Opera of mass destruction – Newspaper Kommersant No. 11 (7456) of 01/21/2023

At the opening of the Epiphany Festival at the Novaya Opera Theater, for the first time in Russia, John Adams’ opera Doctor Atom was performed, dedicated to the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the first nuclear tests and the moral and physical catastrophe that followed them. About the sound and content of the opera, as they were in Moscow, tells Yulia Bederova.

In 2005, the opera Doctor Atom, one of the most performed composers in the world, heir to the minimalist style and living classic John Adams, completed his opera trilogy about American history and modernity, although at first after the sensational success of Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer ”(1991) Adams promised not to write more such operas. But in 1999, the San Francisco Opera started a series of “American Faust”, and Adams could not refuse. Its co-author was the director of the future premiere, Peter Sellars: he built the text of the libretto as a compilation of excerpts from declassified military documents, letters from participants in the first nuclear tests at the New Mexico test site in July 1945, as well as the Bhagavad Gita and the poetry of Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser (her poems entered the history of American poetry and civic activism in the mid-twentieth century).

Adams’ music also does not shy away from compiling: having crossed several hedgehogs and snakes at once, Adams developed his ingenious recipe of the 1980s-1990s, combined inherently anti-European simplicity, rhythm, tonality and repetition of minimalism with European structural and harmonic sophistication. He mixed documentary with metaphor, electronics with acoustics, abstraction with lyrics, reportage with mythology, dramatic statics and hypnosis, characteristic of Adams’ senior colleagues Philip Glass and Steve Reich, merged with Wagnerian tension. He added allusions to Orff, Liszt, Purcell, and then to Britten and Schnittke, composed arias (including the Lullaby of Pascualita, as if lulling an impatient bomb, and Oppenheimer’s famous pre-dawn aria “Break my heart, triune God” to the verses of John Donne), duets, ensembles, choirs and an orchestral storm in the spirit of landscape romantic classics. Marrying all this with cinematic suspense, he ended up with a partly speculative, partly incredibly effective, intelligible and tragic score: its critical pathos, growing out of reflections on the problem of individual and social omnipotence leading to disaster, sounded relevant even in the middle of the 2000s (world premiere in San Francisco was timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bombings), and today it just rolls over.

The opera focuses on the determination and doubts of Oppenheimer, his military commanders and scientific associates about guilt, responsibility, the success of tests and the preservation of the earth’s atmosphere, and the terrible finale is a unique sound picture of an explosion with a recording of the voice of a woman asking for water in Hiroshima. The Russian premiere of Doctor Atom was planned by Valentin Uryupin, the recent musical director of the Novaya Opera. After the forced separation of the theater from the conductor in the spring of 2022, the idea hung up, but, fortunately, it was realized under the direction of Fyodor Lednev, an excellent specialist and the protagonist of most of today’s Russian events in the field of contemporary music. With his skill and attention, the score has developed in detail and as a whole, making a grandiose impression. The most complex counterpoint of vocal, choral and orchestral, varied and varied textures and drawings sounded dynamically built and clear, allowing you to follow the details and lacunae of emotions and facts and live them musically – so that a lump came to the throat, and a long silence in the final before the ovation seemed spontaneous moment of silence.

In this interpretation, with its heroic composure, restrained brightness and depressing context, some of the disadvantages of the performance did not seem fatal, although many later regretted the one-time status of the concert premiere (with the addition of a bit of video projection and light changes). If the opera could be repeated, it would be possible to polish everything so that the parts of Oppi (Dmitry Zuev) and Kitty (Ekaterina Mirzoyants), without losing their pivotal significance, acquire nuance and flexibility, so that the common Russian accent in the text and style does not spoiled the furrows, and the entire ensemble of soloists, including perfectly prepared roles performed by Andrei Borisenko, Konstantin Fedotov, Anton Bochkarev, Alexandra Saulskaya-Shulyatieva, Dmitry Orlov, got used to it more evenly and thinner. In addition, the given need to sing with backing makes all the transitions, seams and pressure rougher, and you need to adapt to this. In the meantime, all this remains a matter of a possible future, other extraordinary events on the themes of Faustianism, good, evil and time are planned at the current festival – including tonight with Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and further programs with music by Schnittke (“The Story of a Doctor Johann Faust”), all the operas by Rachmaninov and again by Adams in the final concert under the direction of Philip Chizhevsky.