User Reviews

[...] The opera divides the stage in three spaces: in the foreground Oppenheimer's home with one night scene with his wife in bed first: a scene that was supposed to be sentimental if not erotic and that turns into some very distantly metaphorical evocation of sensuous pleasures centered on perfumes, the perfumes he finds in his wife's hair and that evoke fruit, foliage and human skin. But he was working on some document at the beginning, he stopped for a short while and he interrupted this sentimental drift to go back to his bomb. Then that private space will be occupied by Kitty Oppenheimer, her infant daughter in a cradle, the Navajo nurse and later three helpers for that nurse. Two short incursions of Peter Oppenheimer, their son can be noted. This private space is centered on the baby and the five women are only there to take care of her.

In a middle stripe on the stage we have the labs and the bomb with two types of personnel, the scientists on one side and then the military people who are managing the first test of this bomb with the scientists, and also trying to manage the weather and the scientists.

Further back, hence in the background of the stage we have an open space where dancers intervene very often, most of the time six dancing on a circle, and once four dancing on parallel lines running from left to right. Personally I do not see what these dancers are bringing to the opera, except that they are dancing in circles like the scientists and the soldiers who are activating themselves, running in circles mostly after their own tails like Chopin's Little Dog Waltz.

Then the back of the stage is most of the time cut in two layers, a top layer that is black and a layer between that top layer and the back line of the stage that is used for light. It is often white, but can be blue or red according to the scenes.

Thus the stage is visually putting one on top of the other five layers from the foreground to the top of the backdrop. This is very interesting for the DVD because cameras can shift from one layer to the next and concentrate or zoom in onto one section of these layers, on one face, one character. We practically never have a full vision of the stage, which is kind of frustrating.

The music is essentially some accompanying music behind the singing. The singing itself having to be clearly understood because of the pregnancy of the text is more chanted than sung. There are very few instances when the singing has any kind of musical complication. At times it is even slightly humdrum. But then the music behind and in-between two sentences can be rich and impressive but always of the accompanying type used to amplify the meaning of the words.

The singing emphasizes some words or phrases by repeating them and such repetitions are never gratuitous and are most of the time triple repetition or a triple simple repetition with a fourth one that is one word longer, or one word shorter. This pattern of four being clearly three plus one is an echo to John Donne's "three-personed God" and this Christian reference is important because then the extension to four is necessarily the extension to the crucifixion. This is a direct allusion to these scientists who are probably very religious in their common life (saying graces at every meal, going to church every Sunday, etc) and yet their very activity is making them the agent of the devil, "your enemy" in Donne's words. Donne's richness is not entirely used. For example the last five lines of the sonnet are very rich in this symbolical way:

"But am betroth'd to your enemy (A), Divorce me (1), untie (2), or break that knot again (3), Take me to you (4), imprison me (5), for I Except (B) you enthrall me (6), never shall be free (C), Nor ever chaste (D), except (E) you ravish me (7)."

The enemy is A-B-C-D-E, hence a pentacle, the devil of course. God is asked to do seven things hence the holy week that ends we must keep in mind on the crucifixion and the resurrection. The crucifixion is carried by the four negatives B-C-D-E- within the pentacle of the devil. And the seven requests to God plus the five attachments to the devil make twelve and there we are whole again since it is the number of the Last Supper's participants, once Judas, the supposed traitor is gone.

In fact in the first scene of the second act Kitty in a long poem by Muriel Rukeyser introduces Jesus:

". . . This earth-long day Between blood and resurrection where we wait Remembering sun, seed, fire; remembering That fierce Judaean Innocent who risked Every immortal meaning on one life."

Jesus, the Judaean Innocent is captured in our memories between blood and resurrection, the crucifixion on the Friday afternoon (death at the ninth hour) and the resurrection on the Sunday morning.

A last remark. The opera starts with black and white images of war scenes, desolation, dead people, bombings, and it ends with the color vision of all the actors and singers lying on their stomach on the ground while the sound tracks gives us some Japanese remarks from people after a bombing looking for help of for relatives, and these Japanese sentences are duly translated in English for us to see the meaning, at least on the DVD. Before we had simple bombings and after the test shown on the stage it will be the next generation of bombings, the atomic generation and the desolation of survivors. War is a cycle from one battle to the next and it never stops.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU