Waiting for the end

Doctor Atomic
English National Opera

Der fliegende Holländer
Royal Opera House

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Brendan O’Neill

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John Adams’s latest opera Doctor Atomic, in a production shared with the New York Met, had its UK première at the English National Opera, and was greeted with the kind of cheers that you don’t often encounter in opera houses. It bored me in a way so special that I feel the need, sometime soon, to do a typology of operatic boredoms: there is the tedium of endless undistinguished recitative, the da capo of an aria which gave very mild pleasure the first time round, the unreal clemency of wronged monarchs worked out in a series of decreasingly dramatic situations, and then the flatulence of late-Romantic conflations of love and death and anything else pretty terminal, with in between the infuriating cheerfulness of cabalettas expressing unrequited passion in many an undeservedly resurrected bel canto piece. Doctor Atomic is unlike any of those in that it concerns a suspenseful situation on which the future of mankind, or the planet, depends, and the people who are involved in that, responsible for it, fascinated by it, above all scientists who are curious about it. It could hardly help being a heady brew. And yet it isn’t that at all, despite the superb cast, the glamorous and efficient production, and the sleekness of the whole enterprise.

Because it presents historical personages of the recent past in a frightening situation, this opera can’t not resonate in some way: hence the peculiarity of its kind of boringness. One watches and listens as the scientists, wives, local population of New Mexico wait, in appalling weather, for the first atom bomb to explode, and one feels no engagement with any of it. This is a formulaic Sellars–Adams affair, with reams of dull conversations which is recalcitrant to musical setting, so merely sung while the orchestra chugs mechanically on.