Explosively original

THE mesas stand in hushed majesty. The sky doesn’t stop. The vistas, those astounding vistas, humble humanity. Native Americans revere this land.

I’m driving through Bandelier National Monument, just outside Los Alamos. Peter Sellars is my passenger. We are quiet for a moment. “These mesas are incredible, you’ve got to give Oppenheimer that,” Sellars, never quiet for long, finally says.

“Why Western man really does select rare sacred sites to put the most toxic ... “ He breaks off with a purposeful, infectious laugh. Silent again, he surveys what he will later call “the world’s biggest horizon.”

Somewhat reluctantly, Sellars has come to Los Alamos at my request to talk about John Adams’ new opera, “Doctor Atomic,” for which he devised the libretto and which he will also direct. The protagonist is J. Robert Oppenheimer, who, as director of the Manhattan Project in 1943, chose an obscure site of mystical beauty to build the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In this desert, and in great secrecy, a number of the world’s most celebrated physicists raced against the Germans to develop the first atomic bomb.

The opera, to be given its premiere by the San Francisco Opera on Oct. 1, examines the mood surrounding; the inner thoughts, doubts and fears behind; and the profound implications of what came to be known as the Trinity test: the first explosion of an atomic bomb, at 5:30 in the morning on July 16, 1945. Three weeks later, another bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and shortly after that another struck the city of Nagasaki. The bombs’ massive firepower incinerated at least 100,000 people. Over time, many more would die from radiation sickness. Japan surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II. The world had changed forever.

Throughout July, Sellars has been working 30 miles away in Santa Fe, directing Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar,” an opera about the fascist murder of Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca during the Spanish Civil War, as remembered by a dying actress. But although “Doctor Atomic” has been on his mind as well, the 47-year-old director has professed no recent interest in visiting Los Alamos, where he has been only once, three years earlier.

This has been an intense month for Sellars. He encouraged a major revision of “Ainadamar” by Golijov and librettist David Henry Hwang, and the rewriting continued right up to the premiere. The day before the first rehearsal, his grandmother died, and he responded by staging “Ainadamar” as an extended, unflinching 77-minute death scene.

When he finally agreed to our “field trip,” at the beginning of August, “Ainadamar” had just had its successful opening and the “Doctor Atomic” rehearsals were set to begin in San Francisco in one week. His objection to going to Los Alamos, besides his impossibly full schedule, was that he found it of little historical interest. The laboratory’s Bradbury Science Museum is a modest, modern structure that stands at the foot of a soulless shopping center. The first thing we see driving into Los Alamos is a new Bechtel building, confirming Sellars’ fears of corporate involvement at the lab.

The libretto for “Doctor Atomic” -- which Sellars has fashioned from documentary material and lines from the pioneering American feminist poet Muriel Rukeyser, the British metaphysical poet John Donne and the Hindu spiritual text the Bhagavad-Gita -- is a meditation on issues of grave moral concern. The Bradbury Museum doesn’t devote a lot of space to moral concern. A short documentary film is shown that gives more attention to the Boy Scouts in the region in 1945 than to Hiroshima. New replicas of the bombs dropped on Japan -- nicknamed Little Boy (a “uranium gun”) and Fat Man (an implosion bomb) -- have been stripped of many exterior details by order of the Department of Homeland Security.

Yet we soon find that history cannot be easily suppressed, not here under the shadow of the bomb and those fascinating, puzzling, disturbing, charismatic scientists who made it. Walking into the museum, we are greeted by a woman who explains the layout of the facility and recommends the documentary.

With his spiky hair, enthusiastic laugh, endless curiosity, boyish friendliness and theatrical graciousness, Sellars attracts attention. He engages the woman in conversation. She’s a retired teacher who has been associated with the museum for many years. And before you know it, Sellars has her reminiscing about Edward Teller, Oppenheimer’s nemesis and a character in the opera.

Teller was less ambivalent about the bomb than most of his colleagues. He was a brilliant Hungarian scientist in his mid-30s when Oppenheimer brought him in on the project. Although Oppenheimer persisted in supporting the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, against opposition by many younger scientists at Los Alamos, he was plagued by guilt for the rest of his life. “I have blood on my hands,” he told President Truman in 1946.

Unlike the conflicted young scientists, Teller advocated bigger and bigger bombs. He became the Los Alamos prime mover for the creation of the many-times-deadlier hydrogen bomb in the 1950s. He was, as the title of a new biography has it, the real Dr. Strangelove.

He was also a devoted amateur pianist who played Mozart every morning. But we learn that Teller wasn’t necessarily the musician he was often cracked up to be. On several occasions, our hostess heard him rehearse with other scientists in a piano trio. “He always made mistakes,” she says, “but he would never admit to them.”

As we enter the museum proper, Sellars suggests that we take a seat on a bench in the small room that houses material relating to the early history of Los Alamos, and he begins to explain Teller’s role in the opera.

“Basically the first half-hour of the opera is an extended prologue, which is all material from the first two weeks of July 1945,” Sellars begins. “Germany has just capitulated. Truman is meeting Stalin at Potsdam, which is where all this pressure comes from for the test to work. Oppenheimer has been in these meetings in Washington to select the target, and it’s full steam ahead to Japan.”

The scene is a freewheeling conversation among Oppenheimer, Robert Wilson (a young scientist who opposed using the bomb on civilians) and Teller. Most of the text comes from documents in the public domain.

Sellars found the opening chorus in a small book, “Atomic Energy for Military Purposes,” published by the scientists themselves several weeks after Hiroshima. “They felt that in a democratic society, citizens should be informed to discuss nuclear questions,” he explains.

The chorus contains a statement of the principles behind the bomb, why it’s practical and what it can accomplish. “It doesn’t exactly say how to build a nuclear weapon,” Sellars says, “but it is a precis of the science involved.”

He is particularly proud of the inclusion in this scene of a petition signed by 70 scientists asking Truman not to bomb Japan. Leslie Groves, the crusty general who oversaw the Manhattan Project, made sure that the document never reached Truman. “What’s beautiful,” Sellars exclaims with delight, “is to have documents that were quietly discarded in history now set for singers and orchestra for all the world to hear.”

FAR-RANGING SOURCES

PERHAPS the most striking part of Sellars’ libretto is his use of poetry. In an intimate scene between Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, their lines come from Rukeyser and what Sellars calls the “ravishing, ravishing poetry of Baudelaire,” which he says Adams has transformed into something deliciously, sensuously Ravelian.

In fact, the couple coded their love letters with quotes from Baudelaire. Oppenheimer was an aesthete, passionate about poetry and the arts. He learned Sanskrit to read the Bhagavad-Gita in the original. A line from it -- “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” -- he said came to him as he watched the mushroom cloud bloom during the Trinity test.

Rukeyser is another natural for the libretto. She attended school in New York with Oppenheimer and his brother and, Sellars points out, “Muriel’s voice comes right out of the heart of this world.”

The opera cuts to the test site in Alamogordo, in southern New Mexico. The weather is bad. A freak thunderstorm delays the test and adds to the danger. No one knows exactly what the detonation of an atomic bomb might result in. The famed and beloved Italian physicist Enrico Fermi takes bets on whether it will ignite, and hence destroy, Earth’s atmosphere.

Gen. Groves threatens a weatherman with court martial unless he changes his predictions that the storm will continue. Oppenheimer sits alone in his tent and sings an aria, its text a poem by Donne. “Batter my heart, threeperson’d God,” it begins. It was that line that inspired Oppenheimer to name the test Trinity.

“John sets it for Gerry [Gerald Finley, the baritone singing Oppenheimer] and full orchestra as a personal chaconne. Of course, you know that Robert Oppenheimer would be somebody who would have gone to an Alfred Deller concert or would have Alfred Deller records,” Sellars says, referring to the countertenor and pioneer in period performance of early music. As he speaks, the sound leaking in the background from a museum video exhibit is that of Glenn Miller’s dance band.

We walk over to the sanitized replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy. The former, which fell on Nagasaki, is more detailed on the opera set than here. Sellars describes “Doctor Atomic’s” second act, which includes a scene between Kitty and her maid back in Los Alamos -- the women are not permitted at the test site -- and then the 20-minute-to-zero countdown.

We are approached by John Rhoades, the museum’s director, who recognizes Sellars. He had shown him around three years earlier, and it turns out that Rhoades has an opera background, having once done fundraising for Santa Fe Opera. He tells us that a busload of scientists will travel to San Francisco for the premiere, but he fears that the scientists may be sticklers for accuracy.

“The only thing that I will do that will annoy some people is I am taking poetic license a little bit with time and space onstage,” Sellars says reassuringly. “Yes, I know, technically so-and-so was not in that room, at that time, on that day. But for the whole dramatic flow of it, I need their voice.

“And the other great thing that we’re allowed to do -- and you’re not -- is use metaphor.”

“Oh, I do it all the time,” Rhoades interjects, “and the scientists hate it.”

Rhoades then introduces us to Ben Benjamin, who happens to be in the museum because a crew from CBS News’ “Sunday Morning” has come to film a segment on Los Alamos for the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima blast. Benjamin was a young photographer serving in the Army in 1945, and he participated in the Trinity test.

Sellars comes alive, full of questions.

“What were you wearing that night?” he asks.

“I was in fatigues, shirt sleeves. It was the middle of summer,” Benjamin answers, then goes on to describe the scene.

“I was on top of a turret intended for four .50-caliber machine guns. Instead, we put up four Mitchell motion picture cameras that had been rigged up to go at 100 frames per second instead of 24. It was known that we’d be shooting an explosion, a big ball of hot gases, so the physicists said, ‘Make sure you guys figure out a way to track that thing.’

“We were warned not to look at it, and everybody was given a little chunk of glass. But once the explosion started cooling down, I took the glass away and said, ‘My God, it’s beautiful.’

“My superior came back and said, ‘No, it’s terrible.’ I wasn’t thinking yet about the moral implications. We were just excited that it was going so well. Then a few days later came Hiroshima, and on Aug. 9 Nagasaki, where they used the same kind of bomb we tested.”

“How old were you that night?” Sellars asks.

“I was 22 years old. But I’m still here. And one reason I’m still here is that I’ve got lots of ionizing radiation. That’s what’s good for you, for your immune system. There have been a lot of studies that show that a low level of it is good for you. The problem is they don’t know what the level should be.”

Sellars loves hearing about the suspense of the countdown. He says that in the opera, this sequence will contain some of the most astonishing music Adams has yet composed. The men have worked on many projects -- the operas “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer” as well the oratorio “El Nino” and the L.A. earthquake musical “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky” -- but still Sellars cannot predict what the composer will do.

He had imagined the 20-minute countdown would be treated in real time onstage. In fact, it will last twice as long. “I expected John would do this scene with a lot of musical layering, much like he did with his 9/11 piece [‘On the Transmigration of Souls’]. But when he got around to setting it, he wanted to be with each person one at a time, which accents the waiting time.”

As we’re about the leave the museum, a scientist with Benjamin who worked at the lab in the ‘40s and ‘50s asks Sellars why he thinks Oppenheimer did such a superb job running the facility. Oppenheimer had been an unlikely choice. He had had associations with the Communist Party in the ‘30s. He was an exceptional scientist but had never been that kind of administrator.

“Obviously, he had this native intelligence, this sensitivity and this ability to move rapidly through a whole range of material,” Sellars replies, moving rapidly through a whole range of material. “You could just feel him taking stuff in with that gadfly energy, that hummingbird energy, taking a little something from here, there and everywhere, taking a little something from everything.”

We have to leave. We are already late. Sellars has an appointment back in Santa Fe. But on the way out, he wants to peek into the bookshop. Known for the epic research he does on projects, he has built up a comprehensive library on the Manhattan Project over the three years he’s been working on “Doctor Atomic.” A peek turns into a shopping spree. He leaves with $509 worth of books and videos in a large box he can barely carry, but he refuses help.

“I do this all the time,” he says. “I’ve already sent four boxes of books this size home since I’ve been in Santa Fe these past few weeks.”

The box seems to give a spring to his step, a hummingbird energy, along with more material from which to take a little from here, there and everywhere.

I drop him and his large box off at a cafe. “How are you going to get that back to your hotel?” I ask. Sellars doesn’t drive.

“That’s a good question,” he answers with a big laugh, happily clutching his carton.

*

‘Doctor Atomic’

Where: War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco

When: 8 p.m. Oct. 1, 7, 11, 14 and 22; 7:30 p.m. Oct. 5, 18 and 20; 2 p.m. Oct. 9 and 16

Price: $25 to $235

Contact: (415) 864-3330 or www.sfopera.com