'Lecture on the Weather' and 'Doctor Atomic' haves modern-day lessons
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
They delve into old American thinking to provide insight into today.
Reporting from New York — Saturday morning, hyperbolic weather reporters here barked out warnings of heavy wind and drenching rain all day. A shower or two did dampen Manhattan streets, but the real New York weather over the weekend was elsewhere.
Friday night at the Chelsea Art Museum, John Cage's “Lecture on the Weather,” commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in 1975 to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial, had its belated New York City premiere. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Opera was in the midst of presenting the New York premiere of John Adams' recent “Doctor Atomic,” which I saw Saturday night. These are strikingly timely works in which past American thought provides acute insight into our country's present situation. In both, weather is the central dramatic device.
Cage's piece calls for a dozen speakers, who recite bits of text taken from Henry David Thoreau, accompanied by the recorded sounds of thunder and downpour, as projections of Thoreau drawings printed in negative are flashed on a screen like lightning.
'Doctor Atomic': An article in Tuesday's Calendar section about the Metropolitan Opera production of John Adams' "Doctor Atomic" said that it would be broadcast in movie theaters Nov. 22. The broadcast will be Nov. 8.
"Doctor Atomic" follows the last 24 hours in the creation of the atomic bomb in New Mexico at the end of World War II. Hitler's Germany has fallen, but war continues in the Pacific. Nuclear might is America's ticket to becoming the world's first superpower. Truman is about to meet with Stalin and Churchill, and he demands the bomb. The first test must progress in the desert on schedule, despite forecasts of rain that could create a radioactive catastrophe.
Like Cage's "Lecture," Adams' opera uses a constructed text. Peter Sellars arranged documentary materials from recently declassified papers, allowing the scientists in question to speak their own words. He also put poetry into the mouths of the morally conflicted leader of the top-secret Manhattan Project hidden away in the Southwestern desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his wife, Kitty.
Through the lyrics of John Donne and lines from the Hindu spiritual work the Bhagavad-Gita, Oppenheimer confronts the world-changing meaning of the moment. The New York poet Muriel Rukeyser is Kitty's voice.
