FAUSTIAN bargains have al ways fascinated opera com posers. And it is a whole nation’s Faustian bargain – the creation of the atomic bomb – that provides the motif and moral shading for “Doctor Atomic,” John Adams’ terrific new opera that had its New York premiere last week at the Met.
For this gloomy tale of scientists building the biggest firework the world has ever seen – and, after great dramatic tension, setting it off with a bang – Peter Sellars’ dull libretto draws from official sources, memoirs and poems as diverse as John Donne’s great sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” It has its moments, but too few.
What carries the opera is Adams’ music, which has a shape, definition and texture unmatched by any other American opera composer with the possible exception of Philip Glass.
His days as a pure minimalist are long past: Now he’s a composer of many voices, and as his music surges up to its inevitable climax, it lets the audience feel the horror of this death watch.
This could have been the way the world ended – with the whimper of a poison cloud, if not a total eclipse – and Adams, in his masterly way, has transferred those dark shadows of fear to the audience.
The singers, most of whom had been involved in the San Francisco premiere, dusted off the complexities of the music with ease. Gerald Finley, as the tortured J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the bomb-making Manhattan project, was superb, and some sharply etched vignettes come from Richard Paul Fink as a stolid Edward Teller, Eric Owens as the supervising Gen. Groves and particularly Sascha Cooke as Oppenheimer’s long-suffering wife, Kitty.
The opera is adroitly staged by Penny Woolcock, who makes clever use of Julian Crouch’s ingenious setting, with its periodic-chart scrim and multitiered cubicles.
Alan Gilbert, the New York Philharmonic’s incoming music director, was magnificent in this, his Met debut, leading the orchestra and chorus into the dark heart of Adams’ music.
DOCTOR ATOMIC
Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; 212-362-6000. Through Nov. 13.