‘Dr Atomic’ and ‘Oppenheimer’
The winner of multiple Golden Globes, the heavily Oscar-nominated film ‘Oppenheimer’ is very much in the news at the moment. I watched it on Amazon Prime recently, and it reminded me that in Strasbourg in 2014, I sang in the opera based on the same story, ‘Dr Atomic’, written in 2005 and premiered in San Francisco, conducted by Sir Donald Runnicles. In Strasbourg, I sang the role of the meteorologist, Frank Hubbard, in a production that featured Peter Sidhom and John Graham Hall, with the German baritone Dietrich Henschel singing Oppenheimer, a role created in America by Gerald Finley.
The film is a sort of biopic, following Oppenheimer through the 20s and 30s as he sees the rise of the Nazis and, as a physicist, understands the terrible potential of splitting the atom, with the horrific possibility that the Nazis could develop an atomic bomb and use it. The race to beat the Germans scientifically, the realisation that, once the Nazi regime was defeated, Japan was going to fight to the end, and that the Soviet Union was now becoming the enemy as well, led to the work carried out in the New Mexico desert in 1944/45, the Trinity Project, under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer, which produced the atomic bomb, which, very soon after the test, was used twice over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 people. Both the film and the opera deal with the moral and intellectual dilemmas facing the team, and Oppenheimer in particular. How can you justify such a weapon, even if you use it to save some future lives? How can you go further to produce a hydrogen bomb many times more destructive than even an atomic bomb, and start an arms race to Armageddon? How can you control something that is potentially uncontrollable, and that might destroy the entire planet?
The opera is largely about the build-up to the first detonation at Los Alamos, with Oppenheimer’s personal story woven into it, with his high sex drive matched by his awareness of literature and mythology and his position as ‘The Bringer of Death.’ His role in the events is crucial, and in the opera, he is given many opportunities to wax lyrical about his dilemmas. Adams wrote the role for the lyric baritone, Gerald Finley, a Canadian singer I worked with right at the beginning of his career. He had just arrived in Britain when we were both chosen to sing all the low voice parts in Purcell’s ‘King Arthur,’ for a Deutsche Grammophon recording and world tour with Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert. I got to sing the cool bits, the Cold Genius and Aolus, while Gerry sang all the other bass/baritone sections. It was a wonderful project, with soprano Nancy Argenta and our own Jamie MacDougall (also right at the beginning of his career) singing various roles.
It was clear from the start that Gerry was going to have quite a career, so, by 2005, when Peter Sellars (the American director and librettist) and John Adams combined to create ‘Dr Atomic’, he was a natural choice for Oppenheimer, and the role was perfect for his voice.
Sadly, in Strasbourg in 2014, someone had the idea to cast the German Lieder singer, Dietrich Henschel as Oppenheimer. Now, Mr Henschel is a good singer, but his grasp of the English language was tenuous at best, his voice is better suited to recitals than opera, and he is not a natural actor, so our production was hampered from the beginning. Since his voice was small, and several of us had larger voices, it was decided that he would use a microphone on stage, to compensate. Most opera singers hate microphones, except in recordings, and there was quite a bit of discussion about this plan! The other problem was that our director was an American choreographer of a certain age, who had almost no experience of directing an opera, and who was not very confident handling singers. Add in a French conductor, who although reasonably fluent in English, was unable to understand many of the nuances of the libretto, especially as it was in American English, and you can imagine that the rehearsal period was fraught with almost as many problems as Oppenheimer had with the military and the other physicists!
It was nonetheless a sobering experience, and made us all think about the Trinity Project, and how we might have felt had we been there. Obviously, there are few nuclear physicists among my operatic colleagues, but we are all human, and the arguments and debates which were had in 1944/45 are still relevant today. Indeed, the fact that no atomic or nuclear device has been used in anger since 1945 is important, especially in any discussion of deterrents, and in our dangerous world at the moment, we all need to pause and look at the way our governments are behaving now. Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, parts of Africa, Taiwan – all these places of strife in 2024 need to be considered as potential catalysts for some idiot to reach for the nuclear button. Sadly, there seem to be too many idiots in power right now, and worse may be about to take over in the coming year.
I hope the recent film will make people sit up and take notice of the terrible decisions those scientists were faced with, and the subsequent harassing of Oppenheimer, which forms the second half of the film, shows what can happen when politics and egos clash in an unstable environment.
The opera, I think, tries to do too much, bringing in extra problems with Native Americans in New Mexico, and the focus on Oppenheimer as a sort of new age mystic, spouting John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, ‘Batter my Heart’. Using this text for a very beautiful aria at a crucial moment in the plot is very operatic, but it adds yet another layer to an already heavyweight scenario.
My role as Hubbard, the meteorologist, who is extremely unhappy that the test will take place potentially during an electrical storm, was not one of the crucial figures, but I did get to sing a quite lyrical passage about weather patterns over New Mexico (which was a first for me). Towards the end of the opera, time slows down to the final countdown (as in the film), but there are yet more added layers, with the chorus involved and electronic voices playing on tapes with testaments from Japanese survivors of the bombing. The opera ends with the detonation of the test bomb, a powerful light shines and all falls silent. It is a very impressive finale, and I must say that, although flawed, ‘Dr Atomic’ is a very important work, demonstrating that this old, supposedly tired, genre of music still has some life left in it.
I would encourage you to see the film, and since the opera is unlikely to be produced in Scotland, it might be worthwhile to find it online. I am not a fan of opera on TV, as I feel it deprives the listener of the visceral experience of hearing live voices, free from amplification, in an actual auditorium, but in the absence of any opportunity to see it here, I think I can break with my code in this circumstance. I have a feeling you can see our production in Strasbourg, on the French cultural channel, Medici TV, but there is also the New York Met production available.
