![]() The documentary links images of the bombs devastation with shots of Oppenheimer at the time - often featuring his trademark fedora and topcoat - as well as the stage performance by Gerald Finley, who essentially genuflects in interviews to John Adams’ frankly awesome compositions. By the time of the Trinity Test, which serves as the climax for Doctor Atomic (“How do you put the bomb on stage?” asks Sellars, quixotically), the six-foot Oppenheimer weighed just 115 pounds and was smoking four packs of Chesterfields a day, incurring a wracking cough. As team member Robert Wilson puts it in a 1973 interview, “Theoretical physicists were deeply troubled when they realized that our beloved physics had been pushed into the darkest part of reality, and we, who were rather unworldly people, had somehow to understand that and deal with that.” Oppenheimer, who died of throat cancer in 1967, left behind no journals or autobiography, only “thousands of pages of official correspondence, memos, scientific papers, and a few poems.” Out of these, as well as he “a lot of classified material that has just become declassified,” the opera conjures its own poetry, at once painfully abstract and urgently material, a combination of image and sound that conveys the impossible dilemmas facing Oppenheimer and his team.Īssembled in 1945, the scientists of the super-secret Project Trinity, men mostly in their 20s, were assigned to “build a bomb before the Nazis.” Though Oppenheimer, just 40 himself, hoped their success would “not only end, but would make all future wars unthinkable,” in fact it expanded the possibilities of destruction for generations to come. This specific trajectory from theory to reality serves as the case study for Doctor Atomic, which Adams made with director Peter Sellars (their fifth collaboration). ![]() ![]() But by then, Wonders Are Many narrator Eric Owens intones, “The secret of the bomb was no longer secret.” And the nuclear arms race, the outcome that theoretical physicist Oppenheimer most desperately dreaded, was underway. In the case of “Oppie,” these costs are well known, as he went on, following the completion of the Trinity Test at Los Alamos, to fight to control the spread of nuclear weapons. The film, directed by John Else, ingeniously considers the parallels between the opera’s conception and development and that of the bomb, exploring the creative process as such, in particular its many costs. These challenges form the core of the excellent documentary Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic. Robert Oppenheimer, the inspired, famously tormented director of the Manhattan Project. “And Oppenheimer is, of course, every dramatist’s dream because he’s so complex, almost theatrically so.” In making Doctor Atomic, an opera about the making of the atomic bomb, Adams took on a series of challenges, not least being the portrayal of J. “What drew me were the people,” says John Adams. Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend ![]() I have a certain amount of respect for that atomic bomb.īatter my heart, three-personed God for, youĪs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend
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