Does it ever strike you how revisiting a familiar story can reveal forgotten details, breathing new life into well-known narratives? Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” recently offered such a moment of rediscovery for me, prompted by a conversation about an opera that left me profoundly uneasy: Doctor Atomic.
It was Julia Sheehan, the insightful co-producer of Standard Operating Procedure, who brought this fable to mind as I recounted my unsettling experience at the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Doctor Atomic. Despite the anticipation surrounding this 2005 English-language opera centered on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the momentous first atomic bomb test at Los Alamos in 1945, the performance left me deeply shaken – but for all the wrong reasons. This pivotal test, designed to ascertain the bomb’s readiness for deployment and its destructive potential, seemed a fitting subject for high art. Oppenheimer, envisioned as a modern Faust, transforming theoretical physics into a world-altering weapon, a potential instrument of global destruction – a contemporary Götterdämmerung.
My recent visit to Hiroshima and ongoing research for a book on the evolving landscape of nuclear warfare had primed me to contemplate the nuclear iteration of the Faustian bargain, particularly the concept of ineradicability. Faust’s pact with the devil, sealed in blood for earthly desires in exchange for his soul, echoes in the irreversible nature of nuclear knowledge. Faust’s desperate plea for divine mercy as damnation looms in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus – “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul…” – is a heartrending cry against the inescapable consequences of his choices. He offers to burn his books, the source of forbidden knowledge, mirroring Oppenheimer’s parallel pursuit of knowledge.
However, like the genie released from the bottle, information, once unleashed, cannot be contained. Nuclear bombs might be banned, but the underlying knowledge, the equations that birthed them, are indelible. Oppenheimer grasped this early on: the nuclear devil, once conjured, could be temporarily suppressed but never truly eradicated. The world had irrevocably entered a new, perilous era.
The stage was set for a powerful transformation of this Faustian, Oppenheimer-esque narrative into tragic operatic art. Or so one might assume. Yet, witnessing Doctor Atomic felt akin to experiencing “The Emperor’s New Opera” – a spectacle lauded for its nonexistent virtues.
The opera’s program credits John Adams, known for contemporary historical operas like Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, as the composer, and Penny Woolcock as the Met’s production director. However, the libretto, a questionable term in this context, is attributed to theater and opera director Peter Sellars. Sellars assembled a patchwork of quotes from diverse sources, including noted poets and fragments of uncertain origin, resulting in a text that feels less written and more… curated.
Adams and Sellars chose to concentrate on the tense days preceding the Trinity test at Los Alamos, a month before Hiroshima, focusing on the internal and interpersonal conflicts of the assembled scientists under Oppenheimer’s leadership.
Anticipating a profound and sophisticated experience, I found the music and set design undeniably dramatic and effective.
However, the libretto – the very words sung – proved to be pedestrian, declamatory, and disappointingly simplistic, often descending into embarrassing melodrama, especially during the ill-conceived “love scenes.” While opera librettos are acknowledged as a distinct genre, and operatic lyrics are not expected to be pure poetry, these lyrics suffered acutely from the jarring contrast between the operatic grandeur of the production and the banality of the content. Singing relentlessly dull prose, far from elevating it to art, amplified its deficiencies, rendering the entire performance, dare I say, bombastic.
Imagine, for a moment, singing the very words of this critique in a tuneless, stentorian, pompous operatic style: “Does this ever happen to you: You discover key forgotten elements in over familiar fables…” Picture these unremarkable words performed on a lavish, multi-million dollar set, delivered by a male chorus with exaggerated, theatrical gestures.
Even this visualization falls short of capturing the true depths of the libretto’s poetic failings. It vacillates between the utterly mundane – “[Deep operatic voice] Well how do you feel? [Less deep operatic voice] Well, pretty excited” – and forced, self-consciously “poetic” lines. Beyond incorporating actual poetry from Donne, Baudelaire, and Muriel Rukeyser, the libretto offers gems like: “The hackneyed light of evening quarrels with the bulbs…” The meaning remains elusive. Sellars’ curatorial approach blurs the lines between original and “appropriated” text, but his talent for unearthing bad poetry is undeniable. These “appropriations,” divorced from their original context, often sound pseudo-profound or simply ridiculous. Even Donne’s magnificent “Holy Sonnet” suffers in this mangled adaptation.
Stunned, I sat amidst the elegantly dressed opening-night audience. Though not a frequent opera attendee, preferring the unadorned power of poetry and drama, I had always held operagoers in high regard for their presumed refined taste. What astonished me was the pervasive air of reverence, the solemn, awestruck expressions on the faces around me, particularly visible during intermission.
The audience seemed united by a collective somberness, a shared belief that they were witnessing profoundly “important” art. A silent suffering permeated the air: “We are burdened by the sheer profundity of it all. We are at the Metropolitan Opera, after all. This must be profound!”
Then, lines from the “love scene” between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty resurfaced in my mind: “… only my fingers in your hair, only, my eyes splitting the skull to tickle your brain with love…” Regrettably, the libretto is replete with such cringeworthy lyrics, transforming Doctor Atomic into something akin to the Spinal Tap of opera. (Yes, the “splitting skull” metaphor for splitting the atom is painfully obvious and not at all “literary,” but simply ludicrous.)
Rarely have I felt such isolation as during that intermission. I felt like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Did words simply not matter in opera? It was a question I hadn’t considered, perhaps because foreign language operas often discourage close lyrical scrutiny. But I began to wonder if opera operated under different rules: did the act of singing somehow transcend triviality, even offensiveness? Did opera aficionados believe that lyrical quality was secondary, elevated merely by the vocal performance, regardless of its inherent merit? In Europe, audiences readily boo poorly sung arias. But what is the appropriate American response to offensively trivializing words in opera?
The following evening, recounting my “Emperor’s New Clothes” experience, Julia Sheehan shared her recent rediscovery of a forgotten element in the original Andersen fable.
She had always questioned why everyone in the story perpetuated the charade, with only a child daring to declare the emperor’s nakedness. Conformity, peer pressure, fear of reprisal seemed like partial explanations.
But Andersen’s version reveals another layer: the weavers had pre-emptively declared the emperor’s new clothes invisible to the stupid. No one dared risk being deemed foolish. This resonated with my frequent experiences at overhyped Broadway dramas tackling “important” themes. The enthusiastic applause often seems less a genuine appreciation and more an audience congratulating itself for attending such a culturally significant event. Stupid people wouldn’t understand, after all.
This must be the key! Supported by the immense weight of cultural capital, the Metropolitan Opera, the velvet seats, the rosy glow of prestige – dissent becomes unthinkable. To question the greatness on display is to risk intellectual ostracization.
Intriguingly, major New York critics seemed to carefully sidestep any substantive critique of the libretto. Acknowledging it as a verbal “assemblage,” they implied that its aural impact superseded its semantic content. On a subject as morally weighty as nuclear weapons, shouldn’t the moral coherence, or lack thereof, of the words warrant critical attention? Instead, perhaps understandably given the libretto’s incoherence, critics focused on the undeniably powerful music. But the apparent indifference to the lyrical void was perplexing. Do words truly hold no weight in judging an opera’s merit?
In New York magazine, the libretto is described as a mix of “leaden lingo” and “opaque poetry,” yet this is seemingly excused by the strength of the music and sets. The New York Times critic praised virtually every aspect, artfully avoiding any direct engagement with the words. The New Yorker largely skirted the issue, declaring the Met’s Atomic “purely as an experience in sound, … a triumph.” The “skull-splitting” duet is even lauded as “sumptuous,” implying a focus solely on sonic texture, not lyrical meaning. Clive Barnes, in a particularly contradictory review, deemed the opera “terrific” while simultaneously admitting the libretto was “dull.” “Terrific” and “dull” are hardly compatible descriptors. It seemed critics were either prioritizing the music or so eager to celebrate the opera’s “daring” and profound subject matter that they minimized the emptiness of its verbal core. Shouldn’t opera aspire to a fusion of lyrical and musical excellence, not a forced march with one element lagging far behind? This acceptance of verbal mediocrity is, to me, deeply puzzling.
But did the audience genuinely engage with the words, even the questionable ones? “Split my skull and tickle my brains with love” – and yet, I suspect they did. The opera offered relevance, nuclear dread, the Faustian dilemma – a thematic buffet. But poetry transcends thematically serious speech structured in stanzas. A libretto is not a poem, but it should aspire to aesthetically elevated language.
Tragically absent was genuine humanity. Who wouldn’t yearn for a brilliant artistic exploration of Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil during this monumental period? Yet, the operatic form, with its inherent distance and grand pronouncements, seemed to dehumanize the characters. Ludicrous “love scenes” were shoehorned in, ostensibly to humanize Oppenheimer, but instead, they rendered him foolish: “If you could know all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair!” His auditory experiences within her “noisy hair” are apparently quite vivid.
But it was avant-garde! Difficult! Perhaps even dangerous! It took daring stances like “nuclear bombs are bad.” One almost expected to hear dorm-room poster slogans like, “You can’t hug children with nuclear arms.” My perspective might be skewed by my recent rereading of Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic,” in the New York Magazine 40th-anniversary anthology, New York Stories. The parallels between the self-congratulatory audience and Wolfe’s depiction of wealthy New Yorkers fawning over the Black Panthers were striking.
The audience’s self-satisfaction mirrored that of Wolfe’s Panther Party attendees. Except the proclaimed “radicalism” (“nuclear bombs: bad!”) felt less contrarian than the Panthers’ (“pick up the gun”). Still, it wasn’t The Marriage of Figaro, right? It was heavy. (Or rather, heavy-handed.)
And yet, Doctor Atomic aligns with my observation that nuclear war awareness has surged, a “return of the repressed,” timely given global events and the persistent nuclear threat. Perhaps flawed art that draws attention to these critical issues is preferable to silence.
However, bad art, while not lethal, hurts. At intermission, a confluence of physical and metaphysical discomfort overwhelmed me. I could no longer endure not just the words, but the evident disregard for them. I made the decision to leave. I was not there as a reviewer, and while I am not prone to public booing (though I sometimes wish I were), staying to the end risked succumbing to that temptation. I resolved to confine my critique to the printed libretto, since its verbal content seemed to be of little concern to others.
To my dismay, the libretto proved even worse upon closer examination. Prolix exposition, pages dedicated to meteorological debates preceding the Trinity test, overshadowed the moral gravity of the bomb itself. Trivially tedious details, like General Groves’ dietary concerns (banality of evil? more like banality of banality), were juxtaposed with melodramatic thunder and lightning, cheap “mounting tension” effects. A stereotypically wise Native American nurse – are there any other kind in such narratives? – spouts ancient wisdom incomprehensible to the scientists and sings a song titled – I swear – “The Cloud-Flower Lullaby.”
The breaking point, however, was the critics’ lauded adaptation of John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet About the Trinity” (“Batter my heart, three-personed God…”). The sung version, with its needless repetition of words, revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of the poem’s intricate mechanics, as complex as nuclear chain reactions. Yet, even this paled in comparison to the composer’s self-congratulatory description of the opera’s finale in the Playbill.
John Adams, in his own words, instructs us on how to interpret his climax. He concedes that “no operatic evocation of an atomic bomb could go head to head with the dazzling effects available to a Hollywood director…” (Ignoring the fact that actual, horrifying footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki exists and could indeed “go head to head” with any operatic staging.)
Instead, Adams explains, “Ultimately I chose to create an extended orchestral countdown. … At the high point of this countdown, with the chorus singing frantic wordless exclamations, the entire cast takes cover, lying prone on the stage, staring straight into the eyes of the audience. As the tape recorded voice of a Japanese woman repeatedly asking for a glass of water plays in the distance, the audience gradually realizes that they themselves are the bomb” (italics mine).
I did not witness this theatrical revelation. But this collective guilt ploy, unconvincing when Mick Jagger employed it in “Sympathy for the Devil,” – “who killed the Kennedys?/ When after all, it was you and me” – rings equally hollow here.
If the audience is “the bomb,” then we are also the planes, grenades, and bullets of conventional warfare. Are we meant to feel collective shame for World War II? Is this a simplistic pacifist argument à la Nicholson Baker?
It certainly oversimplifies Oppenheimer’s agonizing moral dilemma, reducing it to: “Do I want to build a bomb capable of killing 100,000 people, or is that bad?” A simplistic “bad” seems to be the intended takeaway.
The postwar debate about whether Japan would have surrendered without the atomic bombs is complex and ongoing. A bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands loomed, with potentially millions of casualties on both sides.
Hindsight makes it easy to condemn the bomb as unnecessary. But Oppenheimer’s moral calculations were made in the context of wartime urgency and the grim prospect of immense casualties. The firebombing of Tokyo had already claimed nearly 100,000 lives in a single night. Anything that could expedite the war’s end, even a horrific weapon, might have been seen as a grim necessity.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs caused immediate and long-term deaths exceeding 100,000. How does a mathematically inclined scientist like Oppenheimer reconcile this moral equation: 100,000 versus potentially millions, with the added dimension of a new, terrifying form of destruction that would forever alter the world in unpredictable ways?
Reducing the tragic complexity of his choice to dorm-room platitudes is a disservice. Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil deserves nuanced exploration, a genuine challenge for historians, novelists, and yes, opera makers. The moment of the atomic age’s dawn is profoundly significant, a descent into a new kind of hell. And while I lean towards the view that flawed art addressing this question is better than none, it doesn’t obligate me to endure it.
Perhaps engaging with the idea of re-examining the Atomic Age is valuable, particularly as another era of nuclear anxiety seems to be emerging. But the painful pretension of moral seriousness, amplified by bombastic music, is – like the equations of nuclear fission, or the image of a grotesquely naked emperor – tragically ineradicable.
