In-progress report on Doctor Atomic

“100,000 people dead by the end of the year.” “But Oppenheimer didn’t mean for them to die. There was that document where he advocates a display of force to make an impression, though, right? What about that?” “ ‘My sister described this bright flash of greens and purples.’ ‘Was there anything unusual about her reaction?’ ‘My sister is blind.’ ” “Is it considered genocide when that many people are targeted for destruction? When is it not legal war, but illegal genocide?”

Those were my barely conscious thoughts at 5:00 this morning, when I woke up thinking about the atomic bomb. The quotation of the sister comes from a documentary in which a woman who driving through New Mexico saw the test explosion at Trinity in June, 1945. Her sister described the impossibly bright blast her sister saw, a sister, as the woman says, who could not see.

Doctor Atomic opens at Lyric Opera in a couple weeks, on December 14, and I’ve been doing my critical homework on it for an advance article that’ll come out before the opening, along with a review. I have the 500 pages of score; I have a live recording sent courtesy of Boosey & Hawkes. I read the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird; I have interviews with the director and author of the libretto, Peter Sellars, and baritone Gerald Finley, who plays Oppenheimer, committed to tape. I went to a rehearsal. On Sellars’s recommendation, I watched Jon Else’s documentary about the Manhattan Project The Day after Trinity. I read most of Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and will begin his new Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, which deals with the decades after World War II, tonight. And yet, due to the subject matter and the opera itself, I feel under an enormous strain that’s different than any other preparation or study I’ve done.

I’m usually speechless when I try to describe what I’ve been doing. I’ll explain to someone how John Adams uses Baroque forms and formulas in Oppenheimer’s aria at the end of Act I, and then have to stop talking. The descending “sighing” motif appears in that aria, “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God,” and Adams uses a driving ritornello in D minor to separate the sections. The result is that he evokes those tragic portions of Bach’s cantatas and Passions as he’s making an atomic-era point. Unlike so many allusions, however, this one doesn’t merely make me feel smug for having noticed it, it actually sears the aria’s emotion deeper into my consciousness, and I have to put my head down for a moment.

Something similar happened while watching the documentary. The destructive force of the bomb that was tested and those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki are described statistically, and we’re told how many people died as a result of each. Footage is included of the burn victims lying motionless to keep the pain of their wounds at the minimum. Rhodes wrote in the History of the Atomic Bomb that the blast liquefied the internal organs of those who died, before they were burned, in less than nine seconds. The pain must have been more agonizing and more intense than almost anything imaginable. The bombs in our arsenal and those of other nuclear-armed countries are 4,000 times stronger than those bombs. How much more potential pain awaits the next victims of a nuclear attack? I just shake my head, and can’t come up with any sort of coherent answer.

The opera deals with the days leading up to the test explosion in New Mexico. The scientists are tired, and on edge. The music has a density worthy of Sibelius, or even Wagner, married with a propulsiveness that’s reminiscent of Stravinsky, but with explosive quality that’s entirely Adams’s. History beats down on Oppenheimer, the man who must make decisions that centuries of warfare have led him to, and the consequences will be far larger than affecting only his life.

I try to make sense of all of this, and wonder how Adams and Sellars lived with this history for so long, and maintained their stability. It makes me tired, and depressed, and is there waiting for me when I wake up. I don’t like thinking about it, and yet that is precisely what we have to do in order to have some idea of the era we live in. Those bombs aren’t going away, and more and more countries are developing them. The music has an urgency befitting the subject. I have to put my head down again.