For the first time, the Metropolitan Opera will present a work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams: Doctor Atomic, his opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb. The piece is set in New Mexico in the summer of 1945, as scientists, led by Oppenheimer, and the military prepare to test the first nuclear bomb, events that will radically change the course and fabric of history. The new production, starring Gerald Finley in the title role, will open at the Met on Monday, October 13, at 8:00 p.m. When the opera premiered in San Francisco in October of 2005, The Guardian said, “Adams’s ecstatically lyrical writing and the music’s visionary eloquence make this a modern masterpiece.” The New York Times later wrote that Doctor Atomic was “the most complex and inventive of Mr. Adams’s works, an engrossing operatic drama.”
Penny Woolcock, an award-winning British TV and film director who worked with Adams on the 2003 film of his opera The Death of Klinghoffer, is making both her Met and her opera-directing debut with this new production. Doctor Atomic will be conducted by
Alan Gilbert, the
New York Philharmonic’s music director designate, also in his Met debut. The production will be seen live in movie theaters around the world on November 8 as part of The Met: Live in HD, the highly successful series of performance transmissions. The Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery Met will present an exhibition by acclaimed artist David Altmejd to coincide with the opera, opening on October 13.
“The atomic bomb is the all-time American symbol of our darkest mythology—power, technology, science and of course the responsibility of having this ability to destroy the planet,” Adams says of his fifth stage work. “These are Wagnerian topics, and they are ideally suited to operatic expression.”
The libretto for Doctor Atomic is by Peter Sellars, who adapted the text from original sources, including declassified government files and conversations with people who worked on the Manhattan Project. It also includes excerpts from the Bhagavad Gita and poetry of John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, and Muriel Rukeyser. The version of the score being performed at the Met is based on the opera’s second edition, given in Amsterdam in 2007. Performances run through November 13. The co-production with
English National Opera (ENO) will open in London next February.
Julian Crouch designed the sets, and the costumes are by Tony Award-winning costume designer
Catherine Zuber. The lighting is by another Tony winner,
Brian MacDevitt, in his Met debut. Choreographer
Andrew Dawson and sound designer Mark Grey also make their Met debuts with the new production, and the video designs are by Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer for Fifty Nine Productions. (Crouch and Fifty Nine Productions recently collaborated on the Met’s new production of
Philip Glass’s Satyagraha and are working together once again on the upcoming 125th Anniversary Gala.)
A host of events related to Doctor Atomic take place around the premiere and during the run, including lectures sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera Guild; a discussion at the 92nd Street Y; an open rehearsal for students at the Met; and a series of events at the Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY) funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. (See complete listing in this release.)
In presenting this modern masterpiece as the company celebrates its 125th anniversary, the Met reinforces its commitment to contemporary opera, shown last season with Satyagraha. Next season, the company will revive the 1991 production of
John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, and in 2012-13 the company will stage Thomas Adès’s 2004 opera The Tempest. Adams’s own Nixon in China, which premiered in 1987, will be seen at the Met in the Peter Sellars production in 2009-10.
Three of the principal singers return to the roles they performed at the opera’s 2005 premiere: Finley, who was heralded for his interpretation of Oppenheimer, Richard Paul Fink as the physicist Edward Teller, and Eric Owens in his Met debut as General Leslie Groves. Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke plays Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty. Making her Met debut is Meredith Arwady, who plays Pasqualita, the Oppenheimer’s Tewa maid.
After the world premiere, the San Francisco Chronicle called Doctor Atomic “a major addition to the operatic repertory of this new century.” The New York Times said, “Whole spans of the orchestral and choral music tremble with textural density. The vocal writing is wondrously varied, sometimes jittery and naturalistic, sometime melismatic and elegiac.” Adams is often inspired by the drama and moral complexities of recent history, such as President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China (Nixon in China) and Leon Klinghoffer’s death at the hands of terrorists on board the Achille Lauro (The Death of Klinghoffer, 1991). In Doctor Atomic, the composer has heightened the drama of the first atomic test by focusing on a very brief period, less than 24 hours. “It really is all about the tension leading up to the moment of this detonation,” Adams says. “The scientists didn’t know if the bomb was going to work. There was incredible pressure coming from Washington, from the White House, even from Potsdam, Germany, where President Truman and Churchill and Stalin had all convened.”
The Met’s new production of Doctor Atomic is underwritten by Agnes Varis, a Met managing director who last season underwrote the new production of
Philip Glass’s Satyagraha. Dr. Varis is also sponsoring an outdoor advertising campaign for Doctor Atomic that is currently being seen throughout the city. The image is based on an historic photograph of Oppenheimer that was taken by the portraitist Philippe Halsman (part of an iconic series of images of famous people jumping, which were published in Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book). Oppenheimer’s own words are included in the text: “We knew the world would not be the same.”
For a detailed schedule of events and ticket purchase please visit www.metopera.org
