Let’s say you are famed nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, stuck in the New Mexico desert, racing Hitler to build the first atomic bomb. What do you do?
How about sing an aria?
At least that’s what the character of Oppenheimer does in the new opera “Doctor Atomic,” which makes its world premiere with the San Francisco Opera on Saturday, Oct. 1.
Oppenheimer is only one of several historically based characters in this new work from composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars. Others include wife Kitty Oppenheimer, Los Alamos top gun Gen. Leslie Groves and another Jewish physicist, Edward Teller, the man credited as inspiration for the fiendish Dr. Strangelove. (Teller, of Stanford, died two years ago at the age of 95.)
Outgoing S.F. Opera General Director Pamela Rosenberg commissioned the work based on an idea she pitched five years ago.
“In the fall of 1999 I was having a breakfast meeting with the board of directors,” she recalls. “I talked about a Faust series I wanted to do. One of the directors came up and said to me, ‘Across the Bay a lot of old men can’t sleep because they let the genie out of the bottle.'”
He was referring to scientists who had formerly worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other nuclear research facilities before, during and after World War II in nuclear weapons development. Adams initially resisted the commitment of creating another opera, but Rosenberg’s persistence won him over. “I became a physics freak,” she says.
With the dream team of Adams, Sellars and the opera’s music director Donald Runnicles in place, Rosenberg felt she had a potential classic on her hands.
The story follows the lives of the physicists, their wives and their military colleagues in Alamogordo, N.M., during the waning months of World War II. The moral and physical challenges of building the bomb give the opera its emotional ballast.
That, and Adams’ music.
“It’s a score unlike anything he’s written before,” says Rosenberg, referring to the Berkeley-based, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of “Nixon in China” and “Klinghoffer,” who is also the longtime composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony. “That’s what I find mind-boggling about John Adams. He never stops developing. He goes to a new place with everything he does.”
The characters aren’t the only aspects of the opera based on reality. So is Sellar’s libretto, much of it drawn verbatim from declassified documents, letters, even the poetry of John Donne and Baudelaire. That may sound dry, but in the hands of Adams and Sellars, it’s magic, according to Rosenberg.
“Oppenheimer was this extraordinarily sophisticated, erudite man,” she says. “He spoke several languages and actually learned Sanskrit. He carried the poetry of Baudelaire at the test site.”
Of course, it was the Sanskrit passage from the Bhagavad-Gita that Oppenheimer borrowed for his most famous quote. Upon witnessing the first atomic blast he said, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
Oppenheimer’s moral distress stood in contrast to Teller’s glee at the destructive power of nuclear weapons. But, notes Rosenberg, “He was not the Dr. Strangelove he became in people’s eyes. He was brilliant and quirky and didn’t like working in a team.”
Rosenberg has planned several ancillary events to coincide with the opera’s premiere, including a panel discussion at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, featuring both Adams and Sellars. A similar public event, sponsored by the American Physical Society, will be moderated by Marvin Cohen, dean of the physics department at U.C. Berkeley.
“Doctor Atomic” will be one of Rosenberg’s final projects with the S.F. Opera. Next season, she heads for Berlin to take over the opera there.
Though not Jewish herself, she is the widow of Wolf Rosenberg, a respected music journalist and composer in his own right. Her grown sons now live in Germany and identify themselves as Jewish.
Rosenberg is confident of the opera’s success and already has lined up future productions in England, Germany and the Netherlands.
“I think there is a hunger for new work,” she says. “It will have a good life.”
“Doctor Atomic” runs from Oct. 1-22 at the San Francisco Opera, 301 Van Ness Ave. Tickets, dates and times: (415) 864-3330 or www.sfopera.com.