" . . . to break, blow, burn . . . "

Today is the birthday of J. Robert Oppenheimer's "Gadget," which figures so prominently in the staging of the character's aria in the video linked just below. On July 16, 1945, the Gadget -- the first atomic bomb -- was exploded in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico, at the site Oppenheimer had christened "Trinity."

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I had the opportunity at the last minute to attend the final dress rehearsal of John Adams's Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitcan Opera last fall, just before leaving New York for good. It was perhaps the best possible way to leave my beloved city, and it was one of the most moving and astonishing things I've ever seen in the theater, let alone in the opera. From the moment the curtain rises on a hive of cubicles, covered with a scrim on which the real-life security clearance photos of the Manhattan Project scientists are projected, the audience is subject to the heart-changing spectacle offered by a great work of art.

A great work of art, musical or otherwise, has the intention and the result of transforming the witness's relationship to both the history of his own humanity and the humanity he shares with all members of his race. The anguish on baritone Gerald Finley's face as he sings Oppenheimer's Act I aria (linked below), a brilliant setting of John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV (the text of which Oppenheimer had copied into his own diary), invites all who witness to acknowledge the fall from Eden which we share with our first parents and with one another, the curse that keeps us from living in peace, and the hope of redemption for the human race.

I would like to think that J. Robert Oppenheimer, not only a brilliant physicist but also a learned man and a spiriual seeker, found redemption in the end.

To view the trailer from the Met's production of Doctor Atomic, which includes shots of the cubicle scrim, go here.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love that Little Black Dress

My life in the frozen north was briefly interrupted today when I received the J. Peterman catalogue (or Owner's Manual, as it's called on the cover) in the mail. I didn't even know this catalogue was still being published. It's a hoot to read, and I'm sure the copywriters have fun writing it: the clothes, pictured in line drawings and watercolors, are advertised not as clothes, but as cultural tokens meant to evoke nostalgic associatons in the minds of upscale, literate consumers.

There is, for instance, the "Swan Pond" blouse, whose fictional narrative concerns Truman Capote musing upon a coterie of heiresses and Hemingway ex-wives at the now-defunct high-society New York restaurant La Côte Basque in 1960. There is the ensemble in which "you" (most of these descriptions are written in the second-person singular) manage to attract the groom, Lord Randolph, at an English aristocratic country wedding, and there is the "Russian Navy" shirt ("Watch the news on TV tonight. If they're wearing striped shirts like this, it's the Russian Navy. Unless you see a dark-eyed girl paddling a green boat and her boyfriend laughs and smokes and laughs and his cigarette is slightly less than one inch long . . . then it's France"). I was just about to throw it into the recycling bin when I saw a story, about a black dress, entitled "The New Music." Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be about the premiere of John Adams's Doctor Atomic.

"The San Francisco Opera House is exactly the same," the ad copy goes. "Same coffered ceiling, same sweeping balconies, but the music isn't."

"J. Peterman" then goes on to describe the opera:

Long recitations from declassified government files and the Bhagavad Gita set to trilling, clattering, pulsing sounds, atonal explosions and lyrical flights.

You made it through Parsifal, Peterman, I keeep reminding myself.

Then I notice her next to me . . . . The sight of her in this dress [the black dress pictured in the catalogue] is almost enough to persuade me to give Schönberg a second chance.

He then describes the 1940s-style organza dress, finishing with a flourish: "Kitty Oppenheimer stuck out there on that plateau in New Mexico would have killed for a chance to wear it."

I'm not quite sure how to unpack the fact that John Adams's masterful opera is being used as a foil in a catalogue to sell high-end clothing, and a negative foil at that. I suppose it's a sign of hipness to evoke the work, and another such sign not to like it. The musicologist Richard Taruskin, in this long but excellent article in The New Republic, notes the phenomenon, current since the 1960s, of the intellegentsia (though well-versed in and appreciative of the serious and avant-garde in literature, painting, and philosophy) taking a perverse pride in knowing little-to-nothing about classical music (including twentieth- and twenty-first-century art music). Art music, as J. Peterman reminds us in his catalogue, is not hip; cultural elites today vaunt their knowledge not of new art music, but of popular music from various eras, some of which they profess to like for "ironic," rather than sincere reasons; i.e., not for its merits, but for its lack of them.

The irony here is that Doctor Atomic is not an atonal work at all, and certainly nothing like Schönberg. That, and the fact that I would love to have that dress myself.

"Batter my heart"

Anyone who's seen Doctor Atomic, or clips of it on Youtube, will recognize the "Gadget," as the Manhattan Project scientists called it, above; there is an exact replica of the bomb onstage for the second act of the Met production (it was there for the entirety of the San Francisco version).

This site gives a brief history of the actual event that John Adams's opera dramatizes, the test of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in 1945.

H/T: The Big City

Music for a Thursday: Doctor Atomic

I was all set to blog about Gilbert and Sullivan today, but that post is being preempted, because yesterday I happened to be in the right place at the right time to receive the unexpected gift of tickets to the final dress rehearsal of John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic, which took place at the Metropolitan Opera today. I'm extremely grateful for this gift. The opera is about the scientists of the Manhattan Project as they prepare for the test explosion of the first atomic bomb in the summer of 1945, and the curtain opens on an astonishing set: the cross-section of an office building -- the lab at Los Alamos -- divided into many cubicles, each big enough to represent the office of one of the Manhattan Project scientists; these cubicles are covered with window shades, on which the actual security clearance photos of the real Manhattan Project scientists are projected. Then the shades are pulled up from within each cubicle by the excellent singers of the Met Opera Chorus, one per cubicle. The singing was exceptional from all parties; Gerald Finley, above, shone in particular as J. Robert Oppenheimer. My only complaint is that John Adams's compositional style does not allow for the development of character through music -- each character's music is pretty similar to that of the others: long, slow-moving vocal lines over a tense, fast, minutely-subdivided orchestral beat. Adams instead uses text to delineate character, and the libretto of the opera was compiled from many sources by Peter Sellars: not only the obvious historical sources and Oppenheimer's and Edward Teller's own writings -- and the Bhagavad Gita, which Oppenheimer famously quoted at the actual test of the atomic bomb in 1945 -- but also the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, Baudelaire, and John Donne. Oppenheimer's magnificent first-act aria is, in fact, a setting of Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV":

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

If you are in New York this month, try to see it; it's one of the most remarkable works of music-theater I've ever seen at the Met, or anywhere.

On my way to the Met, I was fortunate to have another great musical experience: an encounter in the subway with the traditional string band The Ebony Hillbillies. I'm a fan of old-time music, and in fact one of my best friends is married to the frontman of one of my favorite bluegrass bands, The Crooked Jades. The Ebony Hillbillies struck me as a very fortuitous find. I bought one of their CDs, and hope to hear more of them in the future.