, 6 October 2005; Daniel Patrick Stearns, “Heroic A-bomb opera will create fallout,” The Philadelphia Enquirer, 5 October 2005. 30 Spano interviewed in Pierre Ruhe, “ ‘Atomic’ emperor of opera.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 16 November 2008.


which, as one exasperated critic summed it up, “Motherhood = good; nuclear weapons = bad. Hey,

thanks, man!” (The reference is to the stage design of Act II, in which a life-size replica of the atomic

device dangles menacingly over a baby’s crib.) Physicists and historians complained that the moral

calculus was oversimplified, discounting the real human losses anticipated during an Allied invasion

of Japan; Die Welt remarked acidly that, as Iraq and North Korea flirted anew with nuclear destruc-

tion, “what might have been a critical report from the concert hall…proved only professionally stale,

percussion-peppered political correctness.” (The Wall Street Journal simply suggested that Adams

find another, less wooly-headed collaborator.)31

Even sympathetic critics found Sellars’s libretto for Doctor Atomic strangely “antitheatrical,”

making for “an opera that is not conventionally dramatic in any way”; several, noting its avoidance

of stage action and the focus on issues of power and responsibility, likened the result to eighteenth-

century opera seria. (Daniel Harvey, writing in Variety, found the opera “lofty, dullish” and lacking in

“humanity.”) Many found the “metaphor and high-flown imagery” of the collaged libretto non-

operatic, and its central characters unreadable: “[Doctor Atomic] is a sort of oratorio, lacking the

development of character and relationships that make a good story. Even Oppenheimer seems

opaque.” Structural problems were worst in the second act, a long decrescendo of action which

made many reviewers impatient; waiting for the bomb to go off, at least one missed the presence of

an independent librettist who could advocate for opera as drama: “I wonder if Act II would be so

becalmed dramatically…if Sellars had taken up the creative writer’s responsibility for finding a nar-

31 banality and pretension – Hugh Canning, “Doctor Atomic – the Sunday Times Review,” The Sunday Times (online), 19 October 2008; lethally self-conscious – Peter Reed, “ENO delivers with a bang; Or how I learned to love an opera about a bomb,” The Sunday Telegraph, 8 March 2009; motherhood vs. the bomb – Tim Page, “ ‘Doctor Atomic’: Unleashing Powerful Forces,” Washington Post, 3 October 2005; percussion-sprinkled political correctness – Brug, “The Bomb over the Cradle” (“Ein kritischer Musiktheater-Beitrag...erwies sich als professionell fade, perkussionsgewürzte politische Korrektheit“); Heidi Waleson, “All About the Bomb,” The Wall Street Journal, 4 October 2005.


rative dynamic that Adams’s previous librettist Alice Goodman so wonderfully exercised in Nixon

and Klinghoffer.” 32

Nowhere was the lack of a professional hand more keenly felt than in the actual language of

the opera’s text: had Sellars forgotten that the librettist is also a practical poet whose first job is to

provide patterns of crisp, singable verse for the composer to set? True, a distinct minority liked the

fact that scientific equations, bureaucratic memoranda, and weather reports were sung in grand op-

eratic style. Alex Ross noted what he called “the Gadget effect,” where even the most mundane ut-

terances took on significance in the shadow of the Bomb, while Dennis Overbye, award-winning

author of the “scientific romance” Einstein in Love, saw Doctor Atomic’s singing physicists as figures of

a new, secular epic: “To hear the chorus of khaki-clad scientists and engineers sing of such matters

is to have the gritty details of engineering and science raised to liturgy. It re-mythologized the

atomic project for me in a way I had not thought possible.”33 But the consensus view of Sellars’s

wordsmithing was strongly negative. Critics fell over each other bashing the “verbal flabbiness” of his

libretto: “the words seem like diverse quotes tastefully edited and typeset for a glossy coffee-table

Manhattan Project commemoration book. Then, problematically, it’s set to music…” – “it is alarm-

ingly, sometimes ludicrously intrusive, veering between extremes of technobabble opacity and the

purplest of poetic hyperbole” – “if Adams’s notes don’t cramp [the singers’] style, Sellars’s text, a

32 antitheatrical – Stearns, “Heroic A-bomb opera”; not conventionally dramatic – Kosman; opera seria - Tom Sutcliffe, “Doc-tor Atomic [in SF]. The Times of London (Online), 4 October 2005; lofty, dullish – Daniel Harvey, “ ‘Doctor Atomic’ in SF,” Variety, 4 October 2005; metaphor and high-flown imagery - Andrew Clements, “Doctor Atomic at San Francisco Opera,” The Guardian, 5 October 2005; opaque – Fleming, “Explosive opera”; lack of a librettist – Sutcliffe, op. cit. It must be noted that John Adams himself was a vociferous proponent of Sellars’s libretto, praising it for precisely the qualities that critics later complained were lacking: “In an opera you need that personal interaction, clashes of will, strong emotions, anger, discord, love, hate – the whole gamut of human intercourse. The last thing we would want would be something historically accurate but emotionally frozen, like a Victorian oratorio or some such thing.” As quoted in Thomas May, The John Adams Reader (New York: Amadeus Press, 2006), p. 223. 33 gadget effect – Ross, “Countdown”; it re-mythologized the atomic project - Dennis Overbye, “ ‘Dr Atomic’: unthinkable yet immortal,” The New York Times, 18 October 2005.


mix of official quotations, poetry, and waffle, often will. Even Puccini would falter over a line such as

‘I keep in constant touch with a team of psychiatrists at Oak Ridge’.”34

Perhaps the most devastating appraisal came not from a professional critic, but another,

younger composer. Mark Adamo, whose 1998 Little Women had been one of the very few American

operas to match the genuine popular success of Adams’s Nixon in China, went to see Doctor Atomic

in New York; he came away bitterly disappointed, blaming the composer for letting loyalty to an old

friend blind him to the fact that the collage of prose and poems he had accepted in place of a real

libretto doomed the work to dramatic nullity:

Obviously Sellars and Adams have worked together long and fruitfully, and collegial-ity should count for something; but if, as a composer, I were presented with this li-bretto, I’d have torn it to shreds. Nothing is shaped: nothing develops; so there’s nothing to compose into. For all its moment-to-moment sparkle and range, the score functions in very limited ways: either as extended scare-tremolandi for the foreboding prose scenes, or as tastefully chosen frames for Sellars’s gallery of poetic sources. The composer should have demanded more from his librettist. Based on this draft, Sellars seemed more committed to an anti-dramatic method of creating a text than to ex-ploring the story and the issues that, presumably, spurred the creation of the text to begin with. Didn’t Adams hear what was missing? If he did, didn’t he care?

That incredulous question – didn’t you hear what was missing? didn’t you care? – sounds from

Adamo’s pen with an insider’s defensiveness; we hear a composer totally committed to sung drama,

and willing to forgo a certain measure of reputation to write it, scolding his older, more famous,

more “symphonic” colleague for not taking the practical exigencies of the form seriously enough. (“I

basically don’t have much interest in opera,’ Adams once confided to Joshua Kosman. “But I do

think it’s an art form that can grapple with the deepest, most unknowable subjects.”) For Adamo,

who did have the interest, an opera shouldn’t be a three-hour symphony composed to illustrate,

rather than set, its texts. “A libretto,” he snapped, “is not a program note.”35

34 verbal flabbiness – Clements, 2005; diverse quotes – Harvey; ludicrously intrusive – Reed; even Puccini would falter – Geoff Brown, “Netherlands Opera: Doctor Atomic (DVD),” Times of London (Online), 1 August 2008. 35 Mark Adamo, “John, Atoms,” www.markadamo.com/journal, 14 October 2008; Adams quoted in Joshua Kosman, “S.F. Opera to premiere work by John Adams in new season – Handel, Bellini also in lineup,” San Francisco Chronicle, 13 January 2005.


§ § §

Do words not matter in opera? It’s not something I’d thought about, because opera is so often in a foreign language, which dis-courages close reading. But I began to wonder whether opera fol-lows different rules: Because words are sung, do they transcend any bombastic triviality, any wounding awfulness?36

The Spinal Tap of opera

For a musicologist, this is a stunning passage, the words of a modern-day Bellini diagnosing

in detail how the dramatic shortcomings of Fidelio prove that the Beethoven of the hour is just not

serious about opera. Adamo’s dismissal might itself be dismissed as professional jealousy – but much

harder to ignore are the incredulous responses to Doctor Atomic from non-musical intellectuals

drawn in to see it by the intimation of a “capital-I Important” intellectual event with ramifications

far beyond the clubby world of contemporary music composition.37 For at least one of these opera-

house “virgins,” the experience was shocking to the point of complete disillusion:

I found myself sitting stunned in the well-dressed opening-night crowd. Rarely an operagoer myself (I prefer poetry and drama without orchestral distractions), I’d nonetheless always respected operagoers for what I presumed to be their sophisti-cated taste. What amazed me was the respectful, reverent, awed look on the faces of the crowd around me.

“Doctor Atomic” began to seem like the Spinal Tap of opera…

Ron Rosenbaum, long-time essayist for The Village Voice and other intellectual periodicals,

and the author of two well-received books of cultural journalism (Explaining Hitler and The Shake-

speare Wars), announced defiantly in the online magazine Slate that he had walked out of the Met’s

Doctor Atomic at intermission. Rosenbaum’s extended dissection of the opera’s failings echoes many

of the critical opinions surveyed above: he found the opera’s “dorm-room poster” moralizing pre-

tentious, and its characters opaque and wooden. (Having skipped out before the longeurs of Act II,

36 Ron Rosenbaum, “The opera’s new clothes.” 37 Steven Winn, “The Bomb may be too big even for art to grasp,” San Francisco Chronicle, 6 October 2005. Winn’s thought-fully mixed review counterpointed Kosman’s rave of the previous week.


he did not confront the problem of the opera’s overall dramatic shape.) As a professional writer, he

saved his harshest vitriol for Sellars’s use of language, which he found, even by what he understood

to be the low intellectual standard of opera librettos, “pedestrian, speechifying, and [in the love

scenes] embarrassingly schlocky.”

It’s not clear from Rosenbaum’s furious denunciation whether he realized that some of those

“schlocky” passages in Act I were translations of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, or whether he read in

the program that the pedestrian speechifying was assembled from the actual words of historical fig-

ures in the Los Alamos drama. But – and this is where things get interesting for prognosticators

about classical music’s future – it’s not likely that either point would have mattered to him. Rosen-

baum, less attuned perhaps than Mark Adamo to the politics of operatic collaboration, did not

complain that the libretto of Doctor Atomic was unusually amateurish and poor because no real poet

or playwright had worked on it; he decided, rather, that opera librettos must always have been this

amateurish and poor, and he just didn’t know it. The fact that the libretto of this new work was in

English, and terrible, clotted bureaucratic English at that, ripped the veil of mystification from opera

itself as a dramatic form, suddenly revealed parading across the stage of Lincoln Center with no aes-

thetic covering for its naked absurdity:

“Singing” relentlessly dull prose does not raise it to the level of art. Instead it makes everything sound—forgive me—bombastic. Imagine, if you will, starting at the top of this column and “singing” it, intoning it with a tuneless, stentorian, pompous affect.

Come on, try! Give it your best mock operatic treatment:

Does this ever happen to you: You discover key forgotten elements In over familiar fables ...

Now imagine these (admittedly pedestrian) words being performed on what looks like a multimillion-dollar set by a male chorus making dreadfully hammy gestures at one another? Rosenbaum was not the only observer who found that a contemporary opera in everyday

English disclosed serious literary problems with the form; this was a position taken by a number of


non-musicians who, caught up in the intellectual hype around the premiere, felt moved to write

about Doctor Atomic. New York novelist Carl Watson found the text-setting awkward (“words

seemed to have been stuffed into a musical phrase that was just fine without it”), but admitted this

might be because the foreign texts of most operas let him sidestep the enabling fiction that, in opera,

the singers are actually supposed to be speaking: “I have never been a fan of English-language operas,

and this is because I can understand them. Opera lyrics tend to be pretty corny, even downright

dumb, and they have a lot more power if they are lost without translation, becoming part of the mu-

sic.”38 This may seem like real philistinism – but it has a long and honorable pedigree, especially in

the English-speaking world. It was in 1711 that Joseph Addison famously remarked how “nothing has

more startled our English audience than the Italian recitativo at its first entrance upon the stage.

People were wonderfully surprised to hear generals singing the word of command and ladies deliver-

ing messages in music.”

To a student of the Western musical canon, it is remarkable that people are once again ca-

pable of being surprised by the most well-worn convention of the classical music stage. Rosenbaum’s

twenty-first century indictment – that opera turns the trivial meaninglessly bombastic – finds its

clear precedent in the seventeenth-century verdict handed down by literary man Charles de Saint-

Evremond in a “notorious” letter to George Villiers, the 2nd Lord Buckingham, in 1677:

There is another Thing in Operas so contrary to Nature, that I cannot be reconciled to it; and that is the singing of the whole Piece, from beginning to end, as if the Per-sons represented were ridiculously match’d, and had agreed to treat in Musick both the most common, and most important Affairs of Life. Is it to be imagin’d that a Master calls his Servant, or sends him on an errand, singing; that one Friend imparts a secret to another, singing; That Men deliberate in Council, singing; That Orders in time of Battle are given, singing; and That Men are melodiously killed with Sward and Darts? 39

38 Carl Watson, “A review of the opera, Dr. Atomic,” A Gathering of the Tribes (blog), 21 January 2009. 39 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 29, 3 April 1711; Saint-Evremond’s “notorious” letter to Buckingham is discussed, along with many other apposite examples, in Edward Lippman’s magisterial History of Western Musical Aesthetics (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 48ff. The adjective is Lippman’s.


We seem to have misplaced two-and-a-half centuries of musical aesthetics. Mark Adamo

found the libretto of Doctor Atomic too much a literary conceit, fundamentally un-operatic; but for

Rosenbaum, the once-again strange burden of the operatic, the fatal need to “sing” everything, fore-

closes any emotional insight a character drama about the atomic bomb might try to provide: “Who

wouldn’t give anything for a brilliant artist trying to imagine what was going through Oppenheimer’s

head at such a time? But the operatic mode distances and dehumanizes those bombastically an-

nouncing their inner thoughts.”

Rosenbaum went so far as to reject on literary grounds the one moment in the Adams-Sellars

collaboration that had achieved general critical acclaim: Oppenheimer’s tense neo-Baroque aria at

the end of Act I, fashioned from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14 (“Batter my heart, three person’d

God”) in a nod to Trinity, Oppenheimer’s literary code name for the Alamogordo test site. Joshua

Kosman thought Donne’s dense poetic language inspired Adams to an equally “compact” setting,

like the “fissile core” that powers a nuclear weapon (or a three-hour opera). But Rosenbaum could

not get past the violence done to Donne:

For me, the breaking point may have been the segment of the libretto most cele-brated by critics, the appropriation of John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet About the Trin-ity” (“Batter my heart, three-personed God …”). I found the attempt to “enhance” it by unnecessarily repeating words in its sung version evidence of a fundamental lack of understanding of the poem, the mechanics of which are as intricate as the internal dynamics of a nuclear chain reaction.

Having also spent some time in the Yale English department, I know where Rosenbaum got

his New Critical respect for the tensile strength of complex grammatical constructions, and I do see

how repeating words and phrases could be understood to derail the measured rhetorical progression

of Donne’s elaborate poetic conceits – but really, this is an aesthetic double bind whose effect is to

make serious music drama well-nigh impossible. (Rosenbaum would have made an excellent opera

critic for The Spectator, which almost 200 years earlier had proclaimed that “nothing is capable of


being well set to Musick, that is not Nonsense.”)40 If the libretto is verbose and prosaic, then inton-

ing its banalities is tediously absurd; if the libretto is condensed and lyrical, then the inevitable repe-

titions of text (did Rosenbaum think that this was a mannerism unique to Adams?) will be equally

absurd, in the manner so entertainingly burlesqued by Mr. Jonathan Swift in his Cantata of 1746:

[Jonathan Swift, A Cantata, Collected Works, vol. 17, pp. 318ff]

It seems that the past isn’t dead; as William Faulkner once asserted, it isn’t even past. The

recrudescence of seventeenth-century aesthetic positions in the postmodern present is fascinating to

the musicologist, who may well experience the naïve wonderment of the paleontologists faced with

living dinosaurs in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. (Musico-aesthetic fossils come to life!) But such

reactionary reception is discouraging if one is counting on new operas to throw out the lifeline to

Western art music. Yes, the example of Doctor Atomic shows that opera as drama has access to a

mythic register that can, given the right subject and enough money, be marketed to the educated

40 fissile core – Kosman, “Trinity”; nonsense – Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 29, 21 March 1711. Close reading of the works of John Donne was foundational to the advent of New Criticism in American literary studies. Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947), one of the key New Critical texts, begins with an extended analysis of Donne’s “The Canonization” along the lines Rosenbaum adumbrates. Brooks taught in the English department at Yale from 1947 to 1975; Rosenbaum received his B.A. in English literature from Yale in 1968, and continued briefly in the graduate pro-gram before leaving to become a full-time writer. The present author began the English major at Yale in 1979, and worked through the Holy Sonnets of John Donne in his first year, only to be seduced away to an eventual degree in Music.


public at large; it can indeed try to be music “for the man who enjoys Hamlet,” to paraphrase the

title of a famous mid-century musical appreciation text.41 But the recent reception of Doctor Atomic

shows the riskiness of enticing new audiences unfamiliar with classical music into the theater,

primed for a scintillating new drama of ideas. There is a reason no English-language Hamlet has ever

held the operatic stage. Time-hallowed conventions of text and setting can appear silly, even anti-

intellectual to newcomers, especially in contemporary opera, where recognizable characters sing in

vernacular language about still-controversial issues. Long-resolved debates about the aesthetic value

of music itself may be reopened; audiences may be repulsed, not attracted by opera’s garish specta-

cle; cultural ground may be lost, rather than gained.

New listeners may decline the old gift of…Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.

§ § §

Alice and my chemistry – well…only a chemist could describe that! We had major disputes, even some hard feelings with the two op-eras. I think some of it had to do with the fact that she was a liter-ary person working in what’s fundamentally a musical world, opera, always feeling that her value was never quite appreciated.42

- composer John Adams, 2006

Go ask Alice

From all accounts, Alice Goodman was not an easy librettist to work with; she noted herself

that “John [Adams] is sensitive and highly strung, and I can be very disagreeable.” Yet the reception

of Doctor Atomic leaves one with the same burning questions that animated Mark Adamo’s blogging:

Didn’t you hear what was missing? Didn’t you care? Why did Goodman walk away from the most

successful collaboration in contemporary opera? Why did Adams and Sellars let her leave, and then

assume, with stunning hubris, they didn’t need a librettist at all? (Adamo was a little catty, but dead

41 B. F. Haggin, Music for the Man who Enjoys Hamlet (New York: Knopf, 1944). Ironically, Haggin’s book is a little monu-ment to the German instrumental canon, although he does make an exception for Mozart’s Magic Flute. 42 John Adams interview in Thomas May, ed., The John Adams Reader (New York: Amadeus Press, 2006), p. 220.


right to ask, “Surely Alice Goodman was not the only living librettist that year. Did Tony Kushner

refuse Sellars’s calls?”)43 Given the general dissatisfaction with the collage of found texts Adams and

Sellars used in place of a libretto, it is surprising that few music journalists tried to follow up this

juicy angle, especially with controversy still swirling around Goodman’s work on The Death of

Klinghoffer. Adams himself aggressively defended Sellars, finding dramatic cohesion in his work that

few others could see: “He did a brilliant job of solving the challenge. I think that the dialogue in

Doctor Atomic, particularly in the first act, virtually crackles with the high energy of human interac-

tion. It’s every bit as involving and as realistic as anything I’ve seen in any other opera libretto.”44

Goodman herself was, admittedly, hard to track down by 2005, having married the British

poet Geoffrey Hill and taken holy orders in the Church of England, which assigned her to a provin-

cial parish in Kidderminster, deep in the rust-belt south of Birmingham. When Tom Service of The

Guardian did get her on record just before the San Francisco premiere, her explanation for the fail-

ure of the Doctor Atomic collaboration was distractingly sensational: “I found that the structure

John and Peter had got together with me was really anti-Semitic, with Oppenheimer as the good

blue-eyed Jew and Edward Teller as the bad limping one with the greasy hair, and a host of virtuous

native Americans pitted against the refugee physicists out in the New Mexico desert. I couldn’t see

how it could be anything but deeply offensive.”45 In the wake of The Death of Klinghoffer, which had

been attacked by many New York critics as both offensive and anti-Semitic, this was an incendiary

charge which Adams could only dismiss angrily in the same article as “preposterous”; it would in-

deed have seemed strange to those who later saw the opera, since Sellars’s truncated scenario for

Doctor Atomic eliminated “good Jew” Oppenheimer’s infamous betrayal by “bad Jew” Teller on the

HUAC witness stand in 1953, at the height of the anti-Semitic anti-communist hysteria that put

43 Goodman quoted in Michael White, “God’s opera writer,” The Telegraph, 8 February 2004; Adamo, “John, Atoms.” 44 As quoted in May, The John Adams Reader, p. 223. 45 Goodman quoted in Tom Service, “ ‘This was the start of a new epoch in human history’,” The Guardian, 29 September 2005.


Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the electric chair.

Perhaps the crescendo of hype around the new opera had brought out Goodman’s disagree-

able side; but her accusation of anti-Semitism in the original scenario is a distraction from the real

problem, which, it seems to me, has much more to do with chauvinism, both masculine and musical,

on the part of her collaborators. Many commentators found the finished opera’s gendered division of

moral labor, where men have the power to make the Bomb, and women only the powerlessness to

feel guilty about it, not only historically inaccurate (by all accounts Kitty Oppenheimer was a spouse

both acute and ambitious) but dramatically shallow. It is hard to imagine the acerbic Goodman al-

lowing the “boys” to get away with transposing the most retrograde aspect of Goethe’s Faust, its an-

tique gender politics, into an opera about American modernity; one can only imagine her response

to condescending faux-chivalry like this from Adams, in an interview just before the premiere: “‘I

use Goethe’s term “das ewig Weibliche,” the Eternal Feminine,’ Mr. Adams said. ‘I think that

women have a moral awareness that men have perhaps not achieved.’”46 Oy, gewalt.

Evidently Adams’s and Sellers’s masculine moral awareness did not yet encompass allowing a

female librettist – especially this eccentric, but brilliant one who had cast aside her own career goals

to become a wife, mother, and pastor – to wield equal collaborative power as they determined the

shape and texture of their important new stage work. But – leaving Sellars out of it for a moment –

can we really blame Adams for treating his librettist as callously as famous composers have treated

librettists just as soon they could get away with it, that is, when some operas was were allowed (pro-

visionally) into the classical canon, with its fundamental(ist) belief in the primacy of “abstract” mu-

sic? Rosenbaum insinuates in his review that music critics, who “felt the music was all that mat-

tered,” had deliberately covered up the “emptiness” where Doctor Atomic’s libretto should have

been. He had a point, given the kind of special pleading that sometimes leached through even the

46 On Kitty Oppenheimer and the “eternal feminine,” see Daniel J. Kevles. “Dr. Atomic: an opera about the moral complexi-ties of Hiroshima.” Slate, 19 October 2005; Adams is quoted in Gurewitsch, “The nuclear option.”


most positive notices: “A libretto’s success is ultimately judged by the music it inspires. And the Ad-

ams score is not just powerful, but is also completely distinctive in flavor” – “In opera, it is music

that has the last word, and in the long run it is on the music that the mythic claims of the Adams

triptych will rest.”47

Prima la musica, e poi le parole. The twentieth century is littered with operas doomed to ir-

relevance by composers who thought they no longer needed professional librettists, either because

they wanted to do it all themselves (Schoenberg, Maxwell Davies), or because they were working

with a literary source that could be roughed into shape by an employee, not a collaborator: “The

Great Gatsby is a music-driven opera in which the composer bullied the librettist as they worked to-

gether. Every choice was in favor of musical opportunities; Fitzgerald's novel was “respected” only

insofar as it furthered the musical design.”48 Of course, the repertory is still stuffed with operas from

the high-canonic period of Western music history in which the librettist was little more than a fac-

totum (a moment of silence, please, for the sufferings of Francesco Maria Piave…). But return to

Joseph Kerman’s criterion for classical music as a living culture – “[it] must generate an expanded

repertory that will arouse critics and attract audiences” – and the continuing popularity of “music-

driven” works like Il trovatore and Tosca is hardly a convincing vital sign.

John Adams’s third grand opera, like its two predecessors, should have expanded the reper-

tory in precisely the way Kerman predicted. What went wrong? In early 2004, well in advance of the

publicity blitz around Doctor Atomic, an enterprising reporter traveled to Kidderminster to do a hu-

man interest story on why once-famous poet and opera librettist would step away from the interna-

tional spotlight to minister to the provincial poor. The story had more to do with Alice Goodman’s

own life choices than with the failure of her long working relationship with Adams and Sellars –

47 a libretto’s success – Stearns, “Heroic A-bomb opera”; in opera, music has the last word - Gurewitsch, “The nuclear option.” 48 This is the opening sentence of John Harbison’s composer’s note in the elaborate program booklet for his The Great Gatsby (2000), available online at www.schirmer.com.


anti-Semitism was not mentioned at all – but the new vicar of Kidderminster did eventually unbur-

den herself on how her relationship with the mercurial young composer of Nixon in China had

changed:

John is sensitive and highly strung, and I can be very disagreeable, but he always trusted me to do what was right. We had what I would call a polyphonic collabora-tion where we were thinking/feeling/doing things that weren’t quite ad idem and didn’t have to be. I wasn’t there just to put John’s ideas into words. Now, I feel my role has diminished, the parameters have narrowed. And it’s not unconnected with the fact that John is now the most famous, most performed living composer in the world…and I’m a curate in Kidderminster.49

One wonders if Adams missed Goodman’s contrapuntal style of collaboration, irritating

though it may have been, when the bad reviews started rolling in. Did he regret insisting on his post-

Pulitzer Prize prerogatives as a “great composer”? One can hardly blame Adams himself; this is how

real composers are supposed to act. They create the music, and if it is excellent music, in and of itself,

that’s all that matters.

But the lesson of Doctor Atomic is that classical music, by itself and for itself, cannot save it-

self. A libretto is not a program note; an opera is not a three-hour symphony. To think it can be

these things is hubris, the musical hubris engendered by the classical canon, hubris which deprived

Doctor Atomic of its brilliant librettist, of its dramatic integrity, and thus of its power to make its

musical core relevant outside a charmed circle of believers. Like the doomed scorpion in the folk

tale, crossing the river on a turtle’s back, it seems that classical music still cannot not help stinging

its literary mount to death, even at the cost of its own life.

§ § §

What a curious creature this [Doctor Atomic Symphony] was: not opera, not really symphony. When Hindemith distilled Mathis der Maler into symphonic form he did so with concentrated force and

49 White, “God’s opera writer.”


a structure of iron. Adams generated something wandering be-tween a free-flowing fantasy and a film soundtrack CD.50

Doctor Atomic, symphony

John Adams eventually turned Doctor Atomic into a free-standing symphonic work – not

once, but twice. The first version was premiered at the 2007 Promenade Concerts by the BBC

Symphony orchestra. In four movements, it reproduced unedited generous swathes of both the

“Stravinsky emergency music” (Alex Ross) associated with the construction of the bomb and the

sensual shimmer of the extended bedroom scene in Act I, culminating in a wordless transcription of

Oppenheimer’s “Batter My Heart” for solo trumpet. It is ironic, given the burden of the preceding

argument, that Adams would attempt to turn his “three-hour symphony of dread” into an actual 45-

minute symphony; doubly ironic is how the same orchestral textures that had seemed so Wagnerian

and “symphonic” in the opera now, in the guise of a real symphonic work, struck critics as unfo-

cused and self-indulgent, more like film underscoring than Beethoven. Adams, chastened, withdrew

his piece and cut it in half, eliminating the long Baudelairian adagio and whittling the discursive first

movement down to a two-and-a-half minute prelude.

This second Doctor Atomic Symphony is a tight, 22-minute cruise missile of ferocious orches-

tral virtuosity. Freed from its problematic text and portentous stage action, Doctor Atomic can now

be enjoyed as pure musical kineticism, exhilarating and meaningless, one of the best rollercoaster

rides in sound the classical music world has to offer. That’s no small achievement; played at high

volume, David Robertson’s energetic 2008 recording had me flying down the L.A. freeway, grinning

and pounding the steering wheel with uncontrollable delight. But my pleasure was in a symphony,

not an opera, which would seem to imply, as San Francisco critic Steven Winn argued, that in the

end, “Doctor Atomic may be a self-canceling concept.” Cancel out the Faustian ambition of the op-

50 Geoff Brown, review of Adams, ‘Doctor Atomic’ Symphony, Times of London, 23 August 2007.


eratic mode, the drive to throw characters and plots up on stage for everyone (not just the partisans

of music itself) to see-hear-feel, and what you have left is…a nice symphony, noisier, more disso-

nant, but not fundamentally dissimilar to the abstract pattern-making of Ignaz Pleyel.

Will opera save classical music, as Joseph Kerman hopes? Maybe not – especially if it keeps

hankering after the fading respectability of the symphony and the concert hall – but it might just

save itself.

The canon ain’t over until the fat lady sings.

Marvin L. Cohen, president of the American Physical Society, has said that hundreds of years from now all that popular culture will know of [the first atomic test] could be from what happens on the stage of “Doctor Atomic,” the way most of us know what little we know about pre-Elizabethan England from the plays of Shake-speare. Operas are built for the ages.51

51 Overbye, “ ‘Dr. Atomic’: unthinkable yet immortal.”

“The Emperor’s New Opera- John Adams’s Doctor Atomic and the Future of Classical Music”...

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