Regional Oral History Office University of California the Bancroft Library Berkeley, California DOCTOR ATOMIC: the MAKING of AN

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Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

DOCTOR ATOMIC: THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN OPERA

Interviewees:

PAMELA ROSENBERG, General Director, San Francisco Opera DONALD RUNNICLES, Music Director, San Francisco Opera KIP CRANNA, Musical Administrator, San Francisco Opera IAN ROBERTSON, Chorus Director, San Francisco Opera JOHN ADAMS, Composer

Interviews conducted by CAROLINE CRAWFORD and JON ELSE in 2004-2006

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and John Adams, dated May 23, 2008; Clifford A. Cranna, Jr., dated November 12, 2005; Ian Robertson, dated October 26, 2006; Pamela Rosenberg, dated October 27, 2005; and Donald Runnicles, dated January 12, 2006. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. Except for the interview with John Adams, which is in the public domain, all literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Pamela Rosenberg, Donald Runnicles, Clifford A. Cranna, Jr., Ian Robertson, John Adams, Doctor Atomic: The Making of an American Opera, interviews conducted by Caroline Crawford and Jon Else, 2005- 2006, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2008.

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Canadian Baritone Gerald Finley as Robert Oppenheimer

Photographs Courtesy of San Francisco Opera

The Cast of Doctor Atomic and the “Gadget” (the Atomic Bomb)

“Am I in Your Light?” Gerald Finley and Kristine Jepson

American Mezzo-Soprano Kristine Jepson as Kitty Oppenheimer vii

American Mezzo-Soprano Beth Clayton as Pasqualita

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The San Francisco Opera Chorus, Verses from the Bhagavad Gita ix

In rehearsal: Baritones Richard Paul Fink as Edward Teller and Gerald Finley as Robert Oppenheimer

Discursive Table of Contents—Doctor Atomic

American Composers Series Preface xi

Interview History, Caroline Crawford xii

Interview with Pamela Rosenberg, General Director, October 27, 2005 1

Presenting Doctor Atomic to the San Francisco Opera board of directors—John Adams as American composer and the Faust concept—The team: Alice Goodman and Peter Sellars—The process of fundraising—Casting dilemmas and rehearsal cycles—The reception and the future of the opera—The “Animating Opera” project—Thoughts about Donald Runnicles—The last curtain call.

Interview with Donald Runnicles, Conductor, January 12, 2006 34

Commissioning composer John Adams—Discussion of the Faust theme—The music of John Adams and the collaboration with Peter Sellars—Preparing for the premiere: orchestral rehearsals—Adams and amplification—The future of Doctor Atomic—Thoughts on Pamela Rosenberg as intendant—The American orchestra musician.

Interview with Clifford Cranna, Musical Administrator, November 12, 2005 53

The commissioning of John Adams, a distinctly American voice—Contractual guidelines for the new opera—Collaborating with Peter Sellars and Alice Goodman—The score takes shape—First hearings of Doctor Atomic music: a MIDI recording, a New York Philharmonic concert—The issue of amplification—The composing process: orchestral score and piano reduction—The rehearsal cycle, artists’ preparation, and cast changes—Cuts to the score: conductor and director—A controversial chorus opening—Writing the music of the bomb—Ancillary activities before the premiere: a successful public relations blitz—Critical reception of Doctor Atomic.

Interview with Ian Robertson, Chorus Director, October 26, 2006 87

Role of the opera chorus in creating a new work—Teamwork of John Adams and Peter Sellars— Working out the Corn Dance—Initial choruses: speech rhythm and notation—Vishnu chorus— Choreography session with Sellars and Lucinda Childs—The training of a professional chorus— More about Peter Sellars—A heavy rehearsal schedule—On tonal sounds: vibrato vs. straight, operatic vs. choral society—Setting the music: word painting and the use of language—Potential problems for the chorus: positioning—MIDI technology—The future of Doctor Atomic.

Interview with John Adams, Composer, May 2, 2004 121

Preparing to compose Doctor Atomic—Considering the imagery of the bomb: sexy and terrifying—Weighing science and morality—The libretto—Working with Peter Sellars—The winnowing process—Thoughts about the Faust theme—The process of composing.

Thoughts about Doctor Atomic, by Peter Sellars 129 xi

American Composers: Series Preface

The American Composers Series of oral histories, a project of the Regional Oral History Office, was initiated in 1998 to document the lives and careers of a number of contemporary composers with California connections, the composers chosen to represent a cross section of musical philosophies, cultural backgrounds and styles.

The twentieth century in this country produced an extraordinary diversity of music as composers sought to find a path between contemporary and traditional musical languages: serialism, minimalism, neoclassicism, and back, to some extent, to neoromanticism in the last decades. The battle of styles, and the reverse pendulum swing that followed, were perhaps inevitable, but as the New York Times stated in a recent article, "the polemics on both sides were dismaying."

The composers in the series, a diverse group selected with the help of University of California faculty and musicians from the greater community, come from universities (Andrew Imbrie, Joaquin Nin-Culmell and Olly Wilson) orchestras (David Sheinfeld), and fields as different as jazz (Dave Brubeck and John Handy), electronic music (Pauline Oliveros), spatial music (Henry Brant), Indian classical music (Ali Akbar Khan), and the blues (Jimmy McCracklin). David Harrington, founder of Kronos Quartet, was interviewed about the quartet’s commissioning program, which, in recognition of the fact that classical music is no longer an exclusively European-American enterprise, has engaged composers from Argentina to Zimbabwe, producing more than five hundred new pieces in three decades. Also in the series is the following oral history on the subject of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, commissioned by San Francisco Opera for the 2005 season. Various library collections served as research resources for the project, among them those of the UC Berkeley and UCLA Music Libraries, The Bancroft Library, and the Yale School of Music Library.

Oral history techniques have only recently been applied in the field of music, the study of music having focused until now largely on structural and historical developments in the field. It is hoped that these oral histories, besides being vivid cultural portraits, will promote understanding of the composer's work, the musical climate in the times we live in, the range of choices the composer has, and the avenues for writing and performance.

Funding for the American Composer Series came in the form of a large grant from art patroness Phyllis Wattis, who supported the oral histories of Kurt Herbert Adler and the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and subsequently from the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to tape-record autobiographical interviews with persons who have contributed significantly to California history. The office is headed by Richard Cándida Smith and is under the administrative supervision of The Bancroft Library.

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Doctor Atomic: The Making of an American Opera

When former San Francisco Opera Director Pamela Rosenberg came from Germany in 1999 to talk to the opera board of directors about taking the company directorship, she arrived with the idea of commissioning an opera by an American composer. John Adams was the composer of choice, and one of two ideas presented was to create an American Faust around the figure of Robert Oppenheimer and his involvement in the Manhattan Project—the making of the atomic bomb.

Adams was reluctant. He had had some trouble over The Death of Klinghoffer, a controversial work about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro that some viewed as anti-Semitic, and another opera project was daunting. He thought the Faust concept unworkable: too European, too much baggage to bring to an opera project. “I have no more operas left in me,” he said at the outset, but more discussions followed, and by the following March Adams had rallied his team, director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman, and was ready to begin writing. He was intrigued by the Los Alamos story, seeing in it important American themes: science over nature, “the presumption of military dominance on behalf of what we perceive as the ‘right’ values,” the power to end life on the planet, ethical dilemmas created by the possession of the bomb.

Together Adams and Sellars forged a libretto, after Alice Goodman withdrew from the project, talking with scientists, reading widely and drawing on poetry, books such as Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, government documents, quotes from Teller and Oppenheimer, and the Bhagavad Gita. Adams wanted the work to be not about the morality and the politics of the bomb but “about science, the way people think.”

When the work was done, Sellars described Adams’ score as “insanely complex” and “our Götterdämmerung” and said of the singers, “hope for the world is embedded in one person’s ability to go into a rehearsal room for that many years and listen to this note until it is so beautiful and so refined, and until their voice reaches a place that the rest of the world would not know how to touch. This singer has cultivated the finest that any human being has to offer, and brings it to us with all of its illumination, depth, courage, and heartfelt beauty.” Listeners heard in the score a multiplicity of influences: Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, Varèse. Critics raved about and scorched the premiere. Audiences went again and again to listen. If there was a point of general agreement, it was that the Adams’ setting of John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three person’d God” would live on in the repertoire for time to come.

The oral history attempts to document the process of writing and preparing the opera for the stage, with the interviewees reflecting on the music, the eclectic libretto (Adams called it “the paper chase of paper chases”), the casting, rehearsing, performance and reception of the work, which was first seen in San Francisco on October 1, 2005. The interviewees for the history were Ms. Rosenberg, opera music director Donald Runnicles, who conducted the premiere, music administrator Kip Cranna, chorus director Ian Robertson, and composer John Adams.

Caroline Cooley Crawford, Music Historian Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley, California 2008 1

Pamela Rosenberg Interviewed by Caroline Crawford Interview #1: October 27, 2005

Audio File 1

01-00:00:00 Crawford: This is an interview with San Francisco Opera Director Pamela Rosenberg for the Oral History Office. Let’s start at the beginning of the commissioning of Doctor Atomic. When did you first think of an American opera?

01-00:00:15 Rosenberg: In the summer of ’99, when I was in conversation here with the search committee. And it was sort of becoming clear that they would be offering the position of general director to me. I then sat down and started working out my “Animating Opera” ideas, because I then wanted to be able to present them. I knew that we wanted to do a whole Faust series. And then I thought we really needed an American Faust, and that meant commissioning one.

01-00:00:57 So it was late summer, and I approached John [Adams] then in November, I think—October or November of ’99, after having presented my ideas to the board.

01-00:01:12 Crawford: And the board liked the idea from the outset.

01-00:00:14 Rosenberg: Well, yes. They usually don’t really comment one way or the other, they just listen to it and nod and—it wasn’t that they veto ideas. It’s just that I really wanted to present the whole idea of “Animating Opera” to them. And it was actually very interesting, because after the announcement of my appointment was made in—I think it was the end of September—I flew over for a few days to San Francisco, and was then introduced to the larger board, because up until then, I had just met with the search committee.

And so there was a breakfast with the board of directors, and I presented my ideas at that breakfast. And I talked about the American Faust. My idea would be Oppenheimer, but it remained to be seen if that’s actually what the idea would be. And one of our board members, who is a professor emeritus at Cal, came up to me afterwards and he said, “Well, you know, a lot of your subjects are just sitting across the Bay. They’re old now, and a lot of them can’t sleep at night because of the genie they let out of the bottle.” And for me, that just kind of cinched it: “It has to be.”

Crawford: Did you think of Edward Teller or any of the others?

Rosenberg: No.

Crawford: Never. 2

01-00:02:40 Rosenberg: No. Oppenheimer, for me, was by far the most intriguing of all of them. And since he did run the Manhattan Project— or he got it together in Los Alamos, and really made it happen, and Teller didn’t really; he didn’t participate that much in that phase. So it was Oppenheimer. And Oppenheimer being such a learned, erudite, thoughtful, brilliant, kind of conflicted intellectual, lends himself much more to the idea of the complexity of the whole Faust idea.

Crawford: Did John Adams take the Faust idea, initially?

01-00:03:41 Rosenberg: Yes.

Crawford: I thought he didn’t.

Rosenberg: No, at the very beginning, when I— Kip Cranna phoned— I asked Kip to phone John, because he knew him and I didn’t. I’d just always admired him from afar. And you know, I knew in coming here, I wanted him to write it. So I asked Kip to set up a lunch appointment with the three of us. And so he came into the city. And that was November, it was my second visit. And so when I broached the subject and said I would like to commission an American Faust from him, I don’t know whether I said “American Faust” right off the bat. I did say, “I would love to commission an opera from you.” And he demurred right away. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t have an opera left in me.”

Crawford: [laughs] Yes.

01-00:04:34 Rosenberg: You know, he said, “It’s a huge amount of work,” he said, “And I just don’t have a subject really.” And so then I threw out my American Faust idea: Oppenheimer. But I did also say, “It wouldn’t have to be Oppenheimer, we could think of all kinds of subjects. I mean, you could go off and do something on cloning or there are all sorts of subjects that would lend themselves. This just would be my idea for it.” And so he did say, “Let me think about it.” And I think the first thing he then did was he read the Richard Rhodes book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. And he caught fire. It didn’t take long. I think it was March, 2000, when he definitely said, “Okay, I’m all for it.”

Crawford: What other ideas did you offer?

01-00:05:26 Rosenberg: I didn’t offer many. Obviously, the whole topic of cloning is one. Because if you take the basic Faustian idea of the pursuit of knowledge, no matter what the consequences— cloning’s pretty out there.

Crawford: Right. 3

01-00:05:50 Rosenberg: To create human beings. The idea of having clones walk around and be part of our social fabric. So that was basically the only other little idea I tossed out there. And said he should go away and think of other ideas that he thought maybe would fit in. Anyway, so he originally did come in to the idea of the American Faust. But it was a while later that he demurred again and said, “I don’t want it to have the subtitle, The American Faust.

Crawford: I thought he did, yes.

01-00:06:34 Rosenberg: Yes. And so up until then, we had been referring to it—because we didn’t have a title yet—as the American Faust project. One of his fears was that people would take the Goethe Faust model, and try to figure out: Okay, who’s the Mephisto and who’s the Marguerite and all that?

Crawford: Too restricting.

01-00:72:01 Rosenberg: That was his initial reason for not wanting to be pressed into that kind of mold, or having people seek in what he wrote—the correspondences to that. And then, he thinks Faust is a very European figure. Later on, when he became even more vociferous about its not being a Faust subject, he said, “The Faust idea is a very European one, and this is American, so the bomb is our myth,” he said, “and Faust is a European myth.”

Crawford: It troubled him less if he considered he was working with our myth.

01-00:07:45 Rosenberg: It troubled him less. And ironically, his wife, Debbie O’Grady, a wonderful photographer in Berkeley, has connections to the Jung Institute. And so one of the ancillary events that had been set up with all of the various ancillary events that we had leading up to this, was a day at the Jung Institute for three hours, where they wanted specifically to talk about Doctor Atomic and the Faustian myth. And because his wife basically said, “You’re doing this,” [laughs] I thought it was really ironic. There was John sort of trundling off to the Jung Institute, having to talk about the Faustian myth after all. This was just a few weeks ago.

Anyway, so afterwards I, sort of with this grin on my face, said, “And? Was it torture for you?” He said, “No, it was really fascinating.”

Crawford: What is it about his music that made him first choice for you?

01-00:08:48 Rosenberg: Well, it’s not anything specific about his music for me. He is just simply the best American composer there is, period, the end. And you know, you can make a claim he’s probably one of the best in the world. And the thing that intrigues me about him is that his music has never stayed in a minimalist rut, 4

that it’s always developed. Every piece I hear of his is different. And so he’s constantly evolving. So that’s what fascinated me about him. It wasn’t that I thought, Oh, he will write a specific kind of music for this thing. The way his mind works is what intrigues me, and the fact that somebody can just constantly grow.

Crawford: I found what he said at the Exploratorium interesting. Somebody asked him how he would describe his own music. He said, “Everything I know about sticks. Everything sticks. Sousa, Bach, Liberace. Whatever.”

Rosenberg: Yes.

01-00:09:57 Crawford: That’s what you’re talking about, that kind of freshness.

Rosenberg: Yes.

Crawford: I don’t know how you would answer this question, but if John Adams had said no—which seems to be his initial inclination—was there a backup in your mind?

01-00:10:14 Rosenberg: No. [laughs] No. At that point, I knew several composers who I didn’t want. And I won’t tell you their names.

Crawford: You don’t have to mention names.

01-00:10:28 Rosenberg: I mean, one of the things that I did do right after getting here was to start [this]. Because I’d been in Europe for thirty years, and I actually had been very much up on the American composer scene. Between ’68 and ’70, my husband was a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, as a composer; and John Cage was a visiting professor at the same time. We used to play bridge every Wednesday night—

Crawford: Playing bridge with John Cage!

01-00:10:57 Rosenberg: It was at that stage where he still drank quite a bit. I always had to be his partner, because he was always sort of—it was very surrealistic. [laughs] But at that time, you know, I absolutely was au courant with everything going on. It was just a mind-boggling scene in the States, at that point. But I had lost track, you know, obviously, of some of the composers here. I knew European composers more. So I met with Joel Sachs, for instance, in New York, who has a contemporary music group at Juilliard; who is also probably one of the most informed people about the new music scene in the whole world. He just keeps up with everything. He goes to Uzbekistan, to [hear] contemporary music, to concerts and festivals. And so I actually went to New York. This 5

was after John had accepted, but it’s that I wanted to be getting informed, because I was going to be doing mini-Faust commissions, half-hour mini- Faust works—five before this one came out, then, in 2005. And so I went to him. And I’m blanking out—There’s a fantastic guy at Columbia, who actually organizes at Lincoln Center—contemporary music festivals. And he’s at Columbia University. So I went for two days and just picked their brains. George Lewis. So that I wasn’t just being filled in on American composers. It was all the latest places that Joel had been, I was filling in on those, too. So I did do one mini-commission; that was Lewis Spratlan. And I did one before I came here, and that was called Earthrise. And that, indeed, was on cloning. And we workshopped that.

Crawford: But it wasn’t performed.

01-00:13:41 Rosenberg: It wasn’t performed. My idea initially was to do these half-hour mini- commissions—and for chamber music forces, not for big orchestras—and then to see, of the five that we did before we brought out Doctor Atomic, if there were the seeds in one of them to actually then commission a full-length work in-house. And if not, to just take them as chamber pieces, and put an evening of three together, and another evening of two together, in a chamber space. And so I was in discussion with Osvaldo Golijov after Spratlan. He would’ve done the second one. And then because of the economy tanking... [laughs]

Crawford: Yes. I remember that was one of your retrenchments.

01-00:14:30 Rosenberg: I just scuttled.

Crawford: Well, when John Adams said yes, in March of 2000, what transpired then? What were the early discussions?

01-00:14:44 Rosenberg: Oh, the early discussions were about book lists; it was also about having Peter come on board right way. John was very clear about the fact he always needs the director to be there from the beginning, during the creation of the work.

Crawford: And that is a longstanding collaboration.

Rosenberg: Yes, yes. And it’s a very unusual collaboration, because usually directors don’t get involved until the work’s been written; and then they start analyzing it and directing it. So Peter was, you know, part of the equation very early on. And we all tossed around reading lists. And then the next decision was the libretto. And John was very clear and adamant that he wanted Alice Goodman.

Crawford: How far did she get in the process? 6

01-00:15:45 Rosenberg: She got very far. And I thought it was a brilliant idea. It just made me nervous, because she had left them in the lurch for the two last things they’d done. El Niňo, she backed out in the middle of that.

Crawford: Right.

01-00:15:59 Rosenberg: And then I think it was The Sky is Falling, and she was supposed to be doing that one as well. And so I said, “I think she’s a brilliant librettist, but you know, she’s left you in the lurch twice.”

Crawford: What was it?

Rosenberg: So he said, “Oh, no, she was going through a lot of turmoil in her family life.” She had converted to becoming an Episcopal priest. And had moved from Boston— they wouldn’t ordain her in Massachusetts, so she moved to England, where she was ordained, and then was given a parish, and there were all kinds of things on with her, you know, with her husband and things. So he said, “It was just that she could not focus. There was just too much going on.” But he said, “That’s all fine now. She’s got her parish in the south of Birmingham. So that was fine. Alice was brought onboard, so it was Alice, Peter and John. And then there was this time where not much was done on it, because Peter was in Australia, and John was busy composing other things. But they then did have their first big, big powwow. Alice and Peter then came here, and there were several together with John, brainstorming. And they came into my office—I think it was June of ‘03—and sat here and went through the scenario with me, scene by scene by scene.

Crawford: Were there any stipulations about length or orchestra time?

01-00:17:53 Rosenberg: I said that the chorus could not be bigger than our regular chorus, which is forty-five. That was a stipulation. I didn’t put a cap on three hours, but I did say, “Anything over three hours is usually draining.” The shorter the better.

Crawford: Orchestra size?

01-00:18:23 Rosenberg: Orchestra size, I said a normal to large-ish would be ok, because I didn’t want to put constraints on John’s imagination, as far as the orchestra went. So I said, “[If] it goes beyond Wagner [laughs], that’s too big.” But otherwise, it was the chorus size that I was concerned about.

Crawford: So that was acceptable. 7

01-00:18:52 Rosenberg: Yes. So they went through the scenario, which was very exciting. I mean, at that point, the second act was to be 1954, the House Un-American Activities [Committee], and the Bikini Island tests. And so they started looking at films—I was looking at films, also—from 1954, and sort of the whole Technicolor kind of aesthetic of 1954, and Tupperware. So just all of the kind of gathering of images and sources for kind of accessing the period in your imagination. That was to be the second act.

01-00:19:44 Then they went away, and Alice went back to England. She was supposed to be then starting to write the actual libretto. I think— Kip will know exactly, but I think the first act was due February 1st, 2004, and the second act in March. Anyway, it was due in early spring. And John had set aside big chunks of time, starting in the summer, in August. He had set aside, you know, six weeks or something, and in his calendar, he had these big chunks that were going to be devoted to this. So the libretto really had to be finished by the summer. And all the revisions to it, so that we could then get going.

01-00:20:43 So I was in London some time in the fall. Late fall, I think. And John was starting to get a little bit nervous, because he was not getting much response from Alice when he would...obviously, he would be curious to see some of her first efforts.

Crawford: Where was she, physically?

01-00:21:09 Rosenberg: She was physically south of Birmingham , in a small town there, in England, where she had a parish. So he was getting nervous, because she wasn’t really responding to his emails or his phone calls. He only got her on the phone a couple of times. So I was in London, December or late November. I think December, probably. I asked her if she could come down and visit with me and go through what she’d been working on. And so she came down, and we spent an afternoon together. And she didn’t show me anything she’d written, because she hadn’t written anything yet, but did talk at length about individual scenes and more things that she’d read. I mean, I remember she was very excited because she had found a diary—I think it was a diary—[that said] the young scientists used to sometimes do evenings where they would put on skits, in Los Alamos, just kind of as their own entertainment. And the young scientists had done part of Faust, Goethe’s Faust.

And she just thought, that’s a sign of God or something. [laughs] She thought the opening chorus would be these young scientists doing their Faust play, you know? So we got into a lot of detail. And she kept coming back to the idea of redemption, and how she knows that John doesn’t want it to be Faustian. But the whole idea of redemption made sense to her. And some really detailed things. She was also quite worried, because Peter wanted to have a big portion of the opera really be about American Indians and how 8

their homeland was wrecked by this, and all that. I think that made John nervous when Peter had been talking about that. He wanted me to engage a whole troupe of American Indian dancers, for instance.

Crawford: Peter did.

01-00:23:36 Rosenberg: [laughs] Peter did. And I said, “It’s a slight money issue, to have them here for all the weeks of rehearsals, and then pay per diems in hotels. We have to use local dancers, and it’s then not only, for me, a financial issue, big-time, but it’s also for my co-producers, Chicago and the Netherlands Operas; they would have to import this whole troupe of Native American dancers, and pay their flights, and pay their hotels and per diems.” I said, “That’s just not in any of our budget calculations, and none of us can afford that.” But Peter, very often, has this urge to make it be about the oppressed peoples.

Crawford: He does. And ideas die hard with him.

01-00:24:30 Rosenberg: They do. They do. And so John was actually getting quite nervous about that, because he said he didn’t think that was supposed to be the thrust. So Alice and I talked about all that kind of thing. Anyway, she was so into what she was doing that I was not unnerved at all. But the parish was taken away from her, and she was made a deacon or something. She had been demoted somehow. So she was dealing, again, with some issues. And I didn’t understand exactly what they were. Also, her daughter, who’s a bright girl but has a syndrome where she doesn’t connect with people very well— she’s not autistic, and I can’t remember the name of the condition. But so she was having a lot of things to deal with right then, and her mind was so preoccupied with Doctor Atomic, in detail, I thought, Okay, just once she finally sits down—you know, this kind of thing, it’ll be there, and she will just write it. So I came back and I reassured John. By February, though, he was really, really anxious. I mean, he was really getting upset.

Crawford: He needed to have something in hand.

01-00:25:49 Rosenberg: He was getting really upset, because he said, “She’s gone underground. She hasn’t answered one email.” He said, “I can’t even reach her.” So again, I had to go to England, because we needed to negotiate a co-production that we were doing [with the] English National Opera. So I said, “I’ll talk to her again.” So I did. And again, I was reassured. Naively. And I came back—

Crawford: She had it in her mind. 9

01-00:26:15 Rosenberg: She had it in her mind. And I came back, and I said to John, you know, “She just has not been able to get to it.” I agreed with her, then, that we would change her deadline, so she had to get the whole thing in by the first of June. That would still give John enough time for them to really go over it and, you know, correct it or tweak it, or do whatever they wanted to do, before he then really sat down and started composing, at the end of July. And so I came back, and Kip— because Kip negotiates the contracts for the commission with publishers and things—and so he then officially changed the date that she had to submit. Because I was so reassured by her.

01-00:27:11 And then at some point—I can’t remember; I think it was March, or the beginning of April, I’d have to ask John—she sent John a very bizarre letter and said that she was withdrawing because it was an anti-Semitic project.

Crawford: That’s a huge setback. And anti-Semitic!

01-00:27:35 Rosenberg: Yes.

Crawford: I had no idea it was that far along.

01-00:27:38 Rosenberg: Yes, and it was just a completely bizarre statement to make, because at no point was there any [laughs] intimation, any Jewish theme at all. You know? Oppenheimer’s Jewish, Teller’s Jewish— a lot of the scientists are Jewish.

Crawford: True.

01-00:27:58 Rosenberg: But we weren’t debunking any of them, we weren’t going after anyone.

Crawford: Elevating, if anything, really.

01-00:28:05 Rosenberg: Yes. Psychologically, if you’re feeling guilty about something, you go on the defensive to get yourself out of it. So she was then accusing John of that.

Crawford: Did she see what eventually happened to Oppenheimer as anti-Semitic, perhaps?

01-00:28:29 Rosenberg: I don’t know.

Crawford: She never explained it.

Rosenberg: She never explained. It was just— it was completely off the wall. I then nearly had a nervous breakdown. [laughs] I got so nervous. And there was one poet 10

in Princeton that John was interested in, and he said, “Let me sort of read some of his stuff. I think he could be interesting.” And then he phoned me up a week or so later, and he said, “No, he wouldn’t be right for it.” So that would’ve been to have that poet write the libretto. So it was at that point that Peter and John decided that they would do what they had done with El Niňo.

Crawford: Peter writing the libretto.

Rosenberg: Which would be to gather material. Peter’s class— he taught at the School of Journalism at Berkeley. So he had had his class, anyway, looking into declassified material and gathering— his class had been gathering lots of material anyway. And so he and John met at their café at Berkeley and would just throw books on the table. Then Muriel Rukeyser, at that point, entered the picture and they really were very taken with how she really addressed the period, and her high level of poetry. So basically, they had a few days where they just heaped all the stuff, and would go through and then, you know, Xerox and Xerox and Xerox and Xerox. And then Peter went off to Glyndebourne, where he was directing something, and took all this material with him.

Crawford: Was he daunted in any way?

01-00:30:30 Rosenberg: Peter’s never daunted! Peter’s never daunted, he just never sleeps. Because there he was, going off to direct an opera, which is [laughs] pretty consuming, and had all this material, too. And I was just having conniptions. I was quietly having conniptions, I wasn’t telling them how nervous I was, but I was.

Crawford: You’re the point person.

01-00:30:57 Rosenberg: Yes, and it did unnerve me, because I didn’t want it to be an El Niňo, which is more of an oratorio. The scenario that they had worked up, the three of them, was a very dynamic thing. There were lots of dialogues between people. It wasn’t sort of the distanced kind of oratorio telling of something. And so I was afraid that it was going to lose the kind of theatrical lamenting that it needed, to have people talking to each other. While that whole exercise was going on, I was actually quite depressed, underneath. I was really depressed.

Crawford: I imagine.

01-00:31:42

Rosenberg: I was really depressed. That was that whole summer. I did see it becoming too oratorio-like, and that’s not what I wanted it to be. But at some point—I can’t now recall; maybe that was September— Kip might know. Peter came into my office, and I asked Kip to come in, so the two of us could hear the libretto. The first act. And I was in a state of suspense. They had already told us that 11

the second act was not going to be 1954; that they had so much material that they actually then realized that the whole opera would be the two weeks leading up to the test. So of course, I was in a state of suspense. And Peter’s very emotional and dramatic and sincere and real when he does anything. But the way he read that libretto to us— I, at the end of it, was in tears. And not because I was freaked out and thought, Oh, my God, it’s going to be a disaster.” [I now knew] this was going to be an evening with the kind of intensity and ambiguity— everything that it needs to be. And so at that point, then, I just calmed down. [laughter]

Crawford: Rough going for a few months.

01-00:34:19 Rosenberg: Yes. Then we had to wait for the second act, and assume it would be as good, too. But I sprouted a couple of gray hairs while I was waiting for that first reading.

Crawford: Was the Donne sonnet part of that first reading?

01-00:22:29 Rosenberg: Yes. I mean, what you now have heard in Doctor Atomic has been reduced. There was actually too much material, in a way. So both acts John then pared down. He was writing, and he made some choices, left some things out and kept other things in, just because it was too much. The General [Leslie] Groves scene. The one we saw about the chocolate candy bars now is very short, compared to what originally had been in there. So there were things like that that John then shaped more. That was daunting, absolutely daunting. I have to say that John...because Kip was the point person for that. And it was a major, major thing. John... Are you talking to John?

Crawford: Yes.

01-00:35:50 Rosenberg: I can’t remember whether it was John or Peter who connected with Muriel Rukeyser’s son, I think it was, and started the dialogues with him, and then Kip joined in. But Teller’s daughter, John had a whole series of [meetings] because she was worried that her father would be made out to be this boogie man, kind of. It would just be Edward-Teller bashing.

Crawford: With some reason.

01-00:36:34 Rosenberg: Yes. We would make him into a Dr. Strangelove in this opera. So in the beginning, she had said to me she’s not giving any permission for any of his quotes to be used. And then John, in all of his dialogues with her, was able to show her, convince her. So it was a big collective effort, in a way, getting the rights. It was a huge [thing] and there was classified stuff we had to get rights to. 12

That’s one of the reasons we couldn’t— you know, we had this website, which we started eighteen months before Doctor Atomic—almost eighteen months before—where we wanted, just gradually, to always add more on to the website, the more things developed. And so of course, it was my intention, as the libretto came along, to be putting parts up, but we couldn’t. We’ve never been able to put it on the website, because of the whole rights issue.

Crawford: Still can’t?

01-00:37:41 Rosenberg: The publishers still did not [agree]. But no, I couldn’t.

Crawford: Interesting. You observed the Sellars/Adams chemistry. How would you describe that? They’re such different personalities.

01-00:38:07 Rosenberg: Well, what was interesting for me was that if John objected to something— at one point, he said, “I don’t want any dancers in this,” you know. This was the first time I’d worked with the two of them. I just thought, Well, talk to Peter about that. But he has this kind of diffidence about Peter. So he wanted me to talk to Peter about it.

He didn’t want the going off onto this big tangent of the whole Native American thing. And then we were going to have a King Judah in the second act, when we were going to be showing the test on the Bikini Isle, there was a King Judah and his daughter. John was very worried— but by that time, they decided, okay, the second act would also become kind of a political-folklore kind of thing for Peter. And he said he just didn’t want any of that. But I would talk to Peter about not having the troupe of Native American dancers.

Crawford: And was that easy to do?

01-00:39:39 Rosenberg: I didn’t do it on an artistic level. Although I did share some of John’s concerns. Also, Alice had had those concerns. She would talk to Peter about it. Because when you say she’s the librettist, it’s still that Peter is giving great input into what the shape of the piece is going to be.

Crawford: Peter and the American story. At least, a part of it.

01-00:40:06 Rosenberg: A big part of it. And so she would talk to Peter about that. But John would leave it up to me. So it was very interesting for me, to see that kind of diffidence that he had with Peter. Or I don’t know, maybe it just wasn’t guts or the courage to confront him.

Crawford: He is quiet. 13

01-00:40:33 Rosenberg: [laughs] I don’t know. But they have such an intimate relationship. I mean, they know how each other’s minds work, and both of them deify each other, in a way. They both are just completely humble in the presence of the other, in a way.

Crawford: That has to be an unusually egoless situation.

01-00:40:57 Rosenberg: It is. It is.

Crawford: Is it really?

01-00:40:58 Rosenberg: Absolutely is. And Peter’s very— very protective of John. It’s really interesting.

Crawford: What was the company’s involvement as all of this was going on? Was there any early involvement in terms of artistic discussion? You weren’t hearing music, at this point.

01-00:41:20 Rosenberg: No. No, we weren’t hearing music.

Crawford: When did you first hear the music?

01-00:41:25 Rosenberg: Well, John did “Easter Eve” with the New York Philharmonic in May, 2004. And he had played the synthesizer version of that for me before. So he had played that. But he hadn’t actually started composing until that summer.

Crawford: Did he take that episode out of context to test it?

Rosenberg: I don’t know.

Crawford: Did you gather any ideas about the architecture, as he worked?

01-00:42:09 Rosenberg: He would inform me once in a while. When he did the opening chorus I went over, and he did that on the synthesizer for me. But I certainly wasn’t part of his creative process with how he was structuring it at all. I would just listen to the results of what he was doing. I’d have discussions with Peter often about, “Okay, what’s what— how’s that scene shaping up?” Not too often, but then, you know, we’d get into it. And then we also had production meetings here, because the design phase takes place way before we go into production. And so at various junctures, Peter would be here. John wouldn’t participate in those, but it would be Patrick Markle, our director of production, and various heads of production departments—costumes and different technical people. 14

And so at those production meetings, then, we’d also then talk about, Well, okay, how many supers does he think he’s going to need, how many dancers? It goes through what we call the critical factors of all the various components. But then Adrianne Lobel was involved, and I can’t remember when we asked her to do the set, but it was early days. And so before the design was started, we had discussions about what Peter was hoping for this. And once she started designing, then she would come, and we would have meetings. There was this one issue we had, where she wanted a rake that was one-and-a-half inches to the foot, which, according to our rules, our union rules, would be too much for the chorus to stand on. And so I had knock-down-drag-outs with Peter about that. I’d phone him wherever he was, and he said, “But we need to have that so that, you know, we really have this expanse going up to the mountains and stuff.” I said, “I understand it artistically but I have a chorus that’s not going to stand on it, or the dancers who won’t dance on it, because it’s forbidden by the rules.”

Crawford: Peter must know about that.

01-00:44:55 Rosenberg: But he just thinks, you know, these people should get over it, because this is about art. I said, “I agree, but [laughs] that’s not the way of the world, Peter.”

Crawford: That is a local union rule?

01-00:45:12 Rosenberg: That’s local union, yes. I think so.

Crawford: AGMA [American Guild of Musical Artists], I suppose.

01-00:45:16 Rosenberg: Yes. Or maybe it was even more extreme than that, one-and-a-half, to one- and-a-quarter. So you know, I would get into the nitty-gritty of all of that with him.

Crawford: Was that uncomfortable? No hard feelings?

01-00:45:34 Rosenberg: No. No. I don’t know that he’s used to having a lot of push back. [laughs]

Crawford: I doubt it.

01-00:45:39 Rosenberg: But I’m used to doing push back where I need to do push back, and I think that maybe that’s why John had me go and talk to Peter about certain things that he didn’t want to talk to him about.

Crawford: As you listened to the music, did you have the feeling that it was working out as hoped for? 15

Rosenberg: Well, it’s difficult to do that with the synthesizer. I mean, the opening energetic chorus of the scientists— John described it to me, he said, “Just think of newsreels from the forties and fifties, where they would show all this activity and people were really finishing up a scientific project.” And so I found that very evocative. But it’s easier to listen to the synthesizer music for the energetic parts. It’s very hard to get the poetry of his music from the synthesizer. You get a sense of it, but it wasn’t until I was in the orchestra rehearsals and was just completely blown out of my chair.

Crawford: I’d like to know in some detail about orchestra rehearsals and time, because that’s always such a crunch with a new work. But let’s go on to casting. Talk about the approach to casting.

01-00:47:18 Rosenberg: Let me just talk about Lucinda Childs first, before we do that, because originally, when we’d originally talked about the project, there was no dancing at all, and that sort of gradually crept in. The first time I knew about it was when I heard that Peter wanted the Native American dancing troupe. And John said he didn’t want any dancers. And I said, “Well, I certainly haven’t budgeted for any dancers.” And then it became very clear that Peter did [want dancers], and he wanted Lucinda Childs. And so I said, “Well, I not only have not budgeted for dancers, but I haven’t budgeted for one of the most prominent [laughs] choreographers.” But I went out and found somebody then who took over the financing of that for me.

Crawford: An angel.

01-00:48:13 Rosenberg: It’s not that she gets a humongous fee at all, but I mean, she gets a good choreographer’s fee, and I didn’t have any of that in the budget, and I was, anyway, in the midst of all my fundraising for the season. He said, “It just has to be Lucinda.” And so I said, “Well, she’s an icon and brilliant,” and it was clear that he was not going to do without dancers. And he said, “They’re the ones that are going to give the show the energy, because a lot of the singing for the chorus will be very difficult, so you don’t want them all running around.” And so I became convinced that he was right about that.

Crawford: You went out and got this special funding. What other funding were you doing?

01-00:48:08 Rosenberg: Oh, I did all the fundraising.

Crawford: Oh. So you told the board, “This is my thing, and I’ll do this.”

01-00:49:14 Rosenberg: I’m the one that, if we’re doing new productions or special projects that aren’t really foreseen in the normal budget, then I go out and do special fundraising. 16

So it’s obviously me who knows the topic really, really well, and I have the passion about it, and I’m the obvious person to go to a prominent sponsor and try to get them excited by the project, because that’s how you get them to commit, if they really think it’s relevant or meaningful or exciting.

So it was me going and talking to various people. We did fundraising with several potential sponsors who I thought would be interested. We invited them one evening, just kind of with John and Peter, very early on, to talk about the project with them, and obviously, my development partner. I do a lot of this, but I went down to the Thornton Foundation in Los Angeles and did a presentation. I went to Richard Goldman. Their board member went with me, and I know Dick Goldman really well, and Bertie Bialek, who, if there was a major sponsor, she was it, because she came in with an enormous amount [of funding]. So it was my personal dealings with all these people.

Crawford: Was that difficult, to create the aura of excitement well before there was really much to show?

[Audio file 2]

02-00:00:06 Rosenberg: Yes. But as to the cast— we had a fundamental discussion, which was about not trying to go out and find the physical copies. It wasn’t about going out and looking for somebody who looked like Oppenheimer, somebody who looked like Teller. And so we were quickly in agreement about the fact we wanted somebody who has the aura and the charisma. I mean, for me, Oppenheimer was the main deal— finding somebody who had the kind of charisma that the man had.

But again, it was a no-brainer, in a way. I remember suggesting Gerry [Gerald Finley]. Peter had been working with him, and Peter, in the beginning, thought Gerry, although he’s Canadian, was a little bit too all-American for it. And John didn’t really know— he hadn’t really worked with him. But he knew that he was a wonderful artist. And then there were other ideas that we tossed around, but I just really thought it was Gerry. And Peter then, at some point— I don’t know, a couple months later—he said, “Oh, that’s ridiculous”— [about] whatever he originally had thought, that Gerry maybe didn’t have the kind of aura. And I said, “No, no. It’s definitely Gerry.

Crawford: How did you know him?

02-00:01:46 Rosenberg: I’ve seen him do many, many different performances all over the world. He’s a singer who I’d wanted to get here anyway. I approached him about Giovanni, and he didn’t have the time, but he’s somebody who I’ve always admired. Lorraine Hunt was, from the very beginning, no question, that’s who was [Kitty]. They at some point had said they thought Teller should be a foreigner, so that there would be kind of an accent. 17

Crawford: He was Hungarian.

02-00:02:50 Rosenberg: Yes, he was Hungarian and he spoke with quite a thick accent. And so that’s the only way in which we attempted to be naturalistic. Friedemann Roehlig, who’s a wonderful artist, had done Osmin here, and he was in the Busoni Faust here and he was in the Bohème, and so he was engaged for Teller. But by the time he got here, it had morphed into this high bass-baritone. And originally, John had said it’s going to be for a deep bass. So he could handle it, but it wasn’t where his voice is really comfortable. And so that’s why, right at the beginning of rehearsals, after the first two days of musicals, Richard Paul Fink was approached, who, just by fluke, was finished in a Seattle Ring and just by fluke, had this period free. The day after our last Doctor Atomic, he had to go down to Orange County and do Scarpia, so it just worked out. It just slotted in, luckily, my God!

Eric Owens is an African American bass, who all of us have had experience with, and just think is the cat’s meow. I’ve worked with him before. I had nominated him to get the Marian Anderson Award, which is this really prestigious award, about three years ago. And he’s done roles for me before. And I love him and John loves him. John thinks he suggested him, and I think I suggested him.

Crawford: Well, you get the last word here.

02-00:04:42 Rosenberg: But there was no issue about his being African American for us, because we aren’t doing a documentary, and General [Leslie] Groves was definitely not African American. It just wasn’t an issue for us. And then Tom Randle was a tenor that both John and Peter had worked with extensively. He is American, but he lives in England. He’s never actually sung in San Francisco, and the young scientist that he’s supposed to playing was written for him. For Tom Randle. It ended up being sung by Thomas Glenn, who was an Adler Fellow here, because Tom Randle— the kind of youthfulness for it, actually, he didn’t have. He’s a fantastic artist. I mean, just fantastic, and you know, Peter and John will work with him again many times. But in the course of the rehearsals, it just became evident that this young, idealistic kid— that Tom had a kind of gravitas, even when he wasn’t being intense. He’s in his forties, and it was very sad, for him and for us, that during rehearsals Peter decided it wasn’t workable.

Crawford: He was an important counterpoint to Oppenheimer, of course.

02-00:06:10 Rosenberg: Yes. So then Lorraine Hunt, unfortunately, cancelled in mid-July. We were starting rehearsals in mid-August. It was something medical, and so just by fluke, Kris [Kristine Jepson] was supposed to be here doing a role in Rodelinda by Handel at the same time we were doing Doctor Atomic. And she 18

had been engaged by the Netherlands Opera to do Kitty there in 2007, because Lorraine, from the very beginning, had said she wasn’t free for that slot at the Netherlands Opera, so I thought, obviously, she hasn’t learned it yet for them, but if she’s going to be doing it anyway in Holland, then I’m going to see whether she agrees to switch from Rodelinda into Doctor Atomic.

Crawford: Perfect timing.

02-00:0714 Rosenberg: Yes, I mean, she had to stay two weeks longer, because the Doctor Atomic run went longer than the Rodelinda. So I phoned her just before she left to go onstage at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Maybe she’ll do it!

Crawford: I don’t know why you’re not totally gray.

02-00:07:31 Rosenberg: [laughs] And so we then did fancy footwork, and she thought about it for a little bit and she said, “Okay, I can do it.” And she was brilliant. She got here, she had learned it cold, in that amount of time.

Crawford: Do you wonder how Lorraine Hunt would have done it?

Rosenberg: Yes. Yes.

Crawford: I heard the Adler fellow sing Kitty’s aria, “Am I in Your Light?” at the Exploratorium. It was totally different than in the performances.

02-00:07:58 Rosenberg: Totally different, yes. So we needed then to get a new Edwige for Rodelinda. So, again, just serendipity— Phyllis Pancella, who is a wonderful singer, happened to have a vacation slotted into her calendar. She agreed to give up vacation with family and come do Edwige in the Rodelinda, and then to cover Kitty, if we needed. For a world premiere, you need a cover for everything, just about. You know? If one of them gets sick— So we did all of this kind of shuffling around the last few weeks before we got going here.

Crawford: Is this largely your department? “This’ll be taken care of, don’t worry about it.”

02-00:08:46 Rosenberg: Well, no, of course, I involved John and Peter in this—phoned them up, and I said, “Look, first of all, at that point, it will be a fluke if you find somebody who’s really good for a role, who just happens to be free for exactly the period you need.” Especially four weeks away. And the reason Kris Jepson was free—again, all these poor people give up their [vacations]. The Rodelinda run would be finished two weeks before the Doctor Atomic run. Those two weeks of the Doctor Atomic run were the only vacation she had slotted into her calendar for three years. So that’s why she wanted to think about it for a 19

little bit, because it was a family vacation. When I phoned John, I said I wanted to phone Kris and see if she would do it. And he said, “Well, if she can, great.” And so it was a lot of fancy footwork. [laughter]

Crawford: You must be good at it. Well, let’s talk about the rehearsal cycle, when the techs began, and how that all melded.

02-00:09:55 Rosenberg: Here at the San Francisco Opera, we, in the month of August, do the technical rehearsals for all six productions that we’re showing in the fall season. So that means that we bring the set into the house for the first time, get it set up, and leave it set up, depending on how long the opera is, how much work needs to get done, if it’s just a revival, or if it’s really the creation of a new production. We leave it set up for four to six days, depending. And that’s when a lot of the lighting happens. We try to get as much of the show lit as we can. Of course, if you’re doing a new production, not everything will have jelled in the production, because you still have yet to do the acting and scenic work with the singers. So you get most of the basic lighting set up, and then you tweak it later on in rehearsals, later, down the road.

Crawford: James Ingalls was brought in from outside, wasn’t he?

02-00:11:07 Rosenberg: He did the lighting, and he was, of course, supported by our house lighting team. And then in the evenings, since you have the original stage set up, that’s when you do chorus rehearsals. Now for some production sets, it’s a little disconcerting, because you do your chorus rehearsals two months before you’re going to be rehearsing anybody else in the cast. Well, it’s an idea it took me a while to get used to before I came to San Francisco, because it’s not organic and it’s not the way it’s usually done. But in the case of Doctor Atomic, we had placed the techs in the schedule so that they took place about a week— more or less a week after, six days after we had started the scenic rehearsals. So that the soloists also had already started having some rehearsals. We not only did chorus work on the main set, but we also then had rehearsals with the principals, as well.

Crawford: That’s a luxury, isn’t it?

02-00:12:28 Rosenberg: That was a luxury, but we also had the original floor built up over in our rehearsal stage. It’s a big rehearsal stage. So the floor that you actually saw, the raked stage that you saw in Doctor Atomic, was actually what we also rehearsed with. So they were rehearsing on the original rake, the original size. So the rehearsals, the scenic rehearsals, we start off the first two or three days just doing musicals with the singers. Which is especially needed, of course, in a world premiere, so that everyone can actually hear what it sounds like. The director can hear what it sounds like. And so in those rehearsals, both John and Peter were giving corrections. And John actually changed some of the 20

writing. A lot of tweaking goes on in those. And then Peter was there giving some subtext to the singers. He said, “You know, what you’re feeling right now when you sing this is this. And this is what the situation is.” And so that already helps them with coloring and things. So the musical rehearsals are especially important to establish the characters, in a way, too.

Crawford: And were there far more of those than in a routine production?

02-00:13:54 Rosenberg: One day more.

Crawford: That make you nervous?

02-00:13:59 Rosenberg: No, because we would be having time to work with the music, coaching and so on. It was a long rehearsal period. We started August 18th, and the premiere was October 1st. That’s an unusually long rehearsal period for us, here in San Francisco. I was determined to make that possible, and to finance it. [laughs] To try to rush them and throw this thing on, it’s— you have to give them time for the process, and to really develop it during rehearsals. And so every day, there would be staging rehearsals with Peter. And then at some point, Donald [Runnicles] started the orchestra reading rehearsals, and taking the orchestra through the score. John was at all of those, and he would make corrections. He’d listen to something, and he’d say to the violin section, “You know, I was wrong there. I wrote you the wrong kind of noise; it should be this kind of noise.” So that was fascinating, just seeing John [at work]. He’d listen to something and say, “Oh, my God, I can’t imagine why I wrote it like that. [laughs] I don’t know what I was thinking.” Obviously, you have to do it this way, not that way.” It’s very difficult writing. This is probably the most difficult score for an orchestra that he’s ever written.

Crawford: John and Peter talked to the orchestra. That’s unusual.

02-00:15:52 Rosenberg: Yes. Peter, the very first day, talked to them. Donald had him address the orchestra, and John also talked to them. And then Peter came to as many orchestra rehearsals as he could. Sometimes they overlapped with his scenic rehearsals, but otherwise, he was there. We were all just so in love with the score that if I had some absolutely important meeting that I couldn’t change, I just felt horrible, because I was missing out on an hour of that music. [laughs] So really, it was great.

Crawford: It doesn’t sound as if there was any nervousness about this process.

02-00:16:38 Rosenberg: No, it was very, very difficult, but the concentration and ability of this orchestra was amazing, and Donald was incredibly well prepared. But it was hard work. It was really, really hard work. And then Sitzproben are the next 21

thing. Sitzprobe is a German word that’s used universally throughout the opera world. It’s a rehearsal where you’re sitting down, the singers are just sitting there, and that’s where the orchestra and the singers [are together] for the first time. It’s a purely musical rehearsal; it doesn’t have any stage action in it. I think we did four of those. We usually do two for a normal opera. But I think this one, we did four.

02-00:17:41 Then you bring it into the house, and we had a couple of working rehearsals on the stage again, and we had a piano dress, which is when all the lighting and the costumes, makeup—everything except the orchestra—come together for the first time. And so you can figure out what the glitches are and after that, you have your stage orchestras, of which in this case, we scheduled four or five. Usually, we have one or two stage orchestras. And that’s where the conductor tries to get the balance right, with the singers doing all of their action on the stage, and the orchestra. In this case, since there was sound design as an integral part of the score and of John’s writing, we had Mark Grey, the sound designer, at these rehearsals, with this huge console in the back of the hall, because the singers were augmented.

Crawford: Right. I wanted to ask you about the amplification issue.

02-00:18:43 Rosenberg: We’ve never done that before, and it’s a real issue. And you know, in the beginning, I was dead set against it because we have a wonderful acoustic here in the house. There are certain places— the New York City Opera does it now on a regular basis— because they have the worst acoustic you can imagine. So in their case, I do feel it’s justified. Otherwise, I don’t feel it’s justified. This is a live medium, and a natural medium. But John feels very, very strongly about it; that for his music, he wants the voices augmented, so the ideal that you’re trying to achieve is that the audience doesn’t hear that they’re augmented.

Crawford: How did the singers feel about it?

02-00:19:35 Rosenberg: Once they got used to it, then they were okay. Donald was quite upset by the idea, and we did have a meeting, because all of a sudden he saw thirty mikes going into the orchestra pit. I was shocked by that, and Donald was shocked by that, and I phoned John and I said, “We have to have a meeting.” Donald said, “Well, what do I do as a conductor? I’ve been working all these balances, you know, in all my rehearsals with the singers and the orchestra, and now I just beat time, because somebody else is going to be doing the levels. The conductor is just a marionette.” And so I phoned John and I said, “We have to have a meeting about this.” So we had a meeting with Mark Grey and John and Donald and me, and Donald’s musical assistants, and John explained to us the mikes in the orchestra are just for the singers onstage; we 22

will not hear the mikes— it’s not to augment the orchestra, and he wouldn’t be fiddling with the levels.

Crawford: So the orchestra was not amplified.

02-00:20:47 Rosenberg: Not to the audience. It’s amplified back on the stage, to the singers. And they felt that they needed that many for these various instruments and colors. We always have a couple of mikes taking the orchestra sound backstage to the singers, so they can hear the pitches. So once we understood that, we calmed down, and we thought he should’ve just sat us down at the very beginning of this whole process and explained that to us. We always knew that the singers would be augmented, and it took us a while to get used to that idea, but we accepted it eventually. That’s all we thought, until we saw these thirty mikes going into the orchestra: “What’s this!” But it still was quite a thought process in the rehearsals, because where this huge console is, is at the back of the auditorium. It’s under this overhang, and when Marks’s there trying to gauge the level of the singers, he’s not actually out in the auditorium hearing the acoustic that everybody else is hearing; he’s got this kind of strange acoustic, because he’s under the overhang. So I would have to say that that was probably the most tense part of the whole production process, was trying to get the sound design right. It was the thing that various people felt the most upset about. We were panicked that, [although]we had quite a lot of rehearsals, it was going to take us longer to get it really right. We had an audience in the dress rehearsal— in the other rehearsals, there’d just been a few staff members and people who needed to be there in the auditorium, but otherwise—

Crawford: That makes a difference.

02-00:22:33 Rosenberg: It makes a difference. So Mark Grey then upped the levels in the dress rehearsal. And so it was horrible, because you could hear all the voices booming. You could hear that they were all amplified. And so John got upset, Donald got upset. Then for the second half, he took them way down again. Going into the premiere, Donald was still very nervous. He said, “It’s like a crap shoot, in a way.” But most of the performances, I thought, went very, very well. And in most of the performances, you weren’t aware that the singers were being amplified, except that it does get a little bit weird if somebody’s way upstage and you hear them as if they were downstage. That bothers me. Yes.

Crawford: Well, let’s talk about the first performance, and what the notes and changes were, the tweaking and so on. What was that process?

02-00:23:27 Rosenberg: You’ll have to ask Donald about the musical notes he gave— I’m trying to remember the notes that he gave the singers. Peter, after every performance, 23

gives notes to singers to change things. But not a lot, just certain things. It would’ve been interesting to see him be here for all ten performances, to see what would have changed. He stayed for four, and then he had to go to Paris to do Tristan. John, after I think it was the third or the fourth performance, decided that the levels for the musique concrète at the beginning of the two minutes of electronic sounds— airplanes and vocals and things that were not produced live, that start off both the first and second act before the orchestra joins in— he decided those needed to be brought way up, that it had been too soft. And so then the first performance where Mark brought those up, they were brought up to such a level that when Donald started the orchestra, it was like an anticlimax, instead of leading into this crashing orchestral sound.

So there was that one performance where that wasn’t quite right, but in the next performances, Mark, before the orchestra was going to come in, would sort of crash and take down the level of the electronic sounds.

Crawford: So that was kind of in process during performances.

02-00:25:21 Rosenberg: So that was in process.

Crawford: Let me ask you about the reception of the work, and how you read the audience, how you credit the audience in general.

02-00:25:43 Rosenberg: I am very gratified, because most people, I think, have come out of this just the way I wanted them to come out. Somebody said to me, “What’s your message with this piece?” I said, “I never had a message.” That’s not what art is supposed to be, for me. Art is supposed to stimulate you to ponder things. It’s to open up emotional spaces. And I said, “The whole subject matter in Doctor Atomic is so ambivalent. There’s no black and white about it. These people were very conflicted. They were very proud of what they were achieving. They first went into it to defeat Hitler, and they were proud of their scientific accomplishment, but were completely conflicted about it at the same time. It’s too complex and too ambivalent for me to have a message that I want the audience to come out [with]. If they’re coming out sort of thinking about this world that we live in, and the consequences of what happened in 1945, and have things resonating within them that they can’t put their fingers on— if it stays with them, and preoccupies them, that’s fine.” I’ve had so many people say that’s exactly it, you know?

02-00:27:15 Crawford: That’s what they took away. Let’s talk in general about the audience here. There are clearly various audiences, but is it a good audience? Is it an audience that you could define differently from a German audience? 24

02-00:27:33 Rosenberg: You know, I have been very pleasantly surprised, for everybody was telling me that they only want to see opera done a certain way [here]. I think it’s a sophisticated audience, and I think that the majority of them are very open. It’s been my sincere impression that most of them are open and curious, and wanting to experience something they maybe haven’t experienced, experience repertoire that they haven’t experienced, or maybe see something presented differently. Of course, there’s always a handful of people who have a very rigid view of what opera is, or is supposed to be. But that is true everywhere in the world; you can never talk about one audience. In Germany, you can’t talk about one audience, either; it’s made up of so many different— I mean, you have ten people come out of something, and each one has a slightly different take on it. So I think the audience here is wonderful.

Crawford: The singers you brought here were handsomely accepted. There were some people who had problems with staging— I’m sure you know that Mr. Adler was fairly conservative. There was no radical staging. So how do you feel about that? Were you being a maverick? Alcina seems to be the poster child for what they considered over-the-top staging.

02-00:29:04 Rosenberg: You know, when they first approached me, I said, “I’m not interested in coming to San Francisco, because it’s much more conservative than— do you know what I do? [laughs] What productions I’ve been involved in for twenty years?” And they said, “Yes, we want gradually to be opening up. We want to be showing what’s going on in the rest of the opera world.” So I was brought here to gradually change things. I wasn’t anticipating the majority of the audience taking to it immediately, and that’s why I’ve been surprised that so many more people have taken to it than I would have anticipated

I didn’t anticipate Alcina being anywhere near as controversial as it was, because in Stuttgart it was a cult piece. You couldn’t put it on often enough. It was just sold out, always. The Edinburgh Festival invited us to Edinburgh as the production of the year, and there were three performances. And Brian McMaster told me they were just stomping in the aisles, positively, at the end of the three performances. And he said they’d rarely had such an enormous response to an opera production there, you know? And it was shown on TV all over Europe. I always thought it was such a convincing work in itself that I thought it would be slightly controversial because all of the Baroque opera here—for the last twenty years—was done by one director, and he was very conservative, and kind of cute. He had kind of this cute take on Handel. That was John Copley. You know, for twenty years, he had exclusively done Handel, and so it was always slightly coy, and always in Baroque costumes. So I thought, Well, since we’re doing it modern day, that there may be a few people— The fact that it just split people down the middle stunned me. Because everywhere it’s been shown, people just loved it. But on the other hand, I thought the reaction was fantastic, because I want to stimulate 25

discussion. I had one email from a man whom I didn’t know, and he said he’d been to a dinner party with eight people, and four of them hated it with a purple passion, and four thought it was the best thing they have ever, ever seen on an opera stage. He said, “We discussed it for three hours at that dinner party, and at the end of the dinner party, I turned to everybody and said, ‘When was the last time you even discussed an opera production at a dinner party, let alone for three hours!’”

Crawford: People are still talking about it.

02-00:31:57 Rosenberg: You see? So for me, I found it gratifying. What I hate most is when people sort of leave the theater in a lackadaisical mood— “Oh, that was nice”— and then go out and just eat their dinner. This means that the art hasn’t gotten to them in any way.

Crawford: What about the critical reaction to Doctor Atomic? There was a huge amount of press.

02-00:32:28 Rosenberg: It’s a huge amount of press, and it was exactly what I anticipated, that there were some people very convinced by it, and some people who found that parts of it were weaker and needed tweaking. On the whole, it’s been very positive, except for some critics have objected to the density of the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, for instance— they’ve objected to that. But there’s been the whole spectrum of reactions to it, which I would anticipate.

Crawford: I didn’t read anything that was very strongly against the music at all— more about the libretto.

02-00:33:13 Rosenberg: It’s more about the libretto, you’re right.

Crawford: The New York Times has you already planning a sequel.

02-00:33:24 Rosenberg: Well, that’s why I did the press conference in New York. In August, I said, “Somewhere, some time, I’ve got to commission the 1954 sequel to it.”[laughs]

Crawford: The Wall Street Journal wrote that Sellars and Adams should divorce each other, that that relationship was completely worn out. I feel that the press is often so negative— here, the local press— that people wouldn’t want to sing here. I don’t know how you can turn that around.

Rosenberg: I don’t know. I was very distraught by some of the reviews of some things here, where I thought they had so not gotten the level of singers. The Chronicle review of Rodelinda, for instance. 26

Crawford: I don’t think that they know what goes into performance because they’re not musicians. I think all press should be musicians.

Rosenberg: Yes. Yes, I agree.

Crawford: Well, let’s talk about co-production and the future of Dr. Atomic. How did you work out the co-productions?

02-00:34:20 Rosenberg: I started calling different colleagues very early on. This was part of the whole five-year run-up, looking for co-producers. And I had approached Chicago very early on, and they very early on said yes— the only thing that Bill Mason said, he said he would only do it if Peter Sellars was also willing to go there and direct it there. Apparently, he did something in the past, and he wasn’t going to be able to come, he was going to send an assistant to do the revival of something, so he said, “I’ll only commit to it if Peter [comes].” So I phoned up Peter and said, “Commit.” And he said, “Okay, I commit,” So Chicago. And then I had long discussions at the English National Opera, because Nicholas Payne was there; and we had a very good co-producing relationship. We took their Trojans, and the Parsifal that started there and came here— was a co-production, for instance— and we were talking about lots of projects together. And so Nick, who was putting on Nixon in China again, is a big Adams and Sellars person. So that was a no-brainer, to be talking to Nick Payne at the English National Opera. And then he left the English National Opera, and so there was this interim period when they didn’t have a successor to him, so I was dangling in the air.

02-00:35:43 When his successor came, he said, “It’s going to take me a while to figure out what plans I want— ” He just wanted to be left alone for a year to figure out what his ideas for the English National Opera were going to be. So I basically said, “I can’t wait.” And so then I approached Pierre Audi at the Netherlands Opera. And he immediately committed to it. But he said that he would insist on having the first European performance. So I said, fine.

02-00:36:13 Then I went to Torino, to try to get them. So I went around doing acquisition work, so-called acquisition work. And so Torino’s maybe coming in on it. And English National Opera later got really upset that I had said the Netherlands gets it first, because then the new guy said, “Oh, I want it after all.” I said, “Well, sorry, they actually [laughs] committed and signed on the line, so it is happening there. It can only go to the English National Opera afterwards.”

Crawford: This is a financial partnership, as well.

02-00:36:51 Rosenberg: Yes. We’re the sole commissioners of it. But they are co-producers of the production. So we paid the larger portion of the production, Chicago paid the next larger, and [the Netherlands] paid the least. So when we rent it out to 27

other companies, then we divvy up, according to a certain formula, the rental income from it.

Crawford: And they accept your artistic sway? There is no artistic input with these agreements.

02-00:37:19 Rosenberg: No. Of course, when they presented the scenario to me in June of ’03 or whatever it was, then I wrote it all up and emailed it to Bill, and I kept him abreast of what was going on. Anyway, Kent Nagano then wanted it for Munich, because he’s taking over the Munich Opera, and he wanted to do it in the spring of ’07. I said no, because Netherlands is opening the Holland Festival with it June 1st, 2007 and he wanted to do it in spring of ’07, and so he tried to get the publishers to come in with clout and say that he could still do it. And the publishers said no, because of Amsterdam. So then he said he would do it at his festival in July of ’07. And we said the production wouldn’t be able to get there because there are ten performances of it in Holland going right to the end of June. So there’s no way that three days later you can do your techs and get your chorus rehearsed down there. So then he would do another production of it, which I thought was great for John, to have two different productions out in the world. But then, unfortunately, he decided that he was going to do another world premiere that summer, in the festival, so he wouldn’t have room for both— he could only do a concert performance. And I think John was discouraged, and doesn’t want it presented the first time as a concert. But the Frankfurt Opera is very interested, and it is going to the English National Opera; [and] the Met has taken it. Peter Gelb phoned up four weeks before the opening.

Crawford: I’ve never heard of that before, that kind of a commitment before a premiere.

02-00:39:17 Rosenberg: I think the present administrators of the Met are always kind of jealous about co-productions. They want to sort of be the ones doing it. [laughs] And he’s coming in, and I don’t think that bothers him. He just thought it would be a really important project for the Met to show. So four weeks before the opening, he committed to it. And then Seattle Opera, Speight Jenkins was here at the opening, a little bit skeptical, because he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to think. And he loved it so much that he is taking it to Seattle, too.

So from the Netherlands, it goes back to Chicago. They’ll show it, I can’t remember, it’s January or February, ’08. Then it goes to the Met in October of ’08. And then it goes back to the ENO. And Speight’s going to do it in 2010 or 2011.

Crawford: Has Paris spoken for it? No. Surprising. 28

02-00:40:19 Rosenberg: No, Mortier is somebody who is quite vain about wanting to be the one who originates.

Crawford: What’s does the future look like? It has been suggested that Doctor Atomic will be the Manhattan Project’s historical memory. Is that something you could hope for?

02-00:40:47 Rosenberg: It’s not something you set out hoping for. I was stunned to read that in the science section of the New York Times. It would be wonderful if this had the staying power of Shakespeare. I mean, they’re suggesting that Shakespeare’s period is mainly remembered through Shakespeare. But you hope— I believe in very carefully and slowly husbanding a world premiere. I’m not into churning them out once a year, unless they’re chamber things. It takes a lot of careful midwifery, and should have a slow gestation period. And I feel vindicated with that, that the quality is really there.

Crawford: Will you watch it as it moves along?

Rosenberg: Sure.

Crawford: It’s your baby.

02-00:41:44 Rosenberg: Yes, yes, and John always changes things. And he’s going to change the first chorus anyway, because he feels it’s just wrong.

Crawford: I read about the scientific error of fact in that. I thought he already changed it.

02-00:41:56 Rosenberg: Yes, we tweaked it, and then listened to it in one of the stage orchestras, and he said it sounds just too pasted on. So he really has to rewrite the chorus. So [for] Amsterdam, that chorus is definitely going to be different. And I don’t know whether he’ll tweak other things or not, but he usually, for the first three or four years, slightly changes certain things. And of course, I’m going to go everywhere, to see how it’s changed.

Crawford: It was so interesting that it sparked that kind of controversy, that the American Physical Society listened and reported that some facts were wrong.

02-00:42:32 Rosenberg: Well, it first started because Marvin Cohen, who’s a professor of physics over at Berkeley and worked with a lot of people in the Manhattan Project, was at a workshop that we gave on Doctor Atomic—oh, God, I don’t know when it was— two years ago— to which we invited certain people. And we invited him because he was the president of the American Physical Society. I remember at that workshop, John—because he was so in love with that text— it was so poetic, somehow, that John said, “I have to read you the opening 29

lines.” And Marvin immediately stood up and said, “The physics are wrong. You’re ignoring Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

And that just went right over John. He just blew it off, ignored it, but Marvin, being a professor, said, “You know, when I correct a student, I’m used to having them then do the correction.” [laughs] And so when we gave the press conference in New York in August, somebody who’s in the American Physical Society—I think this year’s president— he came to the press conference. John again read his opening lines, and he immediately sent an email to Marvin, and Marvin then got on my case. Then I tried convincing John. I said, “Why would we let something out that we know is fundamentally flawed like this?” So for two weeks, he ignored me, and then finally I sent him a really nasty email. [laughs] Really nasty. I said, “I just can’t believe you’re being so stubborn.”

Crawford: The error would be picked up, wouldn’t it?

02-00:44:08 Rosenberg: Yes, of course. And the American Physical Society was having an annual convention here especially because we were doing Doctor Atomic. So I said, “We’re going to have a house full of physicists, and they’re all going to be screaming at us.” So that’s when he said, “Okay,” and he changed that line. It took only five words to make it right.

So the chorus rehearsed it, and then at the stage orchestra I had a board meeting, or an executive meeting or something. Otherwise, I’d been at all the stage orchestras, but during that stage orchestra, I wasn’t there. So I came back [laughs] into the house, and Claire Myers, who was doing the program book from Doctor Atomic, comes up to me and she says, “Marvin Cohen needs to talk to you, but he’s agreed to write an explanation in the program book.” And I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “Oh, because they put the original text back in.” I said, “What?” [laughs] I just said, “What?” So she had phoned Marvin Cohen, who was in Washington doing something, got him on his cell, and he said he had to talk to me. I had sent him an email when John changed it, and I said, “You can calm down now. The physics are going to be correct.” You could do a whole chapter on just what happened with that opening chorus.

Marvin wrote back and he said, “Oh, that’s great,” because we had given him the libretto for the whole thing, and he thought the piece was going to be fascinating. We would be doing this panel discussion with him at Berkeley, and he was just completely involved in this project, somehow. And so he was completely relieved, I was completely relieved, and then I come out of this meeting. [laughs] 30

Crawford: Where did the change back come from? Who said, let’s go with the original? It slipped by me. It comes so quickly in the opera. Was it done the correct way for the opening?

02-00:46:27 Rosenberg: No. No, no. We did it the incorrect way.

Crawford: The statement being that energy cannot be created.

02-00:46:31 Rosenberg: And that’s why Marvin Cohen then wrote this explanation, what the correct physics would be for the program book.

Crawford: How do you hope it changes and works its way through the next decade?

02-00:46:55 Rosenberg: I don’t want to answer that. It’s just that, poor John, since it opened, said at least ten people a day either phone him or come up to him and tell him what he should change in it. Everybody else knows better.

Crawford: That’s good, though, that people have strong thoughts about it.

02-00:47:17 Rosenberg: Yes, but after a while, it unnerves you, as a composer, to have everybody think they know how to do his piece better than he can. [laughs] There are two or three places in the opera that I think can be changed or tightened up, but I am not going to talk to John for a while; I’m just going to let him have a little bit of respite. I’ll just, at some point, give him my impressions, not necessarily hoping or stipulating that he make changes. But I’ll be interested to see what he, of his own accord, changes.

Crawford: You got the last curtain call. That’s another thing I want to ask you about. That I’d never seen before. How about that?

02-00:48:01 Rosenberg: I know. John kept trying to pull me out, and I said, “No, it’s tacky. I’m not going out there.” And then he apparently said something to Donald, so Donald came over and grabbed me— So anyway— [laughter]

Crawford: Well, it’s going to be great fun to follow. And congratulations.

02-00:48:16 Rosenberg: I’m thrilled with the results, and what’s also thrilling to me is the way it sold. I did have a couple of people on the board [who thought] I was basically crazy to schedule ten performances of a world premiere. Six would be more like it. And it sold— 80% sold seats. And if we then take the comps and various things like that, then it was up in the nineties. And there were six performances that sold over 90%. Two of them, 95%, and one 98%. So it sold better than any world premiere has [sold] here in the last ten years. And in 31

percentage of tickets, it sold more than Traviata and Tosca and Pearl Fishers last season, which were our biggest sellers. So I thought, in addition to the artistic success, it’s really been a popular success.

Crawford: And people are making up their own minds about it.

Rosenberg: Absolutely.

Crawford: Let me ask a few questions about your time here. You told me what attracted you to San Francisco. Of course, you come from here, you lived here. But was there a hesitation? Was there something negative that you felt reticent about taking on here?

02-00:49:58 Rosenberg: Well, it took me a long time to enter into discussions with them. Lynette Hunter kept coming and saying they needed to talk to me. The headhunter asked Peter Jonas who he thought should do it, whether he wanted to do it. He didn’t want to do it, and he said, “You need to talk to her.”

Crawford: That’s where they made the connection.

02-00:50:28 Rosenberg: That’s what headhunters do; they inform themselves about you. So she presented me, and I, the very first time, said, “No. I really am not interested, because that’s not the kind of work I do, what they do in San Francisco.” I said, “I also don’t want to spend 80% of my time fundraising. And I don’t want to be that far away from my grandkids.” So there were three reasons why [I was reluctant]. I [wasn’t] being coquette or anything, I just said, “No, I’m not interested.” But she kept coming back and coming back and coming back, and I was coming to California to visit my father right after my mother died, and he was not doing well. And so I said they would have to come up to Oregon, where I was taking him to be with his brother, if they wanted to talk to me. So they did, and I then got kind of intrigued. Because [they told me] that they really wanted some kind of renewal here. So I thought that would be a challenge.

Crawford: What did they tell you about the finances here? Kurt Adler said for many years, “I’m going back to Germany.” I heard him say it many times. Because of fundraising.

02-00:51:37 Rosenberg: When they were talking to me, it was presented to me as the big golden plum of the opera world in the U.S., other than the Met. There were no financial problems, as presented to me. But there has been a deficit here every year since 1997. It was into two million dollars.

Crawford: Isn’t that public knowledge? 32

02-00:52:08 Rosenberg: Yes, but I didn’t know. So each year you get rid of the deficit somehow. But it did show me that it was not in the financial shape that I was assuming they were saying it was. Well, you know, I actually didn’t even want to talk about this. They then said they didn’t actually realize it themselves.

Crawford: Pardon?

02-00:52:47 Rosenberg: They said they didn’t even realize it themselves, and that’s what made it worse.

Crawford: Your five-year plan, your “Animating Opera” scheme, took a big hit. Would you talk a little bit about that, and how that was carried out?

02-00:53:08 Rosenberg: The “Animating Opera” idea was to create connections between pieces. It’s kind of a light invitation to the audience to see what there is in certain pieces that is maybe in another piece. So connecting pieces that are from different eras— French school, Italian school. And so there were a series of themes. One was the Faust theme. And I had two composer series, Berlioz and Janácek. And then I had opera in the age of enlightenment, women on the outside of society. A lot of those I was able to realize. Some of them, when I had to downsize and reduce the amount of productions from twelve to nine, then I had to cancel certain things that would have filled out those themes. But on the whole, I feel that several of the themes really did play out really, really well. I would have shown more Janácek if I’d stayed longer. The Trojans, I had to— the Berlioz, I had to postpone until 2008, and now I think it’s been cancelled, for instance. So I ended up only showing The Damnation of Faust in the Berlioz cycle.

Crawford: You’re not wholly frustrated because of what you had to scuttle, and you did bring the company out of the red.

02-00:54:52 Rosenberg: Yes. No, no. You know, I feel like we’ve shown lots of wonderful things here A big part of the “Animating Opera”, I showed. There were some of the themes that weren’t as thoroughly shown as they would have been if I’d stay here ten years.

Crawford: Last question. Your special partnership with Donald Runnicles.

02-00:55:14 Rosenberg: Yes. He is a conductor who thinks holistically. And so when you’re talking to Donald, you’re not just talking about the musical component, he is interested in the entirety. And so that makes him, as a collaborator, very special, because very often, conductors are a bit interested in what’s going on on the stage, but for him, it really is the art form. The entirety of it. I didn’t feel like I was talking to somebody with just one hat on. It was somebody who, together with 33

me, sort of sees the wholeness of it and the complexity of it. So that was wonderful. He’s the reason I actually came. Because when I did come down from Oregon to meet with the chairman or the president of the board and have first discussions, I saw Donald conducting the orchestra. I had worked with Donald in Europe on one Magic Flute in the Netherlands Opera, and I’d seen him conduct often, but I just thought that the orchestra, compared to the time I had heard it six years before, had come to another plane. Donald is someone who has been absolutely a partner to me. I’ve included him in all the major artistic decisions. What he has to bring to the table is just so interesting and so stimulating.

02-00:57:13 Crawford: Unusually so. You wouldn’t have had that relationship elsewhere, quite to that extent?

02-00:57:20 Rosenberg: Well, there are certain people. And Donald has also the wonderful characteristic, as a human, of really opening people up, too. And so when you’re in a rehearsal situation, he brings out the best in people. He can be really stern and strict with orchestras and singers, but he’s basically so supportive of them that I often think people seem better with him than they actually are. You know? So he’s been the optimal partner and artistic partner.

Crawford: You won’t be at the head of an operatic helm now. Will you miss it?

02-00:58:13 Rosenberg: Yes. Sure. I will miss it. On the other hand, I’m excited. There are so many new things in the job that I’m going to that, at my age, I’m finding it really stimulating to go off on a completely different track. It’ll be fun.

Crawford: That is about the end of our second hour, so let’s finish here.

[End of Interview]

Donald Runnicles Interviewed by Caroline Crawford Interview #1: January 12, 2006

Audio File 1

01-00:00:01 Crawford: This is January 12th, 2006, an interview with San Francisco Opera music director and principal conductor Donald Runnicles for the Doctor Atomic project. Maestro Runnicles, you conducted the premiere performances of the new opera. When was your first involvement with it?

01-00:00:16 Runnicles: The first involvement was probably when Pamela Rosenberg had just begun, or had just been appointed General Director of San Francisco Opera; had spoken to me about the big plans, the big projects she would like to see realized here in San Francisco.

One of those, most certainly, was commissioning John Adams to write a new opera. And the whole issue was the subject matter. Initially, Pamela had had ideas of the culmination of a series of Faust operas, being indeed, John Adams’ work. In other words, the story, the legends, the treatment of Faust over hundreds of years, basically, and the story. She had this dream of an American Faust or a contemporary Faust, which figure that, indeed, would be today, or in the last hundred years or so.

It was her idea that Robert Oppenheimer fit that bill. And under that premise, Pamela made her first approach to John. And I was fully aware of this, because as Pamela’s partner, I was music director, and would be involved in this, and... So that’s going back, I would say, at least five, if not six years.

01-00:01:58 Crawford: Would there have been another composer choice? Because I know he was reticent about it at first.

01-00:02:05 Runnicles: No.

Crawford: You didn’t talk about another composer.

01-00:02:07 Runnicles: We didn’t talk about another composer. I think besides Pamela’s devotion to John’s music was that they knew one another, both with their Berkeley background. I don’t recall ever having considered someone else. And John, yes, was initially reticent. But I think— Well, it’s not for me to speak about John and how he came round to warming to this project. I do know that the more he worked on it, the more he read up on it, I think the less attractive was the American Faust premise, as I say. 35

Crawford: Bargain with the devil.

01-00:02:56 Runnicles: The bargain with the devil. I think he felt that that would be more limiting. And would be not only limiting in, perhaps, the treatment of whatever the story was going to be, but also limiting, or would have influenced people, the people listening to his opera too much, in terms of always looking for the story, always looking for, Oh, that’s Faustian; that’s not Faustian. And as we know, it really became— Well, while there are certain Faustian elements to the story, it became, as we know, Doctor Atomic, the extraordinary opera it is.

Crawford: What is it that makes his music good for American opera, do you think?

01-00:03:53 Runnicles: I think John’s music is quintessentially American music. What do I mean by quintessentially American music? I think it is clearly— there are minimalist traits, clear influences in his music.

I think the music of Philip Glass is music that has had its influence on John; but as much as an Elliott Carter has had an influence on John. I think he has very much carried on those traditions. John’s music, though, is always— and I use this in the best, most benevolent way— popular, and it’s accessible, it’s not necessarily overwrought with intellectualism.

And while his music is beautifully and carefully crafted, and he will pore over a bar for a long, long time, I think the end result is— invariably finds its way to the heart, and doesn’t get stuck in the head.

Crawford: He himself has said that he has an ability to purloin and transform. Nothing wrong with that.

01-00:05:31 Runnicles: Nothing wrong with that. That’s a great deal more eloquent than what I’ve just said.

Crawford: How was the score presented to you?

01-00:05:46 Runnicles: Incrementally. I received scenes. John, as you know, has a tried and tested working method of committing his music to what we once upon a time called a synthesizer— the keyboards, and with all the technology available to him now, he creates a tape— it’s not even tape, it’s a digital tape— where, unlike many other composers, he already gives you, the performer, a feeling for what it will sound like, albeit somewhat disembodied and computerized. By his own admission, though, I think he was fired up by this subject, and he wrote very, very quickly. He devoted a great deal of time to it. 36

01-00:06:46 I then received a score of act one, a draft of act one, and once again, parts of act two, in terms of a tape or something to hear. And then it was finally presented to me complete in— Well, we started rehearsing in August. This must have been perhaps June, June or July of last year, where I went over to John’s studio and we sat down with the score.

Act one was already in printed form; act two was still in manuscript. And we literally listened to the entire opera. John sat beside me, and I read along with him. So what was really very welcome, and for which I was quite grateful was, before I started rehearsing with the orchestra, I already had the entire score. Now, that may sound a little strange to find that— exceptional. But there are still those composers who are still writing, and you begin—.

Crawford: [laughs] Mozart-like.

01-00:08:07 Runnicles: That first orchestral— Well, yes, we can always fall back on probably the greatest precedent of them all, but it was terrific that I really had a good stint, a good period of time, where I could try to absorb the entire score, and get a feel for the sweep of the score.

Crawford: Were there any parameters for the orchestra?

01-00:08:33 Runnicles: In what way?

Crawford: Size or— ?

01-00:08:38 Runnicles: I don’t recall whether we stipulated any. I don’t think we would’ve stipulated anything. John, this is not his first opera, clearly. And he was fully aware of some of the limitations imposed by the very size of the orchestra pit. And it was clearly not his wish to have the orchestra spill right over onto the stage, for instance. That brings with it a certain— implies certain parameters. But he scores very generously, and— It’s a large-ish percussion section, but no larger than you’d expect from any contemporary composer.

Crawford: How would you describe the music, as a whole? We talk a lot about how he’s moved from minimalism, for instance.

01-00:09:30 Runnicles: Yes.

Crawford: And he’s talked a lot about the influences that he heard.

01-00:09:35 Runnicles: My first and strongest impression, when I listened to it in its entirety, was how intensely lyrical a lot of the music is. I think many people might associate 37

with John these wonderful jazzy, upbeat, motoric rhythms and buoyant, catchy— music that is quite terrific in its own way.

I’m not sure that one would immediately associate great lyricism with John. Which is not to say he hasn’t written very lyrical music. But when you ask about specifically this opera, and when you hear what the title of the opera is, Doctor Atomic, the first thing that would occur to you would probably not be lyricism.

You would imagine, Oh, well, this is clearly a very scientific subject, so the music may be, quote/unquote, “scientific,” may be more about rhythm, more about motoric textures. No, no, not motoric textures, but motoric rhythms, and exploiting what John does so phenomenally.

There is enormous rhythmic excitement to any of John’s scores. Unexpected rhythmic turns and twists and... But as I say, the lyricism is very apparent. Clearly, Oppenheimer and his intense love for Kitty, his wife, is behind a lot of this lyricism. And I think it’s a very, very important antidote, if you like, to the intensely cerebral, intellectual side to this story, and the build-up to the detonation of the bomb.

Crawford: Is there any part of that work that you would say, “That could only be John Adams?”

01-00:11:55 Runnicles: It’s a good question. Yes. I think the last twenty-five minutes of the piece could only be John. Once again, very carefully, intricately crafted, calculated energy, in terms of the rhythms, in terms of tempo, in terms of this acceleration, as we move through the countdown.

And as we move through the countdown, of course, the emotional tension of both the people present at the detonation, but also the audience feeling time is running out— It’s quite masterful, in the way he himself talks about this final two minutes, the countdown. It’s more like fifteen minutes.

That’s one of the beautiful sides of opera, I suppose, that you really can literally manipulate time. And manipulate people’s perception of the passing of time. And I think John does that in an incredible way.

And once again, there is something quite motoric, and the music has a sense of— It’s relentless. It’s inexorable. Is has to lead to something momentous. And I often find that in John’s music.

I was recently in New York performing his chamber symphony. And there’s also a feeling of this— there’s a slightly manic quality to this rhythmic drive 38

and this energy. And it will stop as abruptly as it begins. But particularly in this piece, it’s an extraordinary final twenty minutes.

Crawford: I know that he labored over that finale, because everybody was looking for a big bomb blast, and he thought, Can’t trivialize it that way. When I heard Richard Rhodes speak, he said that John had approached him, and they had talked very, very specifically about what that would look like to people. What was your feeling and your impression of that last part, where the blast goes?

01-00:14:20 Runnicles: My impression of it was: I was terrified by this ending. I was terrified both by its complexity, in terms of just conducting my way through it— I mean, that’s really quite complicated, that last twenty minutes, or last fifteen.

But from my perspective, it is a terrifying ending to the opera. And brilliant because it’s terrifying. I think there were two questions. John himself shared this with me and Peter Sellars. But particularly John, people had two questions. Overriding concern about what happens at the end— how do you depict the bomb? And the other question was, How is Edward Teller depicted as a character?

Crawford: Yes.

01-00:15:17 Runnicles: It remains a very, very controversial subject, the figure of Edward Teller in this area, specifically in this area—his commitment to the hydrogen bomb, his abandonment of support for Robert Oppenheimer, when his security clearance was withdrawn.

All these sorts of things really stir up emotions, particularly in this part of the world. And so as I say, it was the ending of the opera, but also Edward Teller that people were concerned about. And I say terrifying, because of course, we know what is being depicted onstage.

But I think John and Peter both realized that in today’s world, with all the Industrial Light and Magic, with all the ways in which in film can give the illusion that you’re there, [at] the detonation of the bomb—

On the stage, in live theater, it’s far harder to do something convincing, if you try to be realistic. And I think that’s where very much, John came into his own, because the music, and what happens in the music, even if you shut your eyes, you hear this countdown and this acceleration, and this gradual rushing towards this cataclysmic pit, which was the detonation. And even— as I say, I was performing it.

So I mean, one is very involved in it, and it’s a little harder to be detached and to listen to it. But I do know it was, for all of us— we knew that we were not just performing a great work; I think we also were touched by just how close 39

it was touching us. And just with the awareness that this could happen any day. I mean, this could’ve happened while we were performing this opera, in terms of there are those bombs, or there still is that capability out there.

This is not historical, in the sense of, Oh, we have a safe distance from all of this; this would never happen again. Of course, it could happen.

And you were asking about my impact, about the end. I think it was a very moving end, too, because Peter and John made the very clear decision not to come down on the side of, We should’ve detonated this bomb, or, We shouldn’t have. I don’t think there is any finger wagging. There’s the horror of this genie which is being let out of the bottle, through that detonation. We know already that this is not the ending of an opera. That was not the ending of an era, it was the opening of a vast, terrifying new era of atomic power.

And I think, once again, that is what John and Peter, at the end of this opera, managed to do. It was left very open ended. There was no comfort of, Ah; bomb exploded, end of opera; we survived it. So I think that it’s open- endedness. This is— a question was put at the end of this work. We don’t know the answer yet.

Crawford: What do you make of the influences that John Adams mentioned? How much do you hear of Varèse, Stravinsky— Everybody heard Wagner. Dragons, Ring dragons. People want to know, where is this coming from?

01-00:19:10 Runnicles: Well, they think they want to know that. And I think, quite frankly, they hear Wagner more readily than they hear Varèse, because most people wouldn’t know Varèse if they heard it. I don’t wish to be flippant about it, but his music is not performed that much.

Crawford: Is it there for you?

01-00:19:25 Runnicles: Oh, yes. It is there. I happen to know that music. Very much in this initial— however long; two-minutes, eighteen-seconds or whatever— the very first tableau, or the very top of the opera, it’s a clear influence. Stravinsky, yes, pervades John’s music. What appears in listening to it, rhythmically extremely exciting, but perhaps simple, is in effect—or in reality— a great deal more complex, when you look at the score and see all the cross rhythms and these interpolated tiny bars, throws the emphasis away from beats and— I think that’s a clear and strong influence of Stravinsky.

Yes, the Wagnerian is apparent, and I think it’s the most surprising. One doesn’t expect to hear Richard Wagner and John Adams in the same sentence. But I think his depiction of a sunrise over the desert, or this thunderstorm brewing, those are, quote/unquote, “Wagnerian images.” The forces of nature, if you like. And John himself speaks very clearly to the influence of... 40

Actually, Peter, even more so, when he’s talking about John. But the music of Götterdämmerung— apocalyptic nature of the end of the gods—

Crawford: Peter Sellars did come up with that idea, didn’t he?

01-00:21:19 Runnicles: Yes, and ending of an era as we knew it, and ushering in the atomic era, I think is a close parallel to that. And I think John has no problem talking about just what the influence of Wagner’s music—and Wagner’s orchestration, incidentally—meant for him.

Crawford: Peter Sellars must be an exceptionally musical director.

01-00:21:46 Runnicles: He is. I don’t know anybody who’s more musical. He absorbs, digests, makes every beat of that music his own. He sits at rehearsals. You’ll sit next to him or near him, and you can see his body positively quake with this music. But it’s not just because he’s hearing it; he knows what is coming, because he’s already studied it so.

That’s pretty extraordinary in the best of times, when you’re doing works that you’ve heard many, many times, that may be hundreds of years old. A Mozart opera, for instance. But for a director to have already absorbed music that— that literally, nobody has ever heard before—in other words, this world premiere— makes him quite exceptional.

Crawford: I read somewhere that he asked John for something that sounded like Bruckner, a Bruckner symphony movement, something like that. How did the two relate? Was that okay, for Adams to have somebody so involved musically?

01-00:22:59 Runnicles: I think one of the reasons that John and Peter have enjoyed such a fruitful relationship is that both men have supreme respect for the other, and recognize them as being masters at what they do, respectively. And I think based upon that, they are both enormously open to being quite candid about their thoughts about the music, or about the direction changes that perhaps should be made, suggestions. It’s a two-way street.

Peter has an extraordinary visual eye, and John has an extraordinary aural eye, in some ways. And it’s the first time I’ve collaborated with the two. It was fascinating. It was thrilling.

Crawford: How deep was that collaboration?

01-00:24:0 Runnicles: Very deep. I say very deep, because I was involved in this from the outset. John was, clearly, at all the orchestra rehearsals, initially. And I believe he 41

built up a trust, over time. Trust, in the sense that if there were issues where I thought that— Whether it was one of tempo or one of orchestration— A case in point, a little too strong, overpowering the singers.

It’s not that John would not have heard that himself, but the trust was there that I may make suggestions. “Well, how ’bout this? Or how about that?” And John was extremely open to that, and that’s a privilege, to be part of the genesis of a work, and to feel that you are a fairly important midwife.

Crawford: I should say!

01-00:25:03 Runnicles: And John was— as I say, he was at the auditorium. We were talking regularly through email. Of course, after every rehearsal, we shared thoughts and... It’s as good as it gets, when it comes to putting on opera.

Crawford: You asked Peter Sellars to speak to the orchestra, I believe.

Runnicles: Yes.

Crawford: Which is, I think, unusual. What prompted that, and what was the reception for that?

01-00:25:30 Runnicles: If Peter had not been a director, he would’ve been an evangelist. Peter has the most magnetic, poetic, oratorical skills I think I’ve ever known in this profession.

He is most moving to listen to because he himself is most moved, not only by the specific work he’s working on, which at that moment, is the most beautiful thing that he’s ever worked on; but also because you cannot but be infected by—affected and infected—by his enthusiasm for not only the project that he’s working on, or that we’re working on together, but the project’s importance and significance, in terms of what we’re trying to reach out to audiences with. And why we’re reaching out to audiences.

What is this opera about? What is this story about? How should it touch each and every human being that comes in contact with it?

01-00:26:41 As I say, Peter has an unbelievable ability to be utterly convincing, and make you as evangelical in your approach to doing it to the best of your ability that I’ve really ever experienced.

When you see Peter working with a chorus, there is a stillness and a concentration in that room that I have never experienced with anyone else. Everybody there is enraptured. Peter is somebody who will have tears pouring down his face while he’s explaining something to you. This is not narcissism. This is not, My goodness, that must look effective. It’s because there’s 42

absolutely no safety mechanism in him. He gets so involved in what he’s conveying to you that his emotions take over.

01-00:27:47 So in answer to your question, or implied question— why did I let him speak to the orchestra?— he could convey more about what this music was signifying, and what this story signified, in three or four sentences than I think I could’ve in half an hour.

I wouldn’t say I think; I know that orchestras, orchestral musicians resonate often far more to pictures— not pictures, that makes it sound a little childish, or child-like. But respond very, very profoundly to images, and to the significance in the music: this is what the music is trying to convey. And of course, I can describe those things; but Peter has lived with this piece a great deal longer.

As I say, he’s just— he has this incredible art of communication. Any time that Peter and I have ever talked about this piece— and of course, we’ve talked over a long period of time—I know every time, I came away energized. And I wanted the orchestra to be equally energized.

Crawford: And they were.

Runnicles: Oh!

Crawford: Let’s move on to rehearsals. Being a world premiere, what does it involve that’s greater than the routine preparation?

01-00:29:22 Runnicles: The exquisite responsibility. As I said before, being a midwife in the birth of something unique. And knowing that that carries with it the responsibility of giving the work every chance possible to let it shine, to let it be seen in its best light, and to know that it’s, if you like, it’s warm clay on the potter’s wheel; it hasn’t hardened yet.

You could have a lot to do with the way it does harden, and the way it’s then presented on that opening night. Which is not to say that it won’t change, [that] it won’t be revised. Of course, John [or] Peter may come back to it with time, and make alterations; I don’t know. But that’s the, as I say, the exquisite responsibility, you know, that you are given the chance to give something life for the very first time.

And you live with it for a long, long time. The opening night audience, whatever evening you’re performing it, has a chance to receive a snapshot, as opposed to you having seen an entire video—I mean, if one carries on the metaphor. And that’s thrilling.

Crawford: Is it nervous-making? 43

01-00:30:59 Runnicles: I don’t think it— I’m sure it is for John. I mean, I’m sure that the composer and the director feel more of that nervous energy. But I wouldn’t say I’m any more nervous in conducting the first night of a world premiere than I would be conducting the first night of Parsifal.

It’s the responsibility. But whereas one assumes that most of the audience know what Parsifal is going to sound like, very few people, unless they’ve been at rehearsals, know what Doctor Atomic is going to sound like. And so as I say, the responsibility is a little bit more profound.

Crawford: Did you get the orchestra time that you needed?

01-00:31:43 Runnicles: Yes.

Crawford: You did.

01-00:31:44 Runnicles: Yes. We took a lot of time over it, a lot of orchestral time, to give not only the orchestra a chance to make it their own, to digest it, to— Well, let it percolate, so to speak.

It gave John the chance to hear his music. It gave John the chance to consider making changes. I’m paraphrasing, but there would be moments John would say, “Oh, my goodness, I didn’t intend it to sound like that,” or, “Oh, my goodness, if I had known that, then I would’ve written that slightly differently.” He had the chance, then, to go back— not in a major, major way, because John is good. I’m talking about not large issues, orchestrally.

Crawford: Tweaking.

01-00:32:32 Runnicles: Tweaking, yes. But he had, then, the chance to go back and tweak. And not, “Oh, my God, I don’t have the time to do this,” and, “Oh, if only I’d had two more rehearsals— “

Crawford: You hear so much about that— there’s never enough time.

01-00:32:45 Runnicles: Well, I think we gave it a fair shot. And even though we had a lot of rehearsal time, some of the best rehearsals were the performances. And it’s often like that. It’s actually in the performing of the piece that, with the presence of the audience, with the adrenaline of the artists because of the presence of the audience, with the feeling of a full house there, the energy is completely different.

So it’s a different kind of force field. So in a way, strange though this may sound, the opera reacts differently to— The performing of the opera is a very 44

different thing than in the preparatory period, where people’s focus is a different focus. And we had ten shows.

Crawford: Good audiences? Did they get it?

01-00:33:35 Runnicles: Oh, well, I believe so. One of the most encouraging aspects of that was the fact that people came back two, three, four times to see it.

Crawford: I think you had to see it, or hear it more than once.

01-00:33:47 Runnicles: I think so. And that’s not a bad thing.

Crawford: The issue of amplification. How did you feel about that?

01-00:34:04 Runnicles: It requires a lot of tweaking because, clearly, the space in which you perform such a work, each concert is different, each opera house is different.

And John’s sound world, or the sound enhancement, is an intrinsic part of John’s compositional style. He has worked for many, many years on this, and has his team, and it’s become quite sophisticated. That all notwithstanding, we worked hard to make this sound enhancement as unobtrusive as possible.

That is to say, I don’t think it’s helpful for an audience to feel that, Oh, I can hear somebody; so-and-so is being amplified; so-and-so, so-and-so sounds electronic; it doesn’t sound natural. As I say, it’s not cosmetic. Amplification in John’s scores is not a cosmetic, Oh, my goodness, I’ve written music that’s too loud or too thick, and the best way of dealing with that is, just give the singer a microphone.

John thinks differently. As I say, he— There are electronic sounds which are part of his palette, which he always wants to mingle with natural orchestral sounds.

01-00:35:54 So our task in the weeks of rehearsals was to tweak it in the house as much as we could, in order for the balance between orchestra and singers, but singers amongst one another, whether they were downstage or upstage or to the side, to make it as realistic as possible, in terms of— for the audience; that what you saw related to what you were hearing.

But if somebody was very, very far away, that you wouldn’t want it boosted to the extent that the singer sounded as if he was standing right next to you. Does that make sense?

Crawford: Yes. 45

01-00:36:37 Runnicles: So that the whole perspective of depth, and of this three-dimensional nature to the stage, was reflected also in the sound enhancement.

Crawford: Good answer. How close to the characters do you think the music comes? That is, how much does the music flesh out Oppenheimer, Kitty?

01-00:37:03 Runnicles: I think it goes a long way to flesh them out. I think that one of the strongest aspects of this opera is the success with which, in this case, John, exploits opera for what opera can do, at its best. That is to say, it can be multi-layered. A singer can be singing one thing, while truly, they’re thinking something completely different or feeling something completely different.

And if music is only written in opera in a rather self-effacing, accompanying, descriptive mode—that is to say, if it’s a little like film music, where it’s there only to enhance an emotion; if somebody’s angry, you hear angry music, if somebody’s sad, you hear sad music, if somebody’s happy— and so on. But if music can actually probe the subconscious of a character on the stage—

And there we get, once again, to a Wagnerian—. Not exclusively Wagnerian, because in Mozart, you can also— you can hear the Countess singing music which is, while most pleasant to the ear, and while she wearing this wistful smile on her face, the music is clearly one of profound sadness.

And that remarkable, as I say, quality that music has or can have in opera, is something that John knows how to do. I say that because quite frankly, I think many composers, in writing opera, are not willing to take music further than the merely descriptive, or the merely supportive, underlying nature. And John’s music can, as I say, give another dimension to the characters up on stage.

You were asking about it fleshing out. Oppenheimer was an incredibly tortured soul. He was this genius, this man who was torn between intellect and heart, and intellect and heart. There was the scientist, there was the poet, there was the musician, there was— All of this was in this cauldron of this man’s head. And I think that’s caught very well, indeed, by— not just John, because I keep saying John, but John and Peter are so interlinked in this project.

The choices of text, the choices of distilling this libretto— one is moved and one is touched by an essentially simple, passive story. Not a lot happens in this opera. Virtually nothing happens in this opera, in a sense. It’s a feeling of it is the countdown to that— to the detonation.

So there’s not a lot of action in this work. If there’s going to be any action, if there’s going to be any strife, if there’s going to be any adventure, or— All of that has to— an audience has to be gripped, has to be taken, and has to be transfixed by what is happening onstage. 46

That is not going to happen based upon the events. It happens because of the music. It happens because of the marriage of music and words. It happens because you can see and hear two or three of these individuals being torn apart by their moral responsibility. And there we get to the whole story.

01-00:41:58 To be given that kind of power—that is to say, for your capacity to be able to build the bomb and to detonate it, knowing that it’s as likely to be abused as it is used; what you’re unleashing on the world, was it— should the scientists have taken a stand? Should they have said no, even though we can build this bomb? Even though they knew—or some of them knew—that this was no longer a question of ending a war. This was actually beginning a new war.

Nevertheless, were they, as scientists, bound to be amoral and/or take no moral stance, and just do what they could do? And so as I say, all of this torment onstage is in the music. And I think for John to have brought that across so effectively, and for all the fact that you should go two or three times to see this work, you can also go once and be deeply affected. I think that’s an extraordinary achievement.

Crawford: The future of the work. Will you go as a team to the Netherlands?

01-00:43:17 Runnicles: They will. I won’t be going myself.

Crawford: Will Peter Sellars always restage it?

Runnicles: I don’t know.

Crawford: We don’t know that.

01-00:43:23 Runnicles: Well, he will certainly do it in Chicago; I’m pretty sure he will do it in Amsterdam. It goes to the Metropolitan Opera; I presume that Peter will direct it there. Otherwise, I don’t know. But it already has a rather extraordinary future.

Crawford: It does, doesn’t it? That was very clever, to get that booked before it was heard, really. Not true of Angle of Repose, for instance.

01-00:43:51 Runnicles: I don’t think it’s just being canny, I don’t think it’s just well strategized. I think it’s— John is a major composer. Peter is a major director.

Although all the reviews weren’t ecstatic, people knew they had been present at something quite important. And I think it was once the piece was performed, and then all of a sudden, two or three more people came onboard. 47

Speight Jenkins was at the premiere, from Seattle. Came on afterwards and committed there and then. “I’m bringing not just this piece, I’m bringing this subject matter to my audience.”

I think the subject matter is so important. I felt it’s what— it will, for me, remain one of the most profound experiences of my professional life. Not only because of its musical content, but it was an utter education for me.

It encouraged me to read up on a subject that I knew so little about. And I would be daring enough to say that even many Americans who thought they knew what led up to the detonation of that bomb and what subsequently happened... A great deal of that information is only now beginning to sort of filter though. The subject matter is— affects us all. It knows no international boundaries.

Crawford: So it does serve a historical purpose, as a kind of a document.

01-00:45:33 Runnicles: It’s a document, and, I think, an intensely cautionary tale.

Crawford: Would you assign a singer the [John] Donne sonnet [“Batter my heart, three- person'd God”], for instance, for a recital? Do you think some of the set pieces will survive that way?

01-00:45:47 Runnicles: Oh, yes. And once again, I think that’s a very, very rare commodity today. A scene from a modern opera, from a contemporary opera, where you could take the last fifteen minutes of act one, and perform that like a Tatiana’s letter scene; where you can perform a segment of the opera, and give a very fulfilling experience, both to the performers and to audience, alike.

I know, but I’m sure John has told other people, he has every intention of creating the Doctor Atomic Suite.

Crawford: Oh, yes, really?

01-00:46:34 Runnicles: Oh, yes. And I hope very much that I’ll be one of the first people to perform it. My relationship to John now is quite close, and we had a thrill working together. And I don’t take that for granted.

I know John himself is a very competent, very gifted conductor. I mean, he could’ve insisted that he conduct this work himself in San Francisco. I’ll be interested to see if he does conduct it somewhere. But to have such a good partner in John, and to feel this trust, is— As I say, I don’t take that for granted. 48

Crawford: Let’s talk for a minute about your relationship with Pamela Rosenberg. She’s called you a holistic conductor. What does she mean?

01-00:47:25 Runnicles: Well, you should really ask her yourself. But I think she’s referring to the fact that I love opera for all of its different facets. I’m not a happy opera conductor just when I focus on the music, or on the orchestra, or on the singers.

I love getting involved from the very outset in the team, in finding the right director, finding the right designer, talking with the team early on about their concept of a piece, talking about what the stage is going to look like.

I would say having respect for the fact that where we, the performers, have music in front of us, we have things, something tangible in our hands, where that’s a B-flat, that’s a four-four bar, that’s a sharp, that’s a sign to play loudly.

A director or a designer decides, This takes place there; this is fast, this is slow; this is the story. They have nothing concrete in their hands. They have to create it for you. And there’s something a great deal more amorphous, there’s something a great deal more intangible about what they have to do.

And when I say respect, I mean knowing that it will perhaps take time, it will be during the rehearsal process itself that they begin to— that it begins to take shape, what they’re going for. I’m fascinated by working with directors and designers. Not only because of what they do, but also because they inevitably, the good ones, throw great light on a subject matter.

A piece that you may think you know terribly well, whether it’s a Giovanni or a Figaro or a—I don’t know, any work, any opera—they may suddenly make you aware of things, where you go, “[gasps] I never thought of it like that. Of course, of course.”

: And that they plumb depths. Sometimes it’s somebody coming from straight theater, who does a very successful opera. Not only will they reveal new depths or reveal new truths in that work, but they may elicit from the performers themselves something a little more intense, in terms of acting styles and skills.

I’m enormously fond of Pamela—in that I try to be as inclusive as possible in my dealings with everybody involved in opera, and because I’m enormously interested in every facet of this miracle that happens when, on any given night, you have a hundred players in the orchestra, in the pit; you have perhaps, including chorus, eighty people on the stage; you have people in the wings, under the stage, at the side of the stage, in sound studios; and you have three hours. 49

And somehow, that all comes together for that one audience. And then it’s gone; it was unique. That, for me, is a small miracle. And I take great pride, but also great pleasure, with great humility, in being part of that.

Crawford: Is she unusually musical for an intendant?

01-00:51:05 Runnicles: I wouldn’t say she’s— Of course, there are some musical, some less musical, some very musical. I think she’s one of the most musical intendants I’ve ever come across.

I think Pamela is also holistic, in that she not only takes interest in every facet of theater, in opera, she’s also immersed herself in the techniques and skills of every aspect. She knows the challenges, issues in a scene shop, or in the wardrobe, or in makeup.

She’s worked with enough designers to know what their problems may be. She’s worked with enough directors to know that when they’re sitting together in a studio in Berlin talking about a production they’re going to do in San Francisco, she can say, without having to look up anything, “That’s not going to work on our stage.”

Whether it’s dimensions, whether— whatever. She has an incredible aesthetic sense, as well. She’s forward looking. I mean by that, she’s somebody who knows there may be controversy over a production of any given, particularly familiar work, but that it will probably create much discussion.

And you may find that after a while, an audience realize that they’re being taken very seriously. And I don’t wish to put words or thoughts into her own mind, but— I think what Pamela has given San Francisco over the last five years is a fantastic chance to educate themselves in the art of being more open minded in what one expects to see onstage.

It doesn’t always have to be literal. It doesn’t always have to be spelled out. It doesn’t— a piece doesn’t always have to be performed in the time when the composer stipulated when it was supposed to take place.

I think there’s no going back—not that we will go back. But she... She’s also somebody who has terrific people skills, and is somebody who knows how to bring people together, and bring a team of artists together. Once again, conductor, designer, production. And is actively involved from the outset. Sits in technical rehearsals, scenic rehearsals, music rehearsals.

That’s, incidentally, something I’ve hardly ever encountered, an intendant who makes time to come to the smallest rehearsals; comes to rehearsals where probably not a lot happens. But it may be a technical rehearsal, it may be a musical rehearsal, it may be a dance rehearsal. 50

Because the process is something that Pamela’s so fascinated into, because she has invested so much herself in it. She takes great pride in it. She doesn’t get involved in it, unless there’s something that’s egregiously at odds with what she may think we can present here in San Francisco, where even she may just stand up and say, “It might work somewhere else, but I don’t think that one’s going to work here.”

Crawford: You conduct everywhere. Why were the Handel stagings here so controversial...

01-00:55:02 Runnicles: They were— I don’t want to say controversial...

Crawford: Would those stagings be much more widely accepted in Germany?

01-00:55:08 Runnicles: Yes. I’m not suggesting that that’s because they’re better, or they know more, or they’re more sophisticated. You know, that’s not what I want to say with that. They’re just exposed to a great deal more of that, and just that opera houses there are so ubiquitous.

Crawford: So much a part of life.

01-00:55:30 Runnicles: It’s so much a part of life that people go a great deal more than, perhaps here. And if they don’t go to Stuttgart, they go to Frankfurt; and if they don’t go to Frankfurt, it’s forty-five minutes to Mannheim; it’s fifteen minutes to Heidelberg; it’s forty-five minutes to Stuttgart.

You can go to so many things. So one assumes, because it is so much more of an integral part of their life, that very few people will be seeing a standard work, shall we say, for the first time. They know what it’s about. They’ve seen it a number of times. So they are perhaps more open-minded to an interpretation of it.

Crawford: I wanted to ask you a question before about orchestra preparation, because you always hear that American orchestral players will come knowing their piece by heart, or having read into it very deeply. Is it true?

01-00:56:22 Runnicles: They’re very well prepared. They have to be well prepared, because time is money.

Crawford: Less so than where opera is subsidized.

01-00:56:29 Runnicles: Less than. Absolutely. And so where everything is tightly budgeted, there’s not a lot of room to expand or say, “Oh, we need another four rehearsals for something.” 51

Yes, they are very well prepared. We don’t have time. And when it comes to, as I say, carefully scheduled, crafted rehearsal periods, we don’t have the capacity for them to not know it, come to the first rehearsal and learn it then. That just wouldn’t work.

But it’s the same in Great Britain. There’s the same excellence in preparation. And in the really good houses in Germany, the really good symphony orchestras in Germany, it’s much the same. I think too much is made of this, “You have to come to America for there really to be very, very well prepared orchestras.” I don’t think that’s the case as much as... I wouldn’t say it had ever been, really, that much the case. I think, though... It has an awful lot to do with just the private funding.

This non-governmental approach to putting on the arts. When you do rely, each and every year, upon the generosity of donors and sponsors, you realize that you have to be as economical with your time as possible.

So it’s a little like the chicken and the egg; I’m not sure which came first. But you are now in a situation where I, for instance, if I’m working on a new opera here, will have, for an opera that’s perhaps three-hours long, well, you probably multiply the length of the opera by two, or perhaps by three, to work out how many hours orchestral rehearsal you need.

In other words, if it’s a three-hour opera, you may give yourself three three- hour rehearsals. In other words, you could play, so to speak, the piece three times through. Which isn’t a lot, if you consider...

There may be a lot of technical difficulties and ensemble difficulties. But that presumes that the orchestral players are coming prepared. And that those rehearsals are there for them to discover context, not just what they’re playing, but really playing with or against.

So yes, I’ve been in this business quite a long time—but I still sometimes am a little awestruck by arriving at an orchestra as a guest conductor on a Tuesday, knowing that the first performance is on a Thursday. I just don’t try and think of that.

Crawford: Doesn’t look possible.

01-00:59:29 Runnicles: But that program will come together in three rehearsals.

Crawford: But it works, because it has to.

01-00:59:33 Runnicles: Because it has to.

Crawford: Well, our time is up, and I thank you. That’s a wonderful interview. 52

01-00:59:37 Runnicles: My pleasure.

[End of Interview]

Kip Cranna Interviewed by Caroline Crawford Interview #1: November 12, 2005

Audio File 1

01-00:00:19 Cranna: My title is actually Musical Administrator, whatever that means. And I always like to describe myself as the how- and when- person. My boss, who is currently Pamela Rosenberg, is the person who determines who and what we’re going to present; and it’s my job to figure out how and when we’ll do that; where the performances will fit into the season, and how much rehearsal we can manage or need to manage, how it all fits together into an overall schedule of performances and rehearsals. That’s the core function of my job. And there’s lots of other ancillary material around that, as well. Basically, I’m the person who is in charge of keeping the musical operation of the company going smoothly, from an administrative point of view.

Crawford: Yes, well, let’s go to Doctor Atomic right away. When did you first hear of this American opera project?

01-00:01:14 Cranna: When Pamela Rosenberg was nominated as General Director Designate in 1999, scheduled to take over the company in the fall of 2001, one of the first things I remember her saying was that she wanted to commission an opera from John Adams. And she asked me to introduce her to him. She didn’t know John, but I did, because we had worked on his opera, The Death of Klinghoffer back in 1991, I believe it was. John had conducted that opera here, so I had been able to get to know him fairly well. I arranged a lunch for the three of us, and she popped this question about his doing an opera for us. And John’s initial answer—he’s said this often—was that he didn’t feel he had another opera in him, knowing what a tremendously difficult and long process it is to create an opera. But Pamela was persistent. And she did float this notion of an opera about Robert Oppenheimer. She had established a series of programming initiatives called— I’ve forgot the name now, suddenly.

Crawford: Animating Opera?

01-00:02:33 Cranna: Animating Opera. Thank you. A series of various thematic programming, such as the Berlioz project and the Janácek project and so forth. One of them was a Faust project, doing several operas on the Faust subject. And her idea was to sort of culminate that with an American Faust. And she thought that an opera about Oppenheimer and the bomb would fit that bill very well. John eventually did call back and say, yes, he was intrigued by the idea of an opera on Oppenheimer. 54

Crawford: You say “eventually.” Did he take a few months to think it over?

01-00:03:12 Cranna: Yes, it wasn’t right away; I can’t exactly remember how many weeks went by. But it wasn’t too long. By the middle of 2000, we were well into this project. John did shy away, though, from the concept of calling this a Faust opera. He felt—he has said this often, too—that it would cause too many comparisons to be made that would distract people from the core of the message of the opera. You know, if people are straining to figure out who’s the Marguerite in this story, who’s the Méphistophélès, and so forth—he felt that that would encourage too literal a comparison. So we shied away from using, directly, the subtitle, if you will, of an American Faust.

Crawford: Do you think his initial reticence was at all related to the Klinghoffer controversy?

01-00:04:14 Cranna: No, I don’t think it was that. I think it was the fact— and he has talked about this, too— that when you do an orchestral commission, you pretty much have all of the forces under your own control. You write exactly what you want to write, and it gets performed that way, and gets performed often, usually, in various places. A good example— well, there are many. The Harmonielehre, for example, or the piece that won the Pulitzer Prize, On the Transmigration of Souls. These pieces get done here, there, and everywhere. With an opera, although his operas actually have had pretty good success...

Crawford: I think Nixon in China has had a pretty good performance run.

01-00:05:04 Cranna: Been done in a lot of places. And a lot of places recently.

Crawford: Has Klinghoffer been restaged here, since— I think L.A. cancelled it in ’92?

01-00:05:12 Cranna: Right. The Klinghoffer was a consortium of, I think, six or eight companies. They included San Francisco Opera and the Los Angeles Festival. And along with operas at Lyons and, I think, in Brussels, English National Opera, I believe, BAM did it. And we were at the end of that whole process. It did not go to Los Angeles, ultimately.

Crawford: Yes.

01-00:05:38 Cranna: That was a consortium that was put together from the beginning, so with all these co-commissioners in place, it was assured that this opera would be done in all those places.

Crawford: How smart. 55

01-00:05:50 Cranna: Yes. But there isn’t always that guarantee, and I think that’s one of the frustrating things about opera. Besides the fact that you do yield up a certain control once the score is handed to the singers and the stage director. Things are, to some extent, beyond your control, in terms of how the piece is being interpreted. And that is one, I think, frustration for composers that you don’t have, when you’re dealing in the purely symphonic realm.

Crawford: I hadn’t thought about that. Were other composers’ names raised, in case Adams didn’t come through? Do you remember at all?

01-00:06:26 Cranna: Well, John was definitely Pamela’s first choice, and I had in mind a few that I would recommend if that didn’t work out. But fortunately, we never got that far.

Crawford: Do you want to say who?

01-00:06:36 Cranna: No, I don’t. [laughter]

Crawford: I was sure you wouldn’t. What is it about Adams’ voice that makes it right for opera, that makes it suitable?

01-00:06:46 Cranna: Well, I think John’s music has an immediacy and a kind of vitality that is very distinctly American, and that translates itself very well to the theatrical stage. And I think he has developed a real understanding for what singers sound good. I think that’s extremely evident in Doctor Atomic, where much of the vocal writing is really calculated to present singers in a very dramatic and very effective way. This isn’t always true with composers. They will sometimes treat voices like any other instrument. That often has a negative effect. But John has really developed himself as an opera composer by paying attention to those things that really work for singers. He was very careful, particularly in developing the role of Oppenheimer himself, to tailor that to the extraordinary vocal talents of our wonderful singer...

Crawford: Gerald Finley.

01-00:07:59 Cranna: Who was not known to us before. Gerald had not sung here, and I’m not sure if he performed with John, but John did know about him. Pamela was the one who really felt that he was the person for the job. We had discussed a great many baritones before Gerry was settled on.

Crawford: She suggested him. 56

01-00:08:26 Cranna: Yes. But it was a case of really wanting to make sure that this suited him vocally. And it did.

Crawford: And it did, it was wonderful. Didn’t look a lot like Oppenheimer. But what singer could?

01-00:08:41 Cranna: No, we did not go for that look-alike effect.

Crawford: In that Exploratorium panel that you led, John said about his own style, “Everything sticks to me, whether it is Souza, Ives, or Liberace.” What do you make of that?

01-00:09:03 Cranna: I think John has accomplished a way of being eclectic, without being sort of hodgepodge, which is always a challenge. Eclecticism can be a real distracting element, particularly in an opera, if you get the feeling that it’s thrown together from a variety of inspirations, without any real overarching unifying dimension. But John has found a way to take these various influences, and internalize them and make them all John Adams, which is a very important part of being a composer.

01-00:09:58 Crawford: He is very candid about the fact that he looks for inspiration when he begins a work, I think in this case he mentioned Varèse’s work, which he considered to be a post-holocaust musical landscape.

01-00:10:03 Cranna: Right, and he talked about Stravinsky’s “emergency music”, which I always think more of as being Bernstein’s emergency music, if you will. I sense elements of Leonard Bernstein in some of the real energetic components of this score. But John has acknowledged a debt to Stravinsky there, which I think is also apparent. Again, this kind of very brusque and energetic rhythmic pulsing that is very captivating, and really expresses a kind of a raw tension and drama that’s apparent in the score.

Crawford: I thought there was a lot less of that fierce chromaticism in Doctor Atomic than we’ve been used to.

01-00:10:49 Cranna: There’s certainly more lyricism in Doctor Atomic, I think, than we might’ve been expecting. The music for Kitty, especially, is extraordinarily atmospheric and lyrical. And of course, many people have focused on the wonderful aria that ends Act One for Oppenheimer, “Batter my heart, three person'd God.” Which is an inspiration drawn from, really, the Baroque period. John has mentioned that he really was thinking of a piece like “Dido’s Lament” from 57

Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, when he wrote that. So it was— again, talk about an eclectic sort of source.

Crawford: What would connect the two?

01-00:11:34 Cranna: [There is] this passacaglia structure, where you have this repetition of a long melodic line that forms an underpinning to the whole piece, and creates a kind of underlying tension, while the music unfolds over this underpinning. And that was kind of the effect that John was going for. It’s obviously, in his version, a much more structured— or complicated and structured kind of thing. But that at least was the inspiration.

Crawford: He says he has moved away from minimalism. Could you describe for me where he has gone musically?

01-00:12:24 Cranna: Well, how do you describe that in words? The thing about minimalism when it was first sort of making the scene was that it kind of cast aside the complexities of post-war American contemporary music, with its incredible intricacies of counterpoint, where there are arcanely developed tone rows and other kinds of difficult-to-follow musical structures. Casting all that aside, and going instead for the ultra-simplistic kinds of musical structures— chords, triads, arpeggios— with endless repetition, from which you get the interest and the structure by the gradual accumulation of tiny changes. This was a kind of a repudiation of the old complexities, and insisted on a new way of listening to music, so that you became absorbed in the sameness of it, and listened for these very, very simple, miniscule changes that, by their very rarity, would create interest and sort of form the structure of the piece. John worked in that style, to some extent. But I think he’s gone way beyond that now. And we find only traces of that, I think, in his latest scores, including Doctor Atomic. So we have almost none of the insistent arpeggiation that floats in a single harmony for sometimes minutes on end. Instead, we have a much more complex variety of approaches, with this newfound, in my view, expressive melody, this kind of soaring—how should I say it? A lyricism.

Crawford: Let’s talk about early conversations with John Adams. Were there parameters about cost, about orchestra size and that sort of things?

01-00:14:57 Cranna: Yes. In the contract with John and his publishers, which I worked out—that’s one of my jobs—we spelled out certain guidelines that we wanted to work with. We didn’t want a gigantic orchestra, we wanted our standard-sized orchestra. He ended up using a little more percussion than we really thought, but it was not excessive. We specified how long we thought the show should be. It turned out to be a little bit longer than that. [laughs]

Crawford: What did you say? 58

01-00:15:50 Cranna: Well, we were hoping for two-and-a-half hours; it turned out to be closer to three. But that’s still well within the norm of— Most operas are between three and three-and-a-half hours, in the standard repertoire.

01-00:16:04 Crawford: Is that standard, to say this is what we want? Does that help a composer?

01-00:16:13 Cranna: Oh, sure. Part of that is just a sheer economic factor. The longer a piece is, obviously, the more time it takes to rehearse it. That has a direct effect on everything, in terms of the cost. So these were just really guidelines about how we wanted the structure to be. It was conceived as a piece in two acts. One intermission, which is normal, the standard nowadays. Doesn’t always work out that way, but it certainly did work that way for this piece. And we had relative guidelines about how many characters we thought— how many major characters we thought there should be, how big the chorus would be. We did not want to have to go beyond the requirements of our regular professional chorus that works on a daily basis, because if we had to do that, it really made finding enough rehearsal time extremely difficult. And John was perfectly willing to live within those frameworks.

01-00:17:17 Crawford: Does this help a composer?

01-00:17:18 Cranna: Well, yes, in a way, it does. Because if you give a composer carte blanche, you know, it’s extremely daunting, because you have nothing to hold you back. I think it’s much better to have a certain framework, so you know where to begin. If your resources were unlimited, where would you start, even to conceive your piece? Fortunately, very few companies have unlimited resources— [laughs]

01-00:17:48 Crawford: Orchestral time is just about the most costly factor, isn’t it?

01-00:17:53 Cranna: Actually, yes. Although stage time is costly, too. And the more complicated a production is— which is, of course, beyond the scope of what the composer has to deal with— the more stagehands are required to manipulate the scenery, and change it, and set it up, and take it down, the more that can get into very, very big expenses, before you know it.

Crawford: Did you have a ballpark figure of what could be spent, and is that your domain?

01-00:18:26 Cranna: Actually, in terms of spending on stage stuff, that’s not my domain. Certainly, we’ve had these parameters for what we would spend on the musical side of it. And equally, I know they did on the production side, although that isn’t 59

really my bailiwick. That’s a process that is gone through with the designer and director, as they make their initial plans, and those are often costed out on a very sort of rough basis, and we get an idea of how far over budget it is, and it always is, to start with. And then decisions have to be made about what modifications should be made in the plan to get it within the realm of affordability.

Crawford: What did the production cost?

01-00:19:15 Cranna: I don’t actually know. And I wouldn’t tell you if I did. [laughs]

Crawford: In the early conversations was Peter Sellars brought in?

01-00:19:27 Cranna: Yes. It was, from the beginning, decided— John decided that he wanted to work with his collaborators of his previous two operas, Alice Goodman as librettist, and Peter Sellars as director. And they had quite a lot of talks, which culminated in a meeting with Pamela and me, and the three of them, at which we were given, out loud, a very elaborate, long scenario, which Pamela typed up notes from. And I compared them to mine, and they were— we basically agreed. And that, for a long time, was the only real written scenario of how the opera was going to take shape. That initial plan was much more far- reaching than what we ultimately ended up with. They had really thought of kind of a sweeping music drama that would more or less tell the whole Oppenheimer story, from beginning to end, along with various other connected historical bits about the whole impact on American culture of the development of the bomb. So we would have had the story of the development of the bomb and the first explosion, which became, ultimately, the entire opera, just on that subject.

01-00:20:52 Then the second act would’ve explored the rest of the Oppenheimer story, including his confrontation with Teller and others over the development of the hydrogen bomb, which Oppenheimer opposed. He was accused of being disloyal for that, and ultimately lost his security clearance.

Crawford: Brought down.

01-00:21:12 Cranna: Yes, he was more or less humiliated. Along with that, John and Peter wanted to explore the aftermath of the atomic bomb explosions on American culture— the development of this kind of morbid fascination with what happens from radiation and fallout; the Godzilla movies and the various other sort of sci-fi creations about these monsters that come out of— that result from radiation and all that sort of thing. There was even going to be a kind of an exploration of pop culture in the fifties, with the influence of television on our consumerism. And there was even planned a little side trip to the Bikini 60

islands. As you may recall, some of the first atmospheric testing was on the Bikini atoll. The natives of that area were taken away, and the chief of the tribe of these Bikini people was going to be one of the characters in that scenario, as well.

Crawford: Was this part of Sellars’ desire to have Native American themes?

01-00:22:27 Cranna: Well, he always has had an interest in that kind of thing— sort of looking at other cultures, and looking at the viewpoint of other cultures. And I think that was certainly a goal there. Before long, I think it was realized that this was way too far-reaching, and there was enough material here for a Ring cycle.

More than we could really deal with in just a single evening at the opera. Also, after a year had gone by— a year passed after this initial meeting that I was just describing, during which we never received any actual written libretto material. And after sort of pressing about that, we finally heard from Alice that she felt she couldn’t continue with the project. Her life had changed quite considerably since the days when she had worked with Peter and John on the other two operas, Nixon and Klinghoffer. She’d become an Anglican clergywoman and moved to Britain, and had set up a very busy life there professionally, and just was not finding the time to devote to this project. So at that point, there was a brief period of, I’d say, three or four weeks, when we began thrashing around, looking for another librettist to collaborate with John and Peter. Various names were tossed out. I can’t even remember who we thought about at the time now. I do remember there were some people who had worked on very similar kinds of projects that we looked at. Ultimately, though, Peter and John decided that they would work together, and that Peter would more or less fashion a libretto out of the preexisting material.

Crawford: His first libretto, I think.

01-00:24:19 Cranna: For an opera, at least. Doing this more or less the same way that they had collaborated on El Niňo, which was the Christmas oratorio that John had written a year or two previous. Alice was to have been the librettist for that, as well, but ultimately, wasn’t able to do that. And so Peter assembled texts from a variety of sources. And John found he liked that. He liked working with this assembly of kind of eclectic texts of varying degrees of poetry and prose and various viewpoints.

Crawford: Did John Adams read all the material as well?

01-00:25:03 Cranna: They both read voraciously. And I know that during this period when Alice was still part of the project, Peter kept sending her volume after volume, saying, “Here, read this, read this.” So she was more or less inundated with material that she was supposed to absorb, in order to try to integrate it into a 61

libretto. But John, too, I know, has spoken often about the tremendous amount of reading. They both steeped themselves in the lore of Oppenheimer, the whole culture at Los Alamos, everything that went on there— the politics, the social life, all that kind of stuff. One of the people I talked to who had visited Peter at his home in Southern California had said that he has not just a bookshelf, not just a wall, not just a case of books, but a whole room [laughs] of books devoted to this subject. I find it amazing that he would find the time to do all that.

Crawford: I don’t believe he sleeps—

01-00:26:11 Cranna: Probably not! In any case, Peter then ultimately decided to fashion this libretto from his various readings. And the first draft of that that he showed Pamela and me was actually, literally, a cut-and-paste thing. Of course, he had photocopied [everything]. He didn’t actually [laughs] cut up his books, but he photocopied the various pages of the books that he was interested in excerpting. And he snipped out the little passages, and pasted them into a document. So we had various typefaces, and all the various kinds of material. He read that to us out loud. And I remember him getting extremely emotional as he began to read some of the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, which ultimately became the voice of Kitty Oppenheimer.

01-00:27:11 Crawford: She had been in school with the Oppenheimers, hadn’t she?

01-00:27:30 Cranna: Yes, according to Peter, who did the research, she had been in school with Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother Frank.

Crawford: He had founded the Exploratorium.

Cranna: Yes, after he lost his security clearance. So that was the start of this new approach to the libretto. And I think Pamela and I, at the beginning, had certain qualms about how this could be blended into a unified dramatic work. But John did not. He seemed quite eager to be able to tackle this process. Of course, it’s when you look at something that is literally cut and paste, it sort of is in your face. It kind of strikes you, how varied the source material is. But when it becomes set to music, and with an eye towards unifying it, it becomes a different matter.

Crawford: There were episodes in there that must have been extremely difficult to read without seeing some dramatic presentation. For instance the diet vignette that is a little bit of levity that is much needed. But was there anything in the libretto that you thought wouldn’t work?

Cranna: Well, there were some things that ultimately didn’t stay in the libretto. No specific examples come to mind. But a number of these episodes went on 62

longer. The one thing that I do recall that ultimately went by the by, because of John and Peter’s ultimate feeling about where the opera needed to end— there was going to be an epilogue after the explosions. It was going to be a chorus. And then there was going to be this very surreal epilogue, which was taken from an actual telephone transcript of a conversation between General [Leslie] Groves and a man, Lieutenant Colonel Rea, who was a radiation expert.

01-00:29:47 Cranna: He was reporting on reports that were coming from Japan three or four weeks after both bombs had been dropped there— that people were getting sick. People who had not originally been injured were now getting sick and dying, and having these radiation burns. And General Groves doesn’t believe that. He’s incredulous. And he thinks that this is Japanese propaganda to create sympathy. He says, “People get burns, and they’ll have a scab, and it’ll heal.” He thought about it. But then he does actually ask, when Rea continues to talk about how these people are getting sick, he says, “Is Japanese blood different from ours?” This would’ve been a tremendously bone-chilling conclusion to the opera. But John and Peter ultimately concluded—they never really discussed this, but it was clear they concluded that you can’t really go beyond that blast. There was just nothing else to be said, once you get to that, the actual first release of that destructive bomb blast.

01-00:31:04 Crawford: Understandable. What did you first hear of the music, and what was your impression?

01-00:31:12 Cranna: The very first bits that we heard were parts of John’s MIDI recording, MIDI meaning—I memorized what this means—musical instrument digital interface. It’s basically a computerized version of the score, with a computer simulating the instruments of the orchestra. And when it came to the singing, a computerized version of a piano was plucking out the notes. So the very first things we heard were the very beginning of the opera that John provided us, with his little midi CD. And those were the excerpts that ultimately went onto our website, as we were trying to promote the opera. We had these three little clips on the website, which were the very beginning of the opera. The prelude to the opera; the opening chorus, which is a long story. I can tell you about that. A scientist singing [that] matter can neither be created nor destroyed. And then after that, what John called his Stravinsky emergency music, but what I called the Bernstein, sort of West Side Story, kind of rumble music, which is, oh, a quotation from a book written in 1945 about the development of atomic energy. The idea was that the people in Los Alamos took great pride in what they were doing, and they were excited about the cutting edge research they were doing. They knew they were in this historic race to get this scientific discovery made. And so this opening chorus expresses that kind of tension, and combined pride and anxiety and energy and all that, rolled into one scene. Those were the first three little excerpts that we had to work with. 63

Crawford: And then did you hear “Easter Eve” when it was performed?

01-00:33:11 Cranna: I was, unfortunately, unable to go to those performances; but Pamela Rosenberg did, our general director, and heard them done. It was done at the New York Philharmonic, and it was also done at the BBC Proms. And was broadcast on the BBC. But we were, unfortunately, never able to get a recording of that, [laughs] which was a big frustration.

Crawford: How unusual.

01-00:33:34 Cranna: Well, there were union issues there. It would’ve cost us something like fourteen thousand dollars to get a recording of this twelve-minute scene. And so we decided that was not really affordable. So we never actually heard that sung. In the early stages, though, of promoting the opera, we had another scene, a short scene of Kitty’s, in the first act. The love scene that begins, “Am I in your light?”

One of our young artists in the opera center learned that, so that we had an actual vocal excerpt that could be sung. Elza van den Heever was the singer.

01-00:34:17 Crawford: It was wonderfully sung and so different than in performance, I thought.

01-00:34:18

Cranna: Yes. So that was a great asset, to have a little chunk of actual live vocal music.

Crawford: Did you discuss that with John Adams?

Cranna: Yes. The first of these public events promoting the opera was in October of 2004, an entire year before we did the opera. We decided to do sort of a workshop, quote/unquote “workshop.” We had gotten some grant money to do a workshop in the traditional sense, which is to say, a hashing through of the music, so that the composer and the conductor and the director can kind of get a preliminary look at it, get some feedback and— an actual work-in-progress kind of laboratory. We have done that sort of thing with our previous recent commissions like Streetcar and Dead Man Walking and so forth. And even Dangerous Liaisons. John and Peter don’t work that way, to be blunt. They’re not people who collaborate with a lot of input from a committee of advisors.

But we had the opportunity to do an event, and so what we called a workshop was really more of an audience development event, to which we invited a certain core kind of inner group of potential donors, board members, influential friends of the company. We invited [them] to a very informal Saturday morning event in our rehearsal building. At this we told John and Peter that we would really like to have something sung live. And John 64

originally, he really demurred. But we thought it’s all well and good to play your computer simulations, but they don’t really give the impression of what people are going to hear; we’d love to have a live singer. John thought, and he said, “Well, I loathe hearing my music played on the piano. There’s one thing I can think of that I think I could bear to have sung with just piano accompaniment.” And that was the “Am I in your light?” Then he thought about it a little more, and he said, “Well, actually, there’s part of the opening scene, which is a conversation between Oppenheimer, Teller, and this young scientist named Robert Wilson, who was the one who really was voicing his ethical concerns about the [bomb].”

So John did pick a very specific little chunk of that. He thought he could stand having this sung with just piano accompaniment. So those were the excerpts we chose. And that turned out to be very useful, because it gave people just enough of a hint. Along with the incredible eloquent things that both John and Peter had to say about the subject matter, the importance of it. Peter waxed very eloquent on the whole subject of what opera singers are, and what they do, and how important that is to us. In fact, I was so taken with those remarks that I transcribed them. [see appendix]

01-00:38:05 Crawford: Did you really? That would be something wonderful to have for the history. Could I possibly get those?

01-00:38:17 Cranna: Yes, I will give it to you. Sellars can be truly inspirational. He has the preacher in him, when he gets onto these subjects. And if anyone ever had any doubts about the sort of dignity and value of the role of an opera singer, then these remarks of Peter’s would be enough to lay any fears to rest.

Crawford: They would be immortalized. Well, the issue of amplification was controversial, I gather. How did you handle that?

01-00:38:50 Cranna: Well, it was something that was more or less a given, as far as John was concerned. He has, certainly in his operas, more or less written them around the concept that everything would be amplified. And that whole concept has been— become more sophisticated, I would say, in later years. And certainly, with Doctor Atomic, the whole concept of amplification was taken to a much more sophisticated level than anything we have ever done before. The only other opera we’ve ever done that involved amplification of the singers on a wholesale basis was his other opera, Klinghoffer. And that score involved a fair amount of electronic music, as well. With synthesizers playing in the orchestra. This score, interestingly, did not have any electronic music in it. It had, as you recall, taped music—what we call musique concrète, which is tape recordings of actual physical sounds, like jackhammers, and airplanes taking off and stuff like that. 65

Crawford: So that’s what that is, not sampling music.

1-00:40:03

Cranna: No. That is this notion that was inspired by Varèse, the idea of sounds of the world around you being incorporated into music, or these concrete sounds, if you will. As opposed to sounds that are artificially synthesized.

Crawford: What about the storm as character?

01-00:40:23 Cranna: I think there were some... I’m not actually sure how the sound designer came up with all those sounds. But many of them were from a library of sound effects that John himself, I think, had accumulated. But back to the subject of amplification. From the very first time I ever heard him speak—which I think was back in— somewhere around 1981, before the premiere of Nixon in Houston, John actually did a workshop here in Herbst Theater, with two pianos and singers, which I attended. I remember it very well. I remember the remarks that John made beforehand. And he has said this on subsequent occasions, as well. He doesn’t really like most opera. And one of the things about it that he often doesn’t like is the fact that the singers are so loud. Which is to say that they’re so in your face, in the sense of the actual strain that they are demonstrating to perform at such a high volume, the tremendous amount of physical effort involved in creating the sound... If you think of a Verdi baritone, for example, honking out one of those great tunes. John has felt put off by that and was aiming, in his writing, towards the concept of singers singing with much less effort, a much more natural delivery.

To compensate for the lack of volume that that gives you, then, the amplification would take over. But he’s gone much further with that now. And in the case of Doctor Atomic, everything was amplified. There were microphones in the orchestra, and microphones on the solo singers. And then members of the chorus actually had microphones attached to them at the back, so that they would pick up— they were like walking microphone stands, to pick up the sound of the choristers around them. And many people, including myself, wondered at this; is this really necessary? Does everything have to be louder? Isn’t it loud enough? And as it was explained, John and his sound designer felt that you really can’t create a manipulation, or a kind of a soundscape, unless everything is in the can, [laughs] so to speak. Everything has to be into the system in order to be manipulated. Otherwise, you’re not— you don’t have full control over it all. So that’s why there were microphones everywhere. 66

Crawford: Was this a problem for Maestro Runnicles?

01-00:43:30 Cranna: Initially, yes. Because he was frustrated with the fact that there was so much inconsistency during the rehearsals. He was impatient with the fact that it was taking so long to shake down the process. You know, so that a singer might sound blaring out at one moment, and then another moment was inaudible, just because of the changing quality of the music, the changing location on the stage, and so forth. John had a great deal of equanimity about this. And Donald would complain to him and say, “John, this is just not under control yet. I don’t understand what’s going on.” And John was very calm, and he said, “Listen, nobody freaks out if the lighting designer suddenly flashes a red wash all over the stage, and decides he doesn’t like that, and takes it away. We realize that there’s this experimentation going on and it’s just kind of a trial and error, and this happens all the time during rehearsals, you know. You have all kinds of weird lighting things happen. Or a spotlight will go on and go off, and it’s all a process of just seeing what works and what doesn’t, and what effects you like, and what you don’t. No one gets much upset about that, understanding that it’s all part of the process of developing what you want. And why couldn’t we similarly be patient [laughs] as we wait for the overall effect of the soundscape to be developed?”

Crawford: Is that enabling, in a way? In other words, couldn’t he use singers that perhaps couldn’t fill an opera house with their voices?

01-00:45:0`1 Cranna: Theoretically. Although ultimately, no. Because, you know, even with amplification, the stuff that goes into the system is [laughs] only as good as what the singer is able to actually produce.

Crawford: I remember he used Janice Felty in one of the earlier operas, and I wonder if she could’ve been cast without that amplification. Or would have been heard well enough in a big house.

01-00:45:24 Cranna: Well, it’s arguable that it does enable you to use a singer that otherwise might not be up to it. But that isn’t really, I think, the primary aim. I think one of the things that John wanted to be able to do was to free Peter up to be able to stage his characters in as natural a way as possible, so that they could be singing while turning around and turning upstage, or being anywhere on the stage, and looking in any direction, with a more or less kind of free rein to do that, without having to worry at every moment about, Oh, I have to be aiming my voice right at the audience. And Peter did, I think, make as much use of that freedom as he could. The system was by no means perfect. I’ll be the first to admit that there were still problems. There were times when people weren’t as audible as we would have liked, and other times when they were plenty audible. But it certainly did accomplish what it was set out to do, which was to create this overall integrated sound pattern, soundscape. 67

Crawford: You said something of interest to me. I’ve read that John Adams has said, “Oh, I wish I could play the piano.” And I think most composers compose at the piano, don’t they?

01-00:46:46 Cranna: Many do. Many do.

Crawford: Why his dislike of hearing his music on the piano?

01-00:46:54 Cranna: Well, he really thinks in terms of the overall orchestral palette. And to hear that simulated by an instrument that, in his view, is one-dimensional in tone color as the piano, he just... and you know, with so many rhythmic and tone color effects going on in his score, he just didn’t like the idea of hearing that oversimplified down to what we call a piano reduction.

Crawford: Yes.

01-00:47:26 Cranna: That touches on another interesting point, though, which is that in composing this opera, he worked in a different sort of order of events than we were expecting, and than what is normal, I think even for him. In all the other commissions that we’ve done—and including this one for Doctor Atomic—we specified a date when certain things are due. And the first thing that’s always due is the vocal score, because that’s the thing you need to pass out to the singers so they can start learning and memorizing their music. But actually, the first thing that John produced, and the first thing we got, was the full score. Because that’s what he was creating first. The normal pattern for a composer, as you say, is often to write at the piano. And typically, they’ll write what we often call a short score; which it to say— it’s a little bit kind of like a glorified piano part, with what’s going on in the orchestra reduced to some very simple concepts on one or two staves; and then the vocal line, above that; and then if there are to be certain orchestral effects that he’s already thought of and maybe a little obbligato passage here, he’ll write that in. But in most cases, it’s a score of three, four, five staves that can be played off at the piano by someone who has experience in doing that. From that, then, you can reduce it down to an actual piano part that’s really just a left hand and a right hand at a piano, and the line for the singer. And then that is orchestrated. And that certainly was what was done with more recent operas that we have premiered here.

01-00:49:20 In this case, the orchestration, the full orchestration, came first. John was writing—and I saw him at his desk with these penciled big sheets with all the lines with the orchestral instruments on them, all of the staves. And he was really thinking, then, as he went, in terms of how the entire orchestra would sound. So that came first. Then these penciled manuscript scores were entered into a computer by a technician, which then created the printed-out orchestral scores. From that, then, a piano reduction had to be made. And so the piano 68

reduction was kind of that last thing that we would be getting, the last part of the process.

Crawford: How was that done? All with computers?

01-00:50:12 Cranna: It’s all done with computers nowadays, and the nice thing about that is that you at least get consistency, and there’s much less chance—although it still happens—there’s much less chance of errors of inconsistency; you know, where the full score has a B-flat in the flute part, but its reduction in the piano has a B-natural, and you need to figure out which is correct, and various other mistakes like that are very time consuming to sort out.

Crawford: Is that your work?

01-00:50:43 Cranna: I don’t normally get involved in that directly, but it’s my responsibility to see that these problems are dealt with by our librarians or by the music staff people who actually have to play this music. And they’re very diligent about that, and will keep elaborate lists of errata, even if it’s a...

Crawford: That is a huge assignment.

01-00:51:03 Cranna: Yes, it is. And it can be as simple as, you know, “This part has a dynamic marking, says forte here; and in the piano, it doesn’t say that,” or much more important things, like actual wrong notes. So all those things have to be sorted out. But at least having it all in a computer database, it does reduce, to some extent, the kind of errors that can creep up. But you still have human beings entering this data from the penciled score into the computer, so there is always room for mistakes there. What would happen then is, once this had been done, or once the computer-generated score had been created, that would go back to John to be proofread. And he commented that after he had finished composing—which was a great relief, he could finish the whole score—then he had to spend hours and hours and days and days proofreading it. He said it was like coming down with a hangover after your bachelor party and having to sweep up the floor. [they laugh] He felt it was just, like, such an anticlimax to have to do this tedious, laborious proofreading, after the kind of exhilarating process of actually writing the score.

Crawford: But that would always be the case, wouldn’t it?

01-00:52:18 Cranna: Yes. Someone’s got to do it, and ultimately... well, in some cases, a composer will entrust and just turn over his score to his copyist and say, “Here, proofread against this. My score is correct.” But in John’s case, it’s so intricate and so complicated that he really wanted to be sure it was right. 69

Crawford: Did he ever say how many hours that took him?

01-00:52:43 Cranna: Oh! It was days and weeks.

Crawford: Well, let’s talk about the rehearsal cycle. With such a complicated work, how was it worked out so that everybody rehearsed adequately?

01-00:52:57 Cranna: Well, always the first component in learning the music—at least here in San Francisco—is the chorus. But I should say prior to that, that as soon as we obtained portions of the music in vocal score, we sent them out to the singers, wherever they were around the globe. Gerry, for example, lives in the UK, and various other singers in the cast were here, there, and everywhere. So they were getting their portions of the score piecemeal, you know, as it— whenever we got enough pages accumulated. In some cases, I would ask John if he wanted me to send out things now, and he would say, “Wait till I finish that scene. Don’t send [it now].”

So he would say, “Don’t send two-thirds of the scene, wait until I’ve got the whole scene done,” and then I would send it out. So that was happening by last January. We were getting portions of the score ready to go out. In March, the chorus began learning their music. In group setting here, we start our music rehearsals for the whole season. And they start so early because the chorus has to memorize not just Doctor Atomic, but all the other nine or ten operas of the season. Anything that’s new and unfamiliar takes, obviously, longer, because there isn’t anyone in the group who’s going to know it. If we’re starting to perform Madame Butterfly, most of the people in the chorus would have sung it before, so they don’t take much time to learn it. So that started in March.

01-00:54:50 The orchestral parts were not generated until the summer. And we were fairly concerned, actually, about being able to get them on time to start our rehearsals with the orchestra in late August. But they were available just in the nick of time, really. One of the steps in that process involves getting the string parts bowed, which means that once the computer generates the orchestral parts from the database that has everything else in it, these parts arrive; and then they have to be passed out to the principals of the string sections—first violin, second violin, viola, cello, bass. And they bow those parts. And then they go back to the librarians, who then transfer those bowings into all the other parts for the same section. So that’s a step that has to take place before you can really have an effective rehearsal process.

Crawford: How early did the orchestral players get the score?

01-00:55:53 Cranna: They were getting preliminary rehearsal parts, I think, around the middle of July, if I’m not mistaken. 70

But un-proofread. You know, uncorrected. But they were very anxious to get an idea what challenges they had. And you know, this is something that orchestras like ours are very diligent about. It’s a tremendously competitive world, to get into one of these major opera or symphony orchestras. And once you’re in, it’s a very high standard that is maintained, not only by the organization itself, but by peer pressure. If you haven’t practiced, and it shows in your playing...

Crawford: You’re in trouble.

01-00:56:38 Cranna: People notice, you know, around you. They may not say anything, but people notice. “Well, she hasn’t really looked at that, has she?” So they are very diligent about wanting to... Nobody arrives at a rehearsal for a new piece like this not having looked at it, because they just know that it’s not responsible. There’s so much preparation you need to make on your own, before you get into the group setting and try to work it out. We call these first rehearsals for the orchestra readings. Which is kind of a misnomer. It suggests that everyone’s sight reading. But rarely, they are. In most cases, they have practiced a lot at home on their own, and this is the first chance for the orchestra to play through the music together.

Crawford: It must be very tough, not being able to hear it beforehand.

01-00:57:29 Cranna: Yes.

Crawford: So then the tech rehearsals were going on early, also.

01-00:57:35 Cranna: Yes. I’m going to consult my actual schedule to— so I don’t say things in the wrong order here.

Crawford: This is the nuts and bolts of rehearsing, interesting to people who don’t know how it is done.

01-00:57:47 Cranna: Right. [pages rustling] Just turning back in time here. We had had many discussions about how the rehearsals should be organized. And in a meeting that I think took place last December—or some time last fall—with Peter, we worked out a detailed schedule of how we would organize the final rehearsals for the show. And we actually added some additional rehearsals that Peter felt were really essential. Onstage rehearsals, to get the show ready. And he decided that he would like to begin work—before the actual soloists got here—with the chorus and the supers, which is to say, the non-singing performers. The traditional concept of a super is a spear carrier, a soldier or something like that, who just stands there onstage and doesn’t sing anything. And also the dancers, because dance was going to be an important element in 71

the artistic concept of this show. So he decided he would begin working with them early. And we started, actually, on the 8th of August, with all these people, even though the principal singers themselves were not meant to start until the 17th of August. So that meant that the chorus had to be ready, knowing their music cold, by that early part of August.

The orchestra itself didn’t convene to begin rehearsing the music together until the 23rd of August. Which was still quite early on, in operatic terms, for an October 1st premiere. That’s about a six-week advance on the opening; whereas for a normal, standard rep opera—you know, like a Traviata or a Trovatore or something like that—two-and-a-half to three weeks is usually the maximum.

Crawford: That’s what I thought. Well, let’s stop here. We’re an hour in.

[Audio file 2]

02-00:00:00 Crawford: We were talking about rehearsal cycles, so continue, if you would.

02-00:00:03 Cranna: Yes. So as I was saying, the chorus, orchestra and supers began around the 8th of August. Prior to that, we had, of course, been sending out the music to our principals. And in fact, the very last pages of the vocal score did not go out to them till around the third week in July. And so we knew that, whereas almost all the singers would be very well prepared with Act One, that a lot of them would not have Act Two fully under their belt, in terms of the way that we would normally expect. Typically, a singer is expected, contracted, to show up knowing the part cold, even if it is the first time they’ve done the show. We knew that was a little unrealistic with this opera, because of the process it had taken to get the vocal score to them. But they all did show up on August 17th, and we began rehearsals in our rehearsal building, which is right next door to us here. It’s a wing of Davies Symphony Hall. And the first four days were devoted to really just getting familiar with the music, singing through it and hashing it out. Peter Sellars was very happy to let that happen. Which was a great relief, because normally, the very first day or two of rehearsals is a big sort of wrestling match between the director and the conductor, both of whom want to get right at the artists. Obviously, the very first thing has to be at least one short musical run through. But if it is a standard rep piece that everybody knows, or most people do, then the director wants to dive in immediately and insist on using up all the remaining time with his staging rehearsals.

Crawford: Isn’t he unusually musical, for a director?

02-00:01:55 Cranna: Peter is a very musical person. And he understands very, very deeply the requirements of a singer, and what they need in order to be able to do what they do. He supports them, I think, a great deal. Tries to find solutions, 72

dramatically and staging-wise, that help the singer accomplish what they have to do vocally.

02-00:02:22 So it was a great benefit to have these four days of just the singers really getting to know their music. Not only in a group setting, but also coaching with our wonderful music staff, who had learned the score and were ready to play it off of them.

Crawford: Who did the coaching on this?

02-00:02:39 Cranna: We had three coaches from our regular coaching staff. Adelle Eslinger and Carol Isaac; and although he wasn’t originally slated to play the piece, he did volunteer his services, and it was greatly appreciated, Paul Harris. And then John Paar, who is our head of music, and is here with us on a regular basis, also worked on the score, in a coaching basis.

Crawford: Had the singers already worked with their private coaches?

02-00:03:11 Cranna: The singers, yes, who come from various parts of the globe, will have, typically, somebody that they work with on learning a score. Some singers... It depends. Some of them are very facile pianists, and basically play the part for themselves as they learn it. But most hire someone to coach with them, just so that they really have that experience of getting it under their belt before they get here.

Crawford: Is there a certain amount of nervousness when they approach a new work?

02-00:03:42 Cranna: Oh, yes. Not as much as you might expect, though. The fact is that opera singing is— like playing in an opera orchestra, opera singing is extremely competitive. And the concept of the sort of temperamental or lazy singer is very much the exception that proves the rule, which is that they’re normally very conscientious, very professional. It’s really a job, like any other. And you have to show up on time and be prepared and [laughs] do what you’re told, and be professional. And most singers are very much that way. Particularly American singers, because it’s so competitive, you don’t make it in this world nowadays, unless you really are thoroughly trained in technique, so that you know how to learn complex music; you know how to count, you know how to memorize, you know how to work things out, so that they stay in your brain.

Crawford: That’s interesting. The singer who doesn’t read music is almost nonexistent now. I remember working with some who couldn’t read at all.

02-00:05:00 Cranna: You will still have a few like that, you know. But this concept has more or less gone by the board, of the raw talent out of the church choir, who just has 73

a glorious voice and is suddenly discovered, and catapults to stardom. The world is so competitive now that, unless you are a Luciano Pavarotti-type voice, you’re just not going to make it. You are so far behind in all the skills you need—sight reading, music theory, your languages, all the diction. There’s so much catching up that you would need to do that unless you were one of the three or four most glorious voices of the universe, you just are not going to make it. So you have to have this set of skills. You know, natural gifts are part of it, but you have to have, then, this training to back that up, in order to really make it in the world. So that’s a very long answer to the question of, Do singers get nervous about new music? Obviously, it’s different from singing The Marriage of Figaro. But still, they’re amazingly matter-of-fact about it, when you get into a room with singers who are singing in public, or at least in an open setting, a very difficult score for the first time. But they’re tremendously businesslike about it. You don’t see a lot of excuse- making or a lot of sort of shrinking-violet attitudes. They’re mostly just there: “This is my music; I’ve learned it; I’m singing it. This is what I do.”

Crawford: This is kind of off subject, but the question of traveling and performing so much. It’s a different era for singers, isn’t it?

02-00:06:39 Cranna: It is. Particularly in Europe, of course, where almost every European capital is an hour away from every other one. And that has really changed the way opera singers work. It’s a little bit less that way for us here on the West Coast, where still, we’re anywhere from six to twelve hours from most of the other major operatic centers. But still, it does mean that singers flit around the world from one engagement to another much more rapidly than they used to. And the temptation to overbook oneself is ever great.

Crawford: Are the agents pretty good about that with young singers?

02-00:07:24 Cranna: Most are. You know, there are always the unscrupulous ones whose eye is on the buck, and will suggest their artists for inappropriate roles too early in their careers, just because they know there’ll be a big fee attached, of which they get a percentage. Most agents are conscientious, and realize that if they drive their young singers too far too fast too soon, that it ultimately shortens their career, and shortens their percentage, as well.

Crawford: Yes, good. Good! What were the problems that came up during the rehearsal period? I know you lost Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in July, who was to sing Kitty. That must’ve been a huge concern.

02-00:08:09 Cranna: It was. It was not a total surprise, however. We were bracing for the fact that we might lose Lorraine, because we knew that she’d been having difficulties with her back. And we knew that she had cancelled some engagements because of these troubles. Lorraine is a sort of notoriously private person, and 74

does not like to reveal personal details about her health. But we were aware that there was this possibility. John Adams, who knows Lorraine quite well, had been talking to her directly. And she had said all along that she was really bound and determined to do this opera. I mean, the part was written for her. And she in fact, had cancelled some engagements earlier on in the spring, specifically with the idea that she needed time to recover, so that she would be in shape to come here and do Doctor Atomic. But she realized that that was not going to be possible. And fortunately, she didn’t wait till the ultra last minute. Pamela Rosenberg had been looking around for alternatives to this process. We did have someone in mind as a cover for Lorraine. Which is a different thing from a singer to replace Lorraine, if you understand what I mean. It’s one thing to have Lorraine rehearsing and performing, and have an artist available to step in in an emergency for a rehearsal or a performance or something like that. It’s another thing for Lorraine to be out of the picture and to have another artist completely.

Crawford: That would be a different artist.

02-00:09:50 Cranna: Yes. It’s a different artist. That’s just the reality of the business. And so when it became clear that that was going to happen, we began to focus attention on Kristen Jepson, who we already knew was going to be singing the role of Kitty Oppenheimer in the next production, next performances of this opera, which will be taking place in 2007, in Amsterdam. But she, of course, had not bothered to start learning [laughs] that music yet. And she was going to be here to sing the role of Edwige in Rodelinda. We had, in fact, asked her— knowing that Lorraine was having health difficulties, we had asked her if she’d be willing to just be the cover for Lorraine. And she didn’t want to do that because it meant that she’d not only have to sing the Rodelinda, but then stay on for a few weeks beyond, and this would completely eat up the only free time that she was going to have, I think, in the entire year. And she had carefully blocked out this time period so that she would have some time off. And so it became clear then, when we lost Lorraine for sure, that the solution was to take Kristen out of Rodelinda completely, which relieved her of that obligation of preparing that opera, and switch her into Doctor Atomic. That was more or less a situation that she was able to live with, and it meant that she would get this preparation here for the role that she’d be doing later, in the Netherlands. So we were extremely fortunate that she was willing to do that.

02-00:11:45 Cranna: And interestingly, we found that although the role had been really tailored to Lorraine, there wasn’t any real tinkering that needed to be done to suit Kristen. I talked with her in an interview about that, wondering what sort of little private discussions she had with John about altering this or that to suit her, and she said it wasn’t necessary. She said, “It was as if it had been written for me.” 75

Crawford: Really? Just fit her voice perfectly?

02-00:12:14 Cranna: Exactly. It suited her just fine. This is actually one of the ironies that you find, I think, true throughout the history of music. I remember reading about young Mozart, when he was twelve or fourteen or whatever, when he composed Lucio Silla for Italy, and he was told, “It’s all very well for you to start writing the recitatives before you get here, but don’t think of writing the arias until you’ve met the singers.”

0:12:40 Cranna: It was, even in those days, thought very beneficial to write specifically for the voices you were dealing with. But the irony is that once a composer has done that, these vocal parts that are written with a specific singer in mind very often turn out to be perfect vehicles for lots of other singers. And that was certainly the case here.

Crawford: And that was serendipity.

02-00:13:08 Cranna: Yes, indeed.

Crawford: Either you or Pamela Rosenberg said, “I sometimes feel like a referee.” I know that John would say things to her, to take to Peter. He didn’t want to go directly to Peter Sellars.

02-00:13:25 Cranna: Well, to some extent, I suppose we both, being in the administrative realm, have that responsibility. It is your job to facilitate and to get information conferred, and to some extent, referee. I kind of enjoy that part of it. The aspect of my job, in the general sense that brings that out is the realm of cuts. Which wasn’t, obviously, a factor with Doctor Atomic. But with most standard repertoire operas, whether it’s, you know, The Marriage of Figaro or La Traviata or this year we’re doing The Maid of Orleans, [laughs] of Tchaikovsky. You always have to decide what music you’re not going to do, because you always cut something out. And that process of deciding has to be facilitated. And so I do that, and it’s a referee process, if you like.

Crawford: You decide in detail about cuts?

02-00:14:29 Cranna: Well, I don’t make the decision, ultimately, but I have to make sure that this decision gets made. And it often involves a lot of back and forth between the conductor and the director, who will have different ideas about how it should be done. Often, the director and conductor have different goals in mind, in making cuts. The director wants to keep all the dramatically salient bits, and cut out what he views as sort of useless musical repetition; and the conductor wants to keep all the musically beautiful bits, and sometimes cut out what he thinks is useless recitative and that sort of thing. 76

Crawford: So you might be the go-between.

02-00:15:18 Cranna: Yes. And sometimes an advocate. You know, if I feel that one person’s position is valid and supportable, I’ll try to make the other side accept that, as well.

Crawford: Are you important! Because in this day of the director, the balance is different than it used to be.

02-00:15:38 Cranna: It used to be that the conductor was more or less God, and whatever he said went. It isn’t like that anymore. It has to be much more of a collaborative process now.

Crawford: So in this case, did you run into specific things like that, or did Sellars and Adams pretty well balance each other out?

02-00:15:59 Cranna: Well, John and Peter work out pretty much any differences they have on their own, and don’t really need a go-between or a referee, mostly. The process is one that they’ve worked on together over the years.

Crawford: Were they both at rehearsals? And did they have the notes process and so on?

02-00:16:23 Cranna: Yes. Certainly, they were—John, of course, didn’t hang around every single staging rehearsal with piano. But he was at all the orchestra rehearsals. And Peter, too. This is actually one thing that was quite extraordinary. When we first began the orchestra rehearsals, which were out at the Presidio, in a giant hall that we rent out at the Presidio...

Crawford: Where is that?

02-00:16:46 Cranna: It’s called the Herbst International Exhibition Hall, which is a wonderfully big facility, with natural light and plenty of space for the orchestra to spread out. Not only was John Adams there with the score, following along, but Pamela Rosenberg was there with the score; Peter Sellars was there with the score; the choreographer, Lucinda Childs was there [laughs] following the score. And everyone was so intent on getting familiar with the music that they were there from the very beginning, watching these rehearsals. They were actually a bit rough at the beginning, because the score is difficult. It’s not just a question of just learning to play the notes, but the orchestra needs to take a while to find out what other parts of the orchestra are doing. You might have a very intensely syncopated passage, where you think you’re supposed to be playing together with the basses who are on the other side of the room; and you have to learn, Oh, no, we’re offset against them, and it’s not wrong, what I’m hearing. And you can only really familiarize yourself with that by the actual 77

going through it. Many times, it isn’t a question of just reading what’s on the page, it’s a question of listening to what else is happening around you. That was a fascinating process, to see all that fit together.

02-00:18:20 John did make quite a few changes in the score, as we went through that process. Everything from deciding, Well, that gong is too loud, let’s have a different gong at that place...

Crawford: And those he made on the spot.

02-00:18:41 Cranna: Yes, or in some cases, Donald Runnicles, the conductor, would make specific inquiries, or sometimes suggestions, if he thought that there should be a little caesura—that is to say, a pause at a certain place, to ensure that everybody would be together on an attack.

Crawford: How does that work out?

02-00:19:06 Cranna: Well, John is very open to discussion about things like that, that facilitate the actual playing of the score. I mean, a conductor is not going to say, “Hey, John, I think you should have B-flats in this bar instead of D-flats.” He’s not going to do that. But technical things that, from a conductor’s point of view, will facilitate actually making it sound the way it’s supposed to sound. John was very open to that kind of input, and would maybe find a way to re-notate something, if maybe a rhythm was written complicated, with rests and notes and so on. Sometimes you can get the exact same rhythmic effect by writing notes without the rests, and just putting staccato on them, so that they’re short— it’s easier to read, and will come off sounding the same, but with a lot more ease on the part of the orchestra, and much more chance of it all being precisely together. These are all things that are worked out in that whole process.

Crawford: So Donald Runnicles was present insofar as he could be.

02-00:20:17 Cranna: Oh, yes. He was not here for those first four days, interestingly, for the sort of hashing through the musical rehearsals with the singers; but he arrived after the singers had been at it for four days, kind of getting the music under their belts.

Crawford: I am interested in how much other people were consulted. I think Richard Rhodes [The Making of the Atomic Bomb] wanted to be sitting there all the time. When I heard him speak on the opera panel, I could tell he didn’t want to miss a thing. He is very musical, isn’t he? 78

02-00:20:53 Cranna: I’m not sure. I got to know Richard fairly well in the process of this. I don’t know how much of a musical background he had, but he seemed to have a very fine understanding of how the needs of a drama require a certain amount of poetic license, with regard to the material. Which a bit surprised me. He’s such a renowned scholar; knows, it seems like, everything there is to know about this period. And one would expect someone like that to be constantly raising objections, “Oh, he never said this,” or “It wasn’t like that,” or “She wasn’t like this.” But he had no real qualms about that, knowing full well that this is opera, it’s not journalism.

Crawford: That’s right. And then the American Physical Society got involved in an interesting way.

02-00:21:50 Cranna: They did. I alluded to that earlier, and I’m glad you brought it up, because I mentioned the controversy over the opening chorus of the opera. Which is something that Peter had pulled out of context from the introduction to a book that he quoted extensively, called Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, written by a guy named Henry DeWolf Smyth, and is often called the Smyth Report, published in 1945. And from the introduction to this, Peter pulled out a couple of phrases that sort of resonate, I guess, with those of us who may remember 19th-century attitudes towards physics. The two lines, “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but only changed in form. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but only changed in form”—these two phrases were quoted in the introduction to this book, as kind of a statement of what used to be thought was true of the physical world, until Einstein came along and created, with his theory of relativity and the equation E=MC2, a description of how much energy is created when an atom is split. And the paragraph from which these two quotes were taken goes on to say, “We now know that these two concepts are really a part of a much larger concept, under which, under certain circumstances, energy can be changed into mass, and mass can be changed into energy.” It’s in fact, mass being changed into energy which is what happens when a nuclear explosion takes place.

Well, I mentioned before the cut-and-paste nature of the libretto that Peter had done. So he had snipped out just these two little sentences from the De Wolf Smyth Report and pasted them onto a page. John Adams was actually not aware until much, much later, after he’d set this text to music, that it was pulled quite out of context. It was pointed out to him at that October workshop in 2004, by a physicist from UC Berkeley, that this is actually incorrect; that these two concepts have been proven to be wrong, were proven by Einstein to be wrong. They were the so-called “laws of conservation of mass and energy.” And John was told that it would be misleading to start the opera this way. He didn’t make any changes, though, because he thought, Well, this is a quotation from a period piece. 79

And as such, you know, one need not footnote it or try to explain it in modern terms. But in fact, it is so much out of context that John ultimately decided, after quite a lot of pleading from both Pamela, who is on the board of advisors of the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley, and Professor Marvin Cohen from UC Berkeley’s physics department.

Crawford: Was Marvin Cohen the physicist who suggested the subject, that the focus be Oppenheimer, because of his Berkeley connection?

02-00:25:32 Cranna: It was someone else, a member of our board, who had actually— who has Berkeley connections, who suggested the whole concept to Pamela. He’ll be annoyed with me for having forgotten his name. [Michael Harrison, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley].

02-00:25:53 Cranna: In any case, both he and Pamela had tried to persuade John that, You don’t want a controversy over the truth or [laughs] untruth of your opening words to distract people from the overall effect of your opera. Pamela wanted John to really understand her concern that people get distracted by this technicality in the quotation that starts the opera. And so John ultimately, after we’d started rehearsals, finally decided, “Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe I should change those opening words.” But it was a much more complicated thing, at that point, than it would otherwise be, because the chorus had already learned this music. And there wasn’t much you could do to alter it, without upsetting the whole apple cart. You know, if he had completely rewritten it into a passage that, say, had nine more bars in it than before, not only would the chorus have to relearn it, but the orchestra parts would have to be recopied. It would have to be reorchestrated into a large compositional process that would take a long time and cost some money. And we were already onstage, really, rehearsing, at this point. So John’s solution was a kind of a quickie fix, which was to keep all the music exactly as it was, but to just change the words, and in a few places, add in a few extra notes for the chorus; so that instead of saying, “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but only changed in form,” the chorus was actually singing, “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but matter can be turned into energy.” This took a few more notes, but it could be all fit within the same number of bars.

Crawford: Was it worked in?

02-00:27:55 Cranna: We rehearsed that, and everybody hated it. [laughs] It was unpoetic, it wasn’t— it was kind of a lame way of trying to say this. It was not effective. And John decided he would go back to what he’d originally written for now, but when the opera is redone in Amsterdam and in all the various many other places it’ll be done after that, he will by then have revised that opening chorus, so that it satisfies the concerns. 80

Crawford: Well, that proves prima le parole poi la musica, [first the words then the music] doesn’t it?

02-00:28:27 Cranna: I guess, yes.

Crawford: Were there other people who got involved, like the American Physical Society? Were there others you’d asked to be consultants?

02-00:28:38 Cranna: No, very few—We certainly didn’t. As I mentioned, Peter and John are not collaborators of that kind who, you know, I think like to have a lot of input.

Crawford: You said that.

02-00:28:52 Cranna: Certainly, in the process when they were doing research, a lot of people did chime in with information. You know, “Oh, my uncle lived at Los Alamos, and had all these stories.” And I did refer a lot of people to John and Peter, who contacted us with material like that, historical background information. But when it came to actually writing the opera, I think they pretty much did that on their own.

Crawford: In what sense do you think that he wrote the music of the bomb?

02-00:29:26 Cranna: Well, both Peter and John have said [this]in various ways, Peter saying some events are so horrible that they’re beyond the means of art to express anything about them. He’s mentioned the holocaust in that context, and the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And John felt that anything he did musically to actually try to portray a bomb going off would be immediately a cliché. There’s just nothing that you could do orchestrally that wouldn’t be laughable.

Crawford: Yes, trivializing, in a way.

02-00:30:07 Cranna: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Again, it’s something that’s beyond the scope of art to try to express. And particularly after they had dumped the idea of this epilogue that I referred to, this bone-chilling phone conversation with General Groves, I think it was an idea of focusing on kind of the microseconds before the bomb goes off. Peter talked often about what music can do, and what John’s music does is to try to explore the seconds within the seconds, and the minutes within the minutes. So time slows down—as it so often does in opera—time slows down as we got closer to the end of the opera. And the last four minutes before the blast take something like twenty minutes to actually perform, as we just get deeper and deeper into the emotional lives of the people, and into these split seconds of reality, before our world changed. 81

02-00:31:10 As a complete parenthetical, I often point out, when I talk about opera as an art form, that it is one in which time simply stands still, and we have to expect that. And no matter how urgent matters there are that need to be tended to offstage, there’s still plenty of time to sing about them first. That’s just convention. That someone’s mother could be burned at the stake, but there’s still time to sing an aria about [they laugh] how angry that makes you— before you go off to rescue her. And so that’s a principle that is in action as we get closer and closer to the end of the opera. And then John and Peter never really actually articulated exactly what they’re saying is happening at the end of the opera. But you do have this wonderful feeling that this world- changing event that’s going to happen in the next split second is only the beginning. We see that wonderful image of people with their [heads] upraised from their prone position, looking, and that incredible light bathing their faces and... They’re looking into the future; into the beyond of this moment—this is going to change everything—into the future, beyond that. I think it’s a wonderful solution to the ending of the opera, because it leaves many questions unanswered, but still has a tremendously profound statement to make.

Crawford: I’m guessing the audience was listening for a big blast, however inappropriate.

02-00:32:57 Cranna: Right.

Crawford: Well, let’s talk about the future of the opera. I’m unaware that opera companies usually commit to new operas before they’re heard, but in this case, several companies other than the co-producers have taken the opera, isn’t that right?

02-00:3316 Cranna: Yes. It is not unusual nowadays for a commission, for more than one company to get involved. And we originally knew, when Pamela first started getting this project going, that Bill [William] Mason, who runs Chicago Lyric Opera, was interested; and also Pierre Audi at the Netherlands Opera was interested. Both people that she knows well, and trusts, and likes to work with. And we did contemplate the idea of what we would call a co-commission. Which is to say that all three companies would commission John to write this opera. We would all three be called co-commissioners, and John would get some money from all three of us for writing the opera. [There was] quite a lot of discussion about that. John ultimately pulled back and he said, “I don’t think I want to do that. I think I would just like to have this opera commissioned by San Francisco.” He didn’t actually say it, but I’m quite sure that one of his thoughts behind that was the idea that he didn’t want too many cooks in the kitchen. You know, having to please one company, Pamela and Donald, and to a lesser extent myself was one thing, but to have, you know, the managements that he doesn’t know, at two other companies, also involved. 82

Crawford: And they would be, of course.

02-00:34:47 Cranna: Of course. Because they would be paying the bills. He decided, Better to work with just one company. So he forfeited a little bit of money that way, because a commission from one company is obviously less than a commission from three. But he gained a little more, I would say, artistic [laughs] control. But we did proceed with the idea of a co-production. Which is to say that all three companies own this physical production. And when it gets done by yet other companies, then the three co-producers will share in that income.

So we already know that the opera is going to go to various other places. Not all of them, I think, have fully committed, but it’s certainly been spoken of as going to English National Opera; a possibility it’ll be done in Torino, Italy; possibly in Munich. The Tokyo Symphony has expressed their interest in doing it in concert. And we believe the Metropolitan Opera is pretty certain to be doing it. Speight Jenkins in Seattle has expressed interest. So wherever this production goes, in these various other places, then we will get at least a little bit of income from that. We do not get any income from the opera itself. That is to say, we do not, as an opera company, own this opera. We get no royalties from its being done anywhere else. The only income that we would get is from renting our physical production, our scenery and costume.

Crawford: I see.

02-00:36:29 Cranna: John and Peter are the owners of the opera, together with their agent— with their publisher, I should say, Boosey and Hawkes. And so the income from other performances will go to them, as creators of the opera. So that works out nicely for them.

Crawford: One thing I passed over was rights. And I wanted to ask you about that, because that is your domain, isn’t it? And it’s got to be very tough dealing with materials.

02-00:36:54 Cranna: The whole issue of rights is a very important one, when you’re using any kind of adapted material. Obviously, the only time you don’t get into any rights issue is when a story is completely the creation from the mind of a librettist, and the words that he writes are his, and obviously, when the composer writes all original music. But that’s pretty rare. Almost always, going back to the early days of opera, almost all operas are derived from some pre-existing literary source. Either a drama or a story, a novel, something. In this case, of course, it was a whole variety of sources, some of them in the public domain, like this Smythe Report that I mentioned. Others not. Including the memoirs of Edward Teller; poetry of Muriel Rukeyser; English translation, by Christopher Isherwood, of the Bhagavad Gita; English translations of the poetry of Baudelaire. 83

Crawford: So translators have the rights to their work.

02-00:37:59 Cranna: Yes, works that are old, like Baudelaire or the Bhagavad Gita, they’d be perfectly legal for us to quote in their entirety, in French or in Sanskrit. But in English translation, of course, you have a modern translator who still owns his translation. And so the rights to all that had to be negotiated. Fortunately, not by me. In some cases, I have, in the past, been centrally involved in getting this process going. Like securing the rights to A Streetcar Named Desire, for example; I was involved in that process. And similarly, in working on getting the rights to the book Dead Man Walking. I did not have to spearhead that process in this case, because Boosey and Hawkes, thank God, undertook that on behalf of John, who had already had that kind of process set up for previous works of his, including El Niňo.

Crawford: Terrific that they took that on.

02-00:39:01 Cranna: They took it on. And it was a great blessing to me that they did. Their legal department handled that. And it was complicated, of course, because with all these various sources, you have various publishers. In some cases, it’s a member of the family, as it was with Edward Teller or with Muriel Rukeyser. In some cases, it’s somebody at the publisher’s. It’s a different story in each case, in terms of what their interest is, what their demands will be, what their limitations will be, how much money they’ll want, whether they’ll want any interest in future performances, like what we would call residuals. So a complex series of negotiations went on, of which I was not a part. [laughs] Fortunately. So I don’t even know how much Boosey had to pay [laughs] to obtain all those rights. But they did. And so the way it works, then, is when you contract for something like this, the creative artists have to warrant that the material that they are using— rights for that material have been obtained.

02-00:40:11 Cranna: So that we as the producers are absolved of any guilt in any wrongdoing, if someone should come forward and say, “Hey, you quoted my material illegally.” We were not liable there, because it’s been warranted that this material has been licensed.

Crawford: Have you ever run into anything in the way of material that’s just prohibitive, in terms of money?

02-00:40:37 Cranna: Well, yes. I don’t know the details of this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some things that Peter wanted to quote that they ultimately couldn’t get the rights for.

Crawford: But the unclassified documents wouldn’t give them any trouble, would they? Are those something he had to obtain? 84

02-00:40:51 Cranna: No, Peter did locate a lot of information that had only recently been declassified under the Freedom of Information Act. But you know, stuff like that, no, you don’t need to get the rights for that.

Crawford: Well, the last area for discussion would be the reception. Talk about the critical reception of Doctor Atomic.

02-00:41:2 Cranna: All right.

Crawford: And the performance.

02-00:41:13 Cranna: Yes. The opera, of course, generated a tremendous amount of interest before its premiere. And San Francisco Opera did its best to stir that up. Part of it, by creating a whole series of events throughout the community that related in one way or another to the opera and its subject. And I was fairly centrally involved in that, with a whole list of what we called ancillary activities that happened in places like UC Berkeley, the Exploratorium, Stanford, the Commonwealth Club, the Jung Institute. Here, there, and everywhere, there were events happening , which were mutually beneficial for the organizations involved. You know, if we collaborate with the Exploratorium, we’re getting people who are coming to hear about opera that normally are more interested in the sciences. There are people coming to the Exploratorium who are more interested in opera. And so there’s this cross-fertilization that goes on that’s very beneficial throughout the community.

Crawford: Who put those things together?

02-00:42:22 Cranna: Mostly me, with a lot of help from outside organizations. And some of them came to us with collaboration ideas in mind. And in some cases, it was just me calling them up and saying, “Hey, I think there’s a way we could work together, and it would be fun.”

Crawford: Is there any one of those that you would pick out as being especially fruitful?

02-00:42:47 Cranna: Well, everything we did with UC Berkeley and with the Exploratorium was, I would say, extremely helpful. We had a very exciting event down at Stanford, at the Institute for International Studies there. And there was none that I would say was a waste of time. They all had some value in sort of getting the word out to the community that this was a project worth paying attention to. And then of course, we did a PR blitz of some extraordinary proportions.

Crawford: Yes, you did. 85

02-00:43:20 Cranna: We did a press conference in New York in August; we did another one here in San Francisco, and really beat the drum to try to get press attention. Lots of articles appeared in advance of the opera. There was, I think, a six- or eight- thousand word article in The New Yorker about this, which was extraordinary. And that really helped. There is always a danger in that this can backfire on you. If you hype the piece too much, then the critics will come to the premiere with their knives sharpened, ready to hack it to pieces. That did not happen, for the most part. I think the critics were mostly quite receptive to the piece on its own, without either hating or being overly influenced by the advance publicity. And I tend to think that I agree with almost all the reviews. The ones who loved it glowingly, I thought, Well, yes, exactly. And there were those who had great problems with the structure of the piece; and in most cases, I understood those reservations. And I think to some extent, the degree to which critics liked the piece was related to the degree to which they were able to cope with the eclectic nature of the libretto, and to some extent, its non-narrative features. Particularly the fact that Kitty Oppenheimer is a kind of an iconic figure, who is perhaps not fully three-dimensional. She is basically Muriel Rukeyser, in the body of Kitty Oppenheimer. One of the scholars at Stanford pointed out that the emotions that are expressed by Kitty are very unlike what she was known to have been like.

Crawford: Yes. I thought so, too. She was known as a very difficult woman.

02-00:45:26 Cranna: I could only counter, “Well, that’s the nature of opera. It’s not a documentary medium.” And the fact was that Peter Sellars fell in love with Muriel Rukeyser, and put her in his opera. [laughs] And he needed some character to put her into, and it was Kitty Oppenheimer. It was as simple as that.

Crawford: Well and good, and I like the way that you received the critical reception, “Exactly right.” There were negative reviews.

02-00:45:55 Cranna: Obviously, overall, the gigantic preponderance of opinion was that this is a very important piece. Whether you love it or hate it, it was an extremely important artistic statement, and we know it’s going to have a continuing impact that’ll resonate throughout the rest of this decade, and hopefully, well beyond. It won’t be heard in 2006, because Peter Sellars is busy doing the operas of Mozart, to celebrate his 250th birthday. So we have to wait till 2007, before the reverberations continue.

Crawford: Will that be important, to have Peter Sellars attached to future productions? Is he willing to commit to restagings?

02-00:46:43 Cranna: That’s a very interesting question. As you know, there have been productions of Nixon in China that Peter has not been involved with. And I wouldn’t be 86

surprised if ten years from now, there will be productions of this opera that don’t involve Peter, that some other director will do them, and take a very different approach to presenting them.

02-00:47:05 Cranna: I think he can only maintain a proprietary connection to the piece for so long, before his career takes him to so many other projects that he’ll have to relinquish a connection with it.

Crawford: Is there a standout moment in the opera for you? One character that’s fleshed out most fully?

02-00:47:31 Cranna: Well, I think Oppenheimer himself is a fascinating figure, as shown in this opera. I think it’ll only be a matter of months before we’ll start hearing “Batter My Heart” as an aria sung in auditions, because it is so very effective. But I actually think that Kitty’s pieces, as well, are very, very effective for what they do. They express this underlying anxiety about what was about to happen; this fear for the future. And as Kitty sings often, “fierce peace.” She demands fierce peace. Meaning one that is strong and insistent, and not just the absence of war. To me, those are tremendously powerful statements, and I think they’ll be recognized as such.

Crawford: Good. I think that’s a fine place to end. Thank you.

02-00:48:39 Cranna: Okay.

[End of Interview]

Ian Robertson Interviewed by Caroline Crawford Interview #1: October 26, 2006

Begin Audio File 1 10-26-2006.mp3

01-00:00:00 Crawford: I am sitting with Ian Robertson, director of the San Francisco Opera Chorus, and we’re going to record this interview for The Making of an American Opera Project: Doctor Atomic. What you hear is Mr. Robertson playing from the score for Doctor Atomic. Good morning.

01-00:01:13 Robertson: Morning.

Crawford: Let’s start with your history with Doctor Atomic. What was your first exposure to the score, and your impressions?

01-00:01:21 Robertson: Well, the score came in little bits and pieces. Although I seem to remember that we got the whole of Act I—should I be looking in that camera? Does it matter?

Crawford: Yes.

01-00:01:35 Robertson: We got the whole of Act I, or at least the choral parts of Act I, quite early on. And we got the chorus, Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, first, which is the short chorus and leads into the very rapid declamatory, more scientifically oriented chorus about the end of June, 1945, when they tell us the story of Finds us expecting, from day to day, to hear of the explosion of the first atomic bomb device by men.

Then it gets scientific and very factual about what is a neutron chain reaction? And the description of what this bomb could do, The devastation from a single bomb is expected to be comparable to that of a major air raid by usual methods.

So these were the first two choruses that I saw. I’m just trying to remember if I saw any later in Act I.

Crawford: This was March, something like March, perhaps?

01-00:02:47 Robertson: Yes, this was early.

Crawford: Very early for the chorus? 88

01-00:02:50 Robertson: Quite early. Well, with the chorus, we prepare well ahead of time, because of the way the schedule works here at the San Francisco Opera. And so we had music rehearsals scheduled in March. We got some of Act I just before we started to rehearse. Which was good, thank God, because later, by the middle of the summer, we still didn’t have the later choruses of the opera. They were coming via email from John directly, through his copyists. And so that was all getting a little bit scary, because we didn’t know what the challenges were going to be later on.

We did discover that the challenges of the first couple of choruses were quite strong. The thing that excited me about the first chorus was its tonal bias; tonal, but multi-tonal qualities, in multiple keys at once. The chords were recognizably diatonic. [piano; sings] They’re still diatonic chords. But they are all [piano] juxtaposed against each other. And then the superimposition on the top of the repetitive figure: But only altered in form. This is actually the description of what the nucleus of an atom is.

It excited me because it had that kind of middle-European influence, based on folk music, that I remember in Bartok, Janácek, and other composers. And it seemed to me that it was very rooted in tradition, although it was harmonically completely individual. And the passage goes on, [piano; sings:] Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. There’s always the emphasis on the diatonic chords, although they’re shifting around between keys.

Crawford: Strange intervals for a singer?

01-00:05:16 Robertson: Well, yes. The melodies are always, not arching, but jumping around. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. They’re jumping around. But it’s so rooted in individual chords that ring like diatonic chords. Energy. This is a seventh chord, which is way back into the European, simple European tradition of contemporary music in the middle of the last century. And it keeps returning to that.

It’s as though there is an atom, and it consists of lots of elements, so you get all these different chords. But it always comes back to the center, because the center of the atom is the most important. Then the repetitive passage comes on. [piano; sings:] Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, but only altered in form. That’s kind of like a stability.

Ok, so you can’t create matter or destroy matter, but you can only alter its form. It’s kind of like a reverse look at the whole meaning of the text; and this is a mirror image of it. [piano; sings:] But only altered in form. And off we go again. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. And stability. But only altered in form. And off it goes again. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Same thing. And then there’s the addition, all of a sudden, instead 89

of just But only altered in form, he added another note in the chords. But only altered. A slight instability crept in there.

Crawford: That was because the text was incorrect?

01-00:07:23 Robertson: Well, we haven’t come to the text yet.

Crawford: The chorus must have been incredibly excited.

01-00:07:34 Robertson: Oh, I can tell you, they were very—they were apprehensive, to begin with.

Crawford: They had to be apprehensive.

01-00:07:38 Robertson: But very excited.

Crawford: What do you say to the chorus, when you bring this new work?

01-00:07:44 Robertson: Well, first of all, we were part of the creation of a new opera. Hey, that’s where we want to be, you know? It’s all very well doing the Verdis and the Puccinis over and over again, but every so often, give us a brand new opera. We’ve done several here; but this was an exciting one, a John Adams creation.

It was interesting to let them see which way the composer’s mind was thinking, even at this early stage. How did he write for voices? Were the notes difficult to find? Was he giving us a foundation in the orchestra that we could relate to, in terms of pitches and intonation? We did Klinghoffer, [The Death of Klinghoffer] some years ago here. And that was very difficult.

This was difficult in a different way. It seemed to me, in these opening choruses, that John had established his chordal structure, which was integrated in a multilayered way. The orchestra was repeating [piano; hums a note] this note, all the way through this chorus, so that the superimposition of these chords—I’m playing it very roughly, but there was always—there seemed to be an integration. We could relate to and find these chords. We could find them, with a little bit of practice. And it seemed to be that internally, it was very organic in its construction, tonally and harmonically.

He and I did talk a bit about this additional note that he added on the repetitive music. But only altered in form. The original had [piano; sings:] But only altered in form. This additional note in there. And I had an email from him saying, “Oh, I don’t want that note anymore. We shouldn’t do that.” And I tried to persuade him. I said, “But John, I really like that.” And we kept it in. We kept it in. 90

Crawford: Good.

01-00:09:56 Robertson: I said, “It brings another atmospheric quality to the short opening chorus about What is matter?”

Crawford: What was the difference for you?

01-00:10:04 Robertson: Well, it seemed to me, here we have the first time, Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. First time: But only altered in form. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Second one: But only altered in form. Third one:

Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, But only altered. It seemed to me that it added a color. Why would we do, for a third time, the same. And we added a color. [piano] And John wanted to take that B-flat out, but we kept it in, thank goodness.

Crawford: He was that receptive to what you were saying.

01-00:10:42 Robertson: Oh, completely receptive, completely receptive. We had emails. It was mostly done in email. He was good at email. And it was like certain word pronunciations. But John had a concept—and I don’t think I’m betraying any confidence when I say that—John has a concept, when he writes the music, that is frequently altered by Peter Sellars, when he comes in.

We had long discussions about the purity of the vowels. Like, would we say— I have to find them. Would we say nuclear or nyuclear? Nyuclear, in a choral context, is easier to understand than just nuclear. Of course, there was the joke that John wrote in an email about the president—nucuular. And neutron or nyutron? And I was advising. I said, “You know, we really need to do nyutron for clarity of text.” And there are several examples of that in the second chorus.

But actually, what turned out was, when we got into stagings, Peter Sellars, who is completely irresistible, of course, and suddenly was addressing the chorus, in his very entertaining way, and talking about this first chorus. And he said, “It’s not like a mantra. This chorus never becomes The end of June, [snaps fingers in time] 1945.expecting from day to day to hear of the explosion of the first atomic bomb device by man.”” These are just the rhythms. But the whole chorus is alike:Here’s-what-happened-on-the-first- day-of-June-1945. Production plants of several types are in operation—the explosive material. And it goes on for quite a time, where the orchestra is just doing [piano; sings, first just the notes, then words:] The end of June, 1945 finds us, and so on and so on. It’s very compelling. 91

I’d done it with the chorus, in a very crisp, mechanical way: this is just an explanation of facts; this is a historical statement. This is what we did. And the scientists said this, and they said destructive power, and it was going to change the world forever.

And then Peter came in and said, “No. No, I don’t want it like that.” He says, “I want it like you’re American scientists, and you’re not only reporting, but you’re kind of emotively reporting what’s going on.” So everything [snaps fingers] became very Americanized. Nyuclear fission—

Crawford: What was English about the first approach though? I mean un-American?

01-00:14:01 Robertson: I had done it in a kind of, not English choral style, but a very strict choral style, so it was all crisp. [sings] The explosion. Of the first. Atomic. Bomb. Devised. By man. Almost with English pronunciation. But Peter didn’t want that. He completely changed it. [sings, different emphasis] The explosion of the first atomic bomb devised. And he went completely in another direction.

Crawford: How long did it take to get the chorus to respond that way?

01-00:14:28 Robertson: Not long. Not long.

Crawford: They understood what he wanted.

01-00:14:31 Robertson: They understood. I mean, he’s a great motivator, you know.

Crawford: Yes.

01-00:14:34 Robertson: He paints pictures very clearly.

Crawford: Donald Runnicles said that he could cry—the gamut of emotions. He could command complete attention. He’d never seen anything like it in the chorus room.

01-00:14:47 Robertson: Yes, well—

Crawford: Not only the chorus, but all the singers.

01-00:14:49 Robertson: I don’t know how much John ultimately changes his opinions because of Peter. I mean, they’re a team, hey? They’ve been working together for years. I’ve only had a little window into it, called Doctor Atomic. But I do question some of Peter Sellars’ changes, in pure musical terms. 92

Crawford: Talk about that.

01-00:15:15 Robertson: Well, this is what I’m saying. I would rather this chorus had been crisper, and with much clearer pronunciations, than the character that was finally projected. I know that after all of these emails—months—after all of, “Oh, here’s another chorus,” we got to our summer break. We had the summer break, and Doctor Atomic was coming up for production very soon after the summer break. And more pages of chorus were arriving.

John was giving me encouraging words like, “Well, don’t worry. The beginning of Act II, the corn dance and all of that, the chorus is offstage. They’ll sing it backstage; it’s an atmospheric effect. You won’t have to memorize it.” I said, “Ok.” Not that I always trust composers, what they say like that, because what happened was that Peter then came along and he said, “No, I really want that chorus onstage.” Which means we have to memorize it.

Crawford: At what point was that? August?

01-00:16:28 Robertson: Oh, yeah! Well into production. I mean, the first week of production. And he said, “But don’t worry.” Peter’s a great collaborator and a great practical person, and he doesn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable or stressed out by what he’s asking them to do. He’ll always find a way around your stress and your—[sighs]

Crawford: Anxiety.

01-00:16:58 Robertson: Yes, anxiety about it. And he said, “They’re scientists. I’ll have them come on with clipboards, with the music attached to the clipboard.” Well, I gave that about two minutes worth of thought.

Crawford: [laughs] They didn’t have clipboards!

01-00:17:17 Robertson: And then I said to him, I said, “Peter, that’s going to just look like the chorus has not been able to memorize the music.” And he says, “Well, what do you suggest?” “I suggest we memorize it.” And he said, “Great. Let’s do it.” And it turned out to be a very expressive scene. It became the corn dance music.

All of that music was supposed to be offstage. And then they were into this choreography that Lucinda Childs gave us. All of that was originally supposed to be offstage, for the chorus, and the dancers would do all of that.

Crawford: How did you feel about that? 93

01-00:17:58 Robertson: I thought it was great. But it was an example of how Peter would say, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll find a way to make it work.” And then he presented me with an option, and I tried to persuade him. I said, “I don’t think that’s the way we should go with this. I think we’ll call some extra music rehearsals, and we’ll give the chorus plenty of aid.” You know, we give them analysis sheets of when the music goes up, when it goes down, blah-blah-blah-blah.

Crawford: An analysis sheet?

01-00:18:32 Robertson: Well, aide-mémoire. Aid to memory, that’s what we’re talking about. We’ll try and write it out in such a way that it’s easier to memorize. I always say to my chorus, I say—especially with a new production coming along—“It’s not a question of not trusting, but you never take for granted that something that a composer says, ‘Oh, this’ll be offstage—’ Never take that for granted.” I said, “So even though I’m telling you that John Adams said, “Don’t worry about this—” Because this was getting really late. We were a few weeks away from the opening. We had all this staging to do, and [snaps fingers] new music was coming in.

So I never let them settle mentally into the fact that they didn’t need to memorize this, because I kept jogging them and saying, “No, we may have to memorize this. Be careful, be careful. As you learn it, find your way of locking it into your memory.” Because we had experience with Klinghoffer, which has wonderful choruses, but they’re very random, where they go, and very long. And memorization is a real issue.

Crawford: You’ve said Klinghoffer was easier.

01-00:19:59 Robertson: Well, did I say it was easy?

Crawford: Not easy, easier, I think.

01-00:20:03 Robertson: There was a lot more in Klinghoffer for the chorus. It was easier to sing, to find the notes; but it wasn’t easier to memorize, because the chorus, the Palestine women—Israeli women and Palestine women—is a very rambling chorus. You just never know when the music goes up, when it goes down. It goes up and down, and it goes on for quite a long time. Very hard to memorize. In fact, we had to be in the wings reminding the women, “Now you go up. Now you go down.”

Crawford: Really?

01-00:20:42 Robertson: Because it was wordless, as well. [The corn dance] was all just an “Ah,” there were no words to lock in. So I was concerned about that. And lo and behold, 94

this became onstage. And we had to memorize it. This is just the altos. They go into a repetitive pattern, which is a little easier to memorize. They go [piano; sings:] Ah-ah. Ah. This is the corn dance. Ah. Ah-ah. Then the rest of the chorus doesn’t seem difficult to memorize, but it is.

Then the whole pattern changes. And then it becomes very random. They were counting like crazy. This is the fifth time of the first version; this is the sixth time of the first version; then the version changes; and then you keep counting. Anyway, it was great in the end. But I think John was very pleased that we did memorize it.

Crawford: Were there adequate musical rehearsals for the opera?

01-00:21:59 Robertson: Well, we had a lot of rehearsals. We had a lot of rehearsals. I think we would’ve been pushed had there been more written for chorus.

Crawford: What were the high choral moments for you?

01-00:22:13 Robertson: Well, those opening choruses that I’ve described. Of course, the highest point was the—what did he call it? You’ll know exactly, as soon as I say it. There we are. At the sight of this, your shape stupendous.” It’s the Vishnu chorus.

Crawford: From the Bhagavad Gita. That’s a question I have. There is a stunning array of sources in the libretto. Did the chorus read the classified documents and the John Donne sonnets and—

01-00:22:49 Robertson: Well, a lot of them know the John Donne sonnets. A lot of them are very intrigued by the text they’re singing. But the first priority is always to get the music.

[End of Interview #1] 95

Interview #2: November 1, 2006 Begin Audio File 2 11-01-2006.mp3

02-00:00:00 Crawford: This is the second interview with Ian Robertson, at the San Francisco Opera, on the subject of Doctor Atomic. We talked last week about the first chorus. So I’d like to have you go sequentially, and then we’ll come back.

02-00:00:16 Robertson: Okay. Well, the first chorus was in two parts, if we remember. The slower chorus about Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, and then the more rhythmically and fast chorus, which explains the historical setting, the end of June, 1945, finds us expecting, from day to day, and then a description of a sustained neutron chain reaction, resulting from nuclear fission. This was very rhythmical, very mechanical, in many ways. Deliberately. When it was a factual discussion. The devastation from a single bomb-is expected to be comparable to that of a major air raid by usual methods.

It was very strictly notated and rhythmically precise, and exciting because of that. Including—I suppose this refers back to the composer’s ability of word setting. We always talk about Henry Purcell being the first kind of operatic composer, or even voice composer, who really understood innately how to set the English language. And that all supposedly disappeared for a couple of centuries, until Benjamin Britten came along.

But here’s John Adams’ setting: This weapon has been created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labor of thousands of normal men and women. It takes the speech rhythms and translates them into a very exciting rhythmic setting, which, because the speech rhythms are so irregular, the notation is therefore very irregular. There’s a bar of three-two followed by a bar of two-two, followed by a bar of three-four, then three-eight, then seven-eight, two-two, three-four, so.

Crawford: Very difficult for the chorus?

02-00:02:39 Robertson: Yes, it was very difficult. This is not so difficult, [sings] Not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius, but by the arduous labor of thousands of normal men and women. So the speech rhythms are affecting how the music is notated. But it’s very natural. [sings] Working for the safety of the country— two and three and one, two three—working for the safety—the safety of their country.

Crawford: Very important. This set the tone of the whole opera, didn’t it?

02-00:03:15 Robertson: I think it did. 96

Crawford: How unusual is that?

02-00:03:17 Robertson: You mean in modern operas?

Crawford: Yes.

02-00:03:28 Robertson: This is the first example I think I can remember—and I’ve worked on quite a few modern operas—where I felt that the words had affected the rhythm. It’s as though he sat down with the poetry or the text, with the text that he was supplied with, and he just talked it through, trying to keep as much a regular accent, but having to modify it and put an irregular bar to express the text in a most natural fashion.

Crawford: Where did this bit of text come from?

02-00:04:02 Robertson: Oh! You think I know everything about this.

Crawford: [laughs] The other ones are pretty easy to source, but—

02-00:04:07 Robertson: I don’t remember. Wasn’t this some statement by one of the scientists?

Crawford: Maybe from the 1945 Smythe report?

02-00:04:29 Robertson: The end of June, 1945, finds us expecting, from day to day—It was something like that. There are all sorts of key words that he features. You might say, “It finds us expecting, from day to day;” but he emphasizes, with silence before it, the word expecting. “Finds us [snaps fingers] expecting from day to day.” We could dig really deeply into that. Why does he go, “The explosion of the first [snaps fingers] atomic bomb devised by man,” [snaps fingers] “The explosion of the first. atomic. bomb devised by man?”

It’s like Purcell, in that you read the poetry or the text that Purcell sets, and you find him putting accents in unusual places, to highlight things. You can go to Carmen, the silly little children’s march from Carmen. The poetry is, Avec la garde montante, nous arrivons, nous voilà. The word is avec, with. But because they’re children, Bizet thinks, Oh, you know, they’re not too cognizant of where stresses in the language arise. So he makes them sing [sings] Avec la garde montante, nous arrivons, nous voilà.

Crawford: Which is not French.

02-00:05:57 Robertson: Not French. Avec. Avec la—He does it on purpose, to highlight the fact, oh, they’re kids. They’re not completely easy with where the stresses would 97

normally lie. So it adds that other dimension. Well, I find Adams doing the same kind of thing here.

Crawford: Were you happy with this presentation?

Robertson: Was I happy with the way we did it? Oh, yes. Very much. I remember John Adams saying, because there were scientists running around at this one point, doing experiments, and dancers, in the production—and what did John say? John sat in one rehearsal and he said to me, “I’m still trying to get used to the concept of dancing physicists.” [laughter] I thought that was good.

Crawford: Well, they weren’t dancing, so much as they were bustling, weren’t they?

02-00:06:57 Robertson: Well, no, but they were choreographed. Doing experiments.

Crawford: Did they tone that down in production?

02-00:07:05 Robertson: Well, Sellars had a way of setting things at the beginning of a rehearsal, “This is what I want, this is what I want.” And nothing changed. He set that choreography up with—Was it Alice? Who was it?

Crawford: Lucinda Childs.

02-00:07:20 Robertson: Lucinda Childs. And it was refined, but it never changed from his basic plan.

Crawford: That’s good to know. Well, let’s talk just very briefly about this text, Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, the text that would have to be changed, to reflect that matter can be converted into energy. It was not changed, and Pamela Rosenberg was apprehensive about that.

02-00:07:47 Robertson: Well, he tried to change it at the last minute, the chorus text. And in fact, we relearned it very briefly, in a short rehearsal. For two rehearsals, we tried it with the new text, but John was very uncomfortable with the fact that the new text didn’t match the music, the notes that he’d written for it. And he didn’t want to be, four days before the premiere, actually changing the rhythms, for the chorus to relearn the rhythms, because it was too late. It could’ve been a mess.

Crawford: Nobody recognized that that was an error, did they? So there was no problem.

02-00:08:27 Robertson: No, even though it was in the supertitles, I think it was in the supertitles, the erroneous text, as it were. But I think there was a feeling that they were recognizing that this is how people thought at that time and I think it was a storm in a teakettle, all of it. 98

Crawford: Well, let’s move on to particular choruses. We talked about the Corn Dance. But the Vishnu chorus—terrifying.

02-00:08:59 Robertson: Yes, it’s very terrifying.

Crawford: My peace is gone, my heart is troubled.

02-00:09:09 Robertson: Right. I was just looking at the one before that.

Crawford: Go ahead, take that one first.

02-00:09:15 Robertson: Well, I’m away from it now. This Vishnu chorus came to us very late. We didn’t get this music until just before our summer break. But fortunately, harmonically, it was pretty straightforward. It starts off with unisons and stepwise motion. Your shape tremendous. Two, three, four. Your shape tremendous. Two, three, four. And it gradually opens up.

So the chordal structures weren’t that difficult. [piano; sings:] Your shape tremendous. And. [piano; sings:] That opening passage set the pattern for the rest of it. I mean, ultimately, it’s not that long a chorus. And it’s repetitive later, with a few twists.

These were the things that we needed to focus on, for memory purposes. The tempo doesn’t change. [snaps fingers] The beats and the bar change, but the tempo stays the same all the way through.

Crawford: What is it about that chorus, apart from the words which, as we know, come from the Bhagavad Gita, that makes it so terrifying?

02-00:10:37 Robertson: In a way, it’s like some of the Gluck choruses. You know, it’s very strong C- minor. And it’s a big statement. And it has an ostinato bass that goes all the way through it. Its strength comes from the dramatic impact of the homophonic writing for the chorus. There’s no polyphony. It’s chords, chords, chords, it’s strong, strong rhythm.

Your shape stupendous. Your shape stupendous. And then it goes between that and moments of human agony.

We learned this first. And we’d spent a bit of time on all this opening stuff. Then it does—one, two, three [piano; sings:] Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. And it’s like the human—So we’re describing the monster, terrible with fangs. I hear, Oh. Oh. Oh. And it was like a softer effect, but a pleading. Pleading for mercy. And it was just the way the chord had come out from all of this C-minor basis into the spread chord, which had—it’s got Messiaen in it, it’s got Britten in it. It’s 99

got [piano] a softer edge, and it’s pleading. And that was the first thing that struck us, coming out of all of that, the beauty of these chords, then, Oh, oh, oh.

Then it goes back: Your shape stupendous. [vocalizes] Your shape stupendous. And it goes through the patterns again. All the worlds are fear- struck. Even just as I am. All the worlds are fear-struck. Even just as I am. Then it goes back to Oh. Oh. Oh.

Crawford: Maybe they could’ve ended the opera right there, and left the rest to imagination.

02-00:13:05 Robertson: Well, could be. Could be. This is a very powerful moment. And then it finishes with, again, more pleading harmonies, but it’s still based around C- minor. When I see you, Vishnu. When I see you, omnipresent. Shouldering the sky in—The rhythm’s broader and more sweeping. And then it goes back to the pleading: Oh. Oh. Oh. Of course, we learned it with the correct notation he’d given us, which had a G in the second time round. Third time round of these ohs, it had a G-sharp in it. [piano]

I emailed John, I said, “I don’t think you need that G-sharp.” And he said, “Oh, no. That’s a mistake in the copying.”

So we went back. You see, the chord is open—it’s human. It’s twentieth century, twenty-first century, but it’s harmonically—It gives me a feeling of pleading for mercy, something like that. Not weak, but just human. [piano] Whereas, if you had the G-sharp in it, it’s [piano]. It loses—

Crawford: It’s strident, almost.

02-00:14:25 Robertson: It’s more strident. And so we changed that. That was a mistake in the copy.

Crawford: Did you change quite a bit?

02-00:14:31 Robertson: A little bit. Little bit. Little bit, yes.

Crawford: Adams is open to that.

02-00:14:34 Robertson: Then he goes back to At the side of this, oh my heart is troubled. And you know, I really liked his harmonies, because they’re full of kind of classical little suspensions.

There’s little clashes in there, which resolve. You know, there was a couple of choruses—one of the stronger, faster choruses in Klinghoffer had this kind 100

of—I recognize this harmonic style from having worked with him in Klinghoffer.

Crawford: So you could say, “That is Adams.”

02-00:15:08 Robertson: Yes, exactly. That as soon as I looked at it, I said, “This is Adams. This is Adams.” And that chorus was over in a flash. Now, that was very strongly choreographed. So there was a lot. But again, that choreography session, I think—And we had so many hours planned for staging rehearsals, but that choreography session with Peter Sellars and Lucinda, that chorus was set, movement-wise, in about an hour.

Crawford: Walk me through that, if you would.

02-00:15:48 Robertson: Well, I actually don’t remember the details, but he was very—One of the things that really impressed me about him—and it was mostly him, not so much the choreographer, because it was more just hand movements and—“Go down, and stand up, lift your head here.” It was very much related to the words. And it was as though Peter Sellars was making that up. I don’t mean that disparagingly. But it was so fresh that I could sense that he was thinking of the next phrase and saying, “Now, where would that move lead to in the next phrase?” It was very clearly laid out. And it stayed, for the rest of the three or weeks we rehearsed the whole opera.

Crawford: Remarkable.

02-00:16:28 Robertson: He refined it, but basically, in that first hour, every move was set.

Crawford: Is that unusual?

02-00:16:36 Robertson: I think it’s part of his genius that he would be able to see the people. He relates to the people he sees, when he’s planning a staging. And he reacted immediately to them, and saw the beginnings of the movements, how he would do all of the movements. And it just stayed. I was so impressed. It was like, God, he’s done that in an hour. And I thought to myself, Ah, well, that’s all going to change. Uh-uh.

Crawford: Never did. How did he work with Lucinda Childs?

02-00:17:08 Robertson: Lucinda was, to me, she was very withdrawn, and she worked, basically, with the dancers. I didn’t really have much contact with her. And of course, I wasn’t around the choreography rehearsals with the dancers, so I don’t know how that—I just remember being very struck by how quickly and how fresh he did the movements for the Vishnu chorus, and how I thought, That’s going 101

to change. We’ve got four weeks. Not one thing changed in it. They just practiced it.

Crawford: Did he do all the staging with the chorus?

02-00:17:41 Robertson: Yes.

Crawford: All the blocking.

02-00:17:42 Robertson: Absolutely. Absolutely. He works very well with everybody, but I think the more he worked with the chorus, the more he trusted them to do more and more complex things. You know, like the corn dance. Originally, the composer wrote it to be sung offstage, and then Peter said, “No, no. This has to be onstage.” And it was very late in the process. And he said that, well, they could bring clipboards on, with the music. And I said, “That’s not going to look good.”

Crawford: You thought it would seem as if they didn’t know it.

02-00:18:23 Robertson: Like they didn’t know it. So he said, “Well, that’s great, if they can memorize”—And we memorized it.

Crawford: How long did it take you to memorize that whole thing?

02-00:18:29 Robertson: Oh, it’s hard to quantify, because you can’t sit down and say, “Now, this is a three-hour rehearsal to memorize the corn dance,” because you’ll blow people’s minds. You just keep coming back at it, every opportunity you get. You talk them through it again, you play it through. And then you leave it.

Then they would choreograph it, and then they would forget it. And so just after that, we would sit everybody down and just go through it again. And having the movements, of course, helps memory, because “Oh, yeah, I remember; when I’m singing that note, I’ve got this foot out.”

Crawford: I wanted to ask you about the musicality of a professional chorus. This company didn’t always have a professional chorus. Under Merola, the singers were working people from North Beach—that’s what Adler said. Adler claimed to have formed the first professional chorus for the company. What is their musical education, if you could generalize?

02-00:19:27 Robertson: Well, one of the prerequisites that we ask for before we accept them for an audition is that they have a college education in music or voice. And they have a vocal qualification from some institution somewhere. 102

Crawford: That’s impressive. They all read music. They probably read music better than some of the principals.

02-00:19:51 Robertson: Oh, we never even ask for them to read music, we just assume they read music. You know, and that’s one of the reasons why we have this college degree requirement; you’ve got to be able to read music. Some people work with certain transcriptions to help them read it more easily.

But this wasn’t particularly difficult to read. And with all these modern computer technologies for printing and writing music, it’s so much clearer. I mean, we used to do premieres with handwritten music, the composer’s handwritten music.

Crawford: But the meter changes in the first chorus were, perhaps, the most difficult.

02-00:20:33 Robertson: I think so, yes. The meter, and the setting of the text, and all of this—the faster the opening chorus is—Building a stockpile. The explosion material. That all took a good bit of reading. But actually, because it’s based upon the rhythm of the text, it’s not that difficult. Once you get into your body, you’ll get, Resulting from nuclear fission. Resulting from nuclear fission. It’s kind of natural. Resulting from nuclear fission. It’s almost like you would [do the] rhythm as you would speak it.

Crawford: You would say it, yes.

02-00:21:15 Robertson: And that’s a big help. That was a big help. And then as I mentioned, in the corn dance, which really wasn’t much chorus, we wondered, “What is this all about?” It’s the moment when Pasqualita is singing about—Now, who? She was the maid, wasn’t she?

Crawford: Yes.

02-00:21:42 Robertson: Why was this? Pasqualita is singing, “Then word came from a runner, a stranger, they are dancing to bring the dead back.” These little quotes of poetry come out of nowhere, and they all try to have a relevance to the story of Doctor Atomic and its setting in the desert. So you have this Native American, Pasqualita, who’s—

Crawford: That came from Sellars, didn’t it?

02-00:22:08 Robertson: Yes, because generations living on this land understood the quality and the nature of the land, and the problems with what they were trying to do on this land. “To bring the dead back. To bring the dead back, and the coming again 103

of our leaders. We danced at an autumn fire. We danced the coming again of our leaders. But they did not come.”

And then John Adams goes into this kind of mechanical quality again. And the chorus starts a strange little broad dance. [piano, sings notes] And I think it’s like an old, long ago forgotten dance. I don’t know whether he thought of it that way or not.

But this was the start of the corn dance. Now I, being a Brit, I didn’t know what a corn dance was. Still not quite sure what a corn dance is, but it’s something to do—

Crawford: Prayer for harvest, isn’t it?

02-00:23:40 Robertson: Harvest. Fertility. I don’t even know where the choreography came from, because they were doing, Ah. Ah. Ah, as they took one step forward. Ah. Ah. Ah.

Crawford: What was the tribe? Not Navaho or Hopi, though they have their corn dances.

02-00:24:05 Robertson: Right, well, this is—I think it was child-like, maybe very ancient tribal rituals.

Crawford: Sellars has done a lot of work around that culture?

02-00:24:18 Robertson: Oh, I’m sure. I don’t think there’s anything he didn’t know about, what he was trying to put forward. But it struck me that this was so strange that this music was written like this and it was going to be offstage.

John kept emailing me, “Don’t worry about the rest of Act II.” He said, “I know it’s coming very late.” This was after the summer, now. This is, like, four weeks before the opening. “Don’t worry about it.”

Crawford: So September first!

02-00:24:44 Robertson: Yes. “Don’t worry about it,” he kept emailing me. So as I told you he said, “It’s all going to be offstage.”

Crawford: You hadn’t seen any of it.

02-00:24:49 Robertson: I hadn’t seen one note of it. And he said, “It’s all offstage.” He says, “Only the last bit in Act II will be onstage. And there’re no words,” he said. “It’s only Ah.” And I said, “Ok, but I just don’t trust—” I said, “I’ve got to see this music.” 104

Crawford: The chorus rose to the occasion.

02-00:25:10 Robertson: Well, when we saw it, first of all, we said, “Oh, this is pretty straightforward.” But if you string the whole thing together, it becomes kind of harder to memorize. One. [piano; sings:] Ah. Ah. Ah. And it just keeps going and going and going and going.

And then the women are singing this. So just no words, just [piano; sings:] E, D. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. And that was the first section of the corn dance that they had to memorize, that we got very late.

Then he goes into the clock. [piano; sings] Just goes on forever. But we did it. We did it.

Crawford: It was wonderful. How much would you say this is a choral opera, as compared with a great Verdi, say.

02-00:26:16 Robertson: Well, I mean, there’s a way of defining that. Is it the amount of chorus music that’s in the opera? Which in this case, is not really that much. Or how critical it is. And I think it’s very important here. I think it’s very important that the chorus had this presence. There were scientists, there were—What else were there? General work people, there were office people. The whole laboratory was populated by these people. The chorus presented the voice, both in a public fashion and in a private fashion.

Crawford: Did the chorus have a moral point of view? Do you sense that in any way?

02-00:26:59 Robertson: Well, it was funny. As we developed into learning this music, externally, we had a couple of little things. Like two of our women got ill. Not seriously, fortunately, but they got ill. And they think they’re not going to be able to do this production.

One of the ladies that I wanted as a replacement was a Japanese girl. I thought, What am I doing? Am I doing the right thing here? But it turned out really well. She’s American, but she was of Japanese extraction. Her parents had been involved in the war. So that was just a subplot that I find interesting, that she took this on board.

Crawford: That she would do it and feel easy about it.

02-00:27:55 Robertson: That she would do it. She felt good about it. But what was your question?

Crawford: Did the chorus present a moral point of view— 105

02-00:28:05 Robertson: Oh, the moral, yes, that’s where I was coming from. Well, I think, [sighs] like most people, they were horrified at how a project like this can just go forward, gain its own momentum, and despite all indications to the contrary, still go through with its ultimate mission.

Maybe there was no need to go as far as, certainly, beyond the Second World War, to continue on with the project. And it had gained its own momentum. I think they were more concerned—I don’t think they got a really clear picture, no matter how much you write, or was written about the opera, that they read, they never got a really clear picture, because they were just involved in it.

So you know, if they’re doing costume changes while critical scenes are happening onstage, they don’t get a chance to see those moments. So they don’t get a sense of where it’s going.

I think everybody’s completely bemused and amused by working with Peter Sellars, because he’s so entertaining, he’s so verbose. He’s a great collaborator. He finds ways to make people do what needs to be done, and takes them with him.

He doesn’t say, “You know, I need you to do this.” He’ll take them with him on the journey and say, “You know, wouldn’t it be good if we did this? Would you like to try this?” That was very obvious throughout the whole rehearsal procedure.

There are two sides to Peter. I mean, you don’t argue with him, and his mind’s made up, and he’s existing on a different plane from the rest of us, mentally. I had made a couple of suggestions, like, “Wouldn’t it be better if we, instead of, in the opening chorus, having them so spread out over the whole stage, we had them—” He said, “They’ll make it work.” I mean, that’s Peter saying to me, “No.” You know? He thrusts a spin on it that says, “Oh, no. They’ll make it work.” What can I say then? Okay, he’s talking about my chorus; and if he believes they can make it work, then who am I to question it?

Crawford: I had the idea you didn’t approve of some of the staging.

02-00:30:38 Robertson: Yes, that opening chorus, I thought we could’ve been more musically cogent, if they hadn’t been spread out so much. Because of its homophonic nature. It’s chordal. And, you know, if you have the space, the distance of—I don’t know, sixty feet between the front of the stage and the back of the stage, and then you’ve got the distance from the edge of the stage to the conductor’s podium. And the people downstage are singing exactly the same music as people sixty feet away.

Crawford: How many people were singing at that time? 106

02-00:31:14 Robertson: Forty-eight.

Crawford: It’s a huge stage.

02-00:31:18 Robertson: It’s a huge stage. And I felt he went for visual image there, more than— ultimately. I mean, fortunately, Donald Runnicles was able to keep it mostly together, but there were all these things happening.

Crawford: How did he work with Donald Runnicles?

02-00:31:32 Robertson: Fine. Fine, I thought. They got on very well. I wasn’t part of inner discussions, nor did I want to be. I had plenty on my plate.

Crawford: Did he ever turn to you and say, “Okay, Ian, your chorus is good?”

02-00:31:46 Robertson: Who, Peter? Well, yes. But it was always couched in the terms of, Oh, they’ll make that work. You know?

Crawford: What I’ve done is really good.

02-00:31:58 Robertson: Right. Good.

Crawford: Well, let’s move from March to October fifth, generally speaking. What was the flow of that?

02-00:32:06 Robertson: Well, you know, it started way before that. It started with us putting in place a schedule for the chorus to learn this. Now, you’ve never seen a note of it, so what are you quantifying?

Should you plan twenty-four hours of music? Should you plan forty-eight hours of music? Well, instincts told me, Listen, I’m taking no chances. World premiere, John Adams, San Francisco Opera. No chances whatsoever.

So I had tons of hours scheduled, because I didn’t know what was coming. I had eighty-something hours planned for. And it went in like that. But then, you know, I didn’t plan three-hour rehearsals, because I thought, Three-hour rehearsals on this kind of music, by the time you’ve reached the third hour, you’re diminishing returns.

Crawford: Loss of concentration.

02-00:33:04 Robertson: Yes, because it’s so demanding. So they were all two-hour rehearsals, in the afternoons. So people were feeling fresh. And the first set of music came 107

about not long before we started. And I was very anxious to see it. We were all viewing on the—because they were all coming in PDF files, from the copyist, and we’re hastily looking at them. And I started to have my doubts about that first slow chorus. I thought, My God, this is difficult. I mean, the altos are singing, [piano; sings:] Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Not easy.

And the other parts, you know, they’re all singing in three parts, with odd intervals. But you know, as I talked about before, this became a kind of— These odd chords strung together seem to have a very much atonal basis, a diatonic basis, which to me, is very exciting. You know, they are chords, although the intervals are awkward; I think he did that on purpose, in order to stretch people to be at their most expressive.

Crawford: Do you give the chorus piano tapes?

02-00:34:30 Robertson: No, we didn’t do that. We didn’t do that.

Crawford: So they just hear it during rehearsal, basically.

02-00:34:36 Robertson: Well, they can read it. And then we give them help from the piano as we go along. But I wasn’t at the point of doing tapes for it. You know, we were working, like, four or five afternoons a week, for two hours each afternoon. And that was enough.

In the evening, we’d be learning Puccini or Verdi or something like that. So each afternoon, it was like, Oh, my mind’s wide open to this again. Rather than saying, “Well, I want you to go and listen to this tape and”—

Crawford: What a lot on their plate!

02-00:35:12 Robertson: I didn’t want that to happen. And the other thing we had to focus on was the type of tonal sound we were producing. Because if they’re singing a big, loud Verdi chorus or Turandot or something, these are operatic voices, these folks, with plenty of vibrato and richness.

But we were the other spectrum here. Part of the thing at the opera chorus here is that we pride ourselves on is the ability to sing full voice. But also, we have the ability to pull the whole thing right back, go into straight tone, no vibrato, and sound like nuns and monks. [laughter] Gregorian chant.

So it was a question of getting them [piano] to sing these very precise chords with no vibrato, so that it sounded like pure choral music. He didn’t want operatic voices to sound like operatic voices in this; he wanted it to sound— [piano] very, very pure. Very choral society. 108

And they take to that, because they know that they have the opportunities to open up in most of the repertoire. Quiet music in Verdi, and sometimes in Puccini. The nuns’ chorus in Trovatore. You know, we will sing like this. [piano] Like a choral society, the rest of it. And that’s another reason why we wouldn’t want them to rehearse for any more than two hours a day, because that takes a certain kind of vocal technique that you don’t want to put the voices under strain or press or anything like that. They need the variety in their vocal production—

Crawford: Does that affect the color?

02-00:37:15 Robertson: Yes, very much affects the color. It needs to be pure, straight tone for [piano; sings:] But only altered in form. With these two, very pure, no vibrato.

Crawford: So it’s kind of like a restraining order, almost.

02-00:37:30 Robertson: Well, it’s a restraining order which brings a new sense of freedom, I see it as. Because there’s nothing quite like having this opera chorus in full cry, in some big operatic chorus, and then you turn a page, and there’s a group of monks, or Ballo, or a group of nuns in Trovatore, who are singing like King’s College, Cambridge.

I think they find it very {inaudible}. It’s taken a few years to build this armory of tone colors. And I knew what was coming with John Adams. I knew. Because we had to work very hard in Klinghoffer to get the straight tone that John wanted. And it was the same, so I knew this was coming.

Crawford: Are you going to Amsterdam?

02-00:38:31 Robertson: No. No, no, no. I’m done with this wonderful piece.

Crawford: Might you conduct it someday?

02-00:38:36 Robertson: Oh, I don’t know about that.

Crawford: Would you?

02-00:38:38 Robertson: Oh, I would love to. I would want to change a lot. But then, so does John. I don’t know about the Amsterdam chorus. I would think that—There’s a conception out there that opera choruses sing with big heavy vibratos, and that all obfuscates pitch and clarity. But just like any other chorus, I think the opera choruses need to be able—they always need to be able to sing the Puccini, the Turandots. They always need to be able to sing with fullness, richness, vibrato, exciting sound. 109

But they also have to have in their armory, a whole range of tonal color and expression, which comes right down, or right up, to the best choral society sound. And here you have the conflict, because Donald and I have encouraged that type of flexibility in this chorus here, over all these years.

And on the other hand, you get the choral society—like on the TV the other night was the Glagolitic Mass, the Janácek, sung by one of the best choruses in London, the BBC Symphony Chorus. And while so much of it was so beautiful, in the quieter modes, what I missed was the raging inferno, the bigger sounds. But that kind of chorus goes for the small, straight sound voices.

If we can have the combination of the ability to do this, which we do, and they can open up into this big, exciting, rich sound—I thought it was very suited to this.

John recognized there were other issues here. In this opening chorus, “The end of June, 1945,” it’s divided three part women, three part men. And offstage, even with the microphoning—the whole thing was miked one way or another—John comes with that whole concept.

Crawford: I know. Some of the chorus wore mikes on their backs, I understand.

02-00:40:52 Robertson: A few. We had a few key people with mikes on their backs. If you’re dealing with John and his setup with Peter, that’s part of the creation. You know, so you live with it. You don’t live with it, you try and make it work.

But what it did was, he’d written the second bass and the third bass parts very high, consistently, throughout this “The end of June” chorus, and the women’s part, he wrote low. And I think he recognized that, and said, “Oh, we’ll need to get the women to be a bit higher and the men to be a bit lower.” Because there was an imbalance happening all the time. Like, it was too much men, and not enough women. And we tried to correct that with the microphone setup. But basically, the premise was wrong. The way John had written the textures. I wouldn’t be surprised if he changed that.

Crawford: Let me ask about your working relationship with Donald Runnicles [company music director and principal conductor], and when you turn the chorus over to him.

02-00:42:00 Robertson: Well, you know, I’ve worked with Donald for many years. In lots of productions, what I find one of the most exciting things I do is all the detailed preparation. The tone structure, the memorization, the quality.

But ultimately, I’m not responsible for the performance; that’s the conductor’s responsibility. And I always say to the chorus that there comes a point during 110

my rehearsals where I know that what they have created and what they’re doing is at a growth point where now I need to let it go.

That’s why I say to them. I say, “You have created something here that I now need to let go.” I said, “I’m going to be in the background now.” And I watch this thing grow exponentially, as Donald, or any of the guest conductors, come in and, as it were, take this over.

And they let it grow or they make it grow in the direction that they want it to grow in, because they’re the final arbiter. And to me, it’s always a very interesting moment. I can sense, in rehearsals, when we’ve had however many rehearsal hours, I can sense, Okay, I’ve built in the flexibility, I’ve built in the tone colors, which can be changed. Everybody’s comfortable in memory. The rhythms, the pitch are now soaked into the fibers, that I can tell the moment when you say, “Folks, I’ve taken this through the nursery phase, and now I’m going to take a background position”

Crawford: Is that difficult?

02-00:44:07 Robertson: Yes and no. I find it’s occasionally frustrating when the conductor is not always as capable as, say, Donald is. I mean, I hand things over to some people that it would be better I hadn’t handed them over to. But in the case of Donald, it’s—

Crawford: What about Pamela Rosenberg and her role in this? Unusual?

02-00:44:43 Robertson: Well, I suppose it’s the general director’s prerogative to make sure that the contemporary music and new commissions are always coming along. I know that she was very excited about the choral component of Doctor Atomic and she sat in on a couple of the music rehearsals, which was good. But of course, the whole thing that gets translated, you know, if we’re— John was blown away by the chorus when he first heard it in the chorus room there.

But by the time we started making adjustments and spreading a chorus over sixty yards of stage or something like that, I was not as happy as I was [before]. And I think we all went through that. We all have to go through that process of adjustment, saying, “We are not doing concert performances. We are doing operas.” And operas require visual and stage effects, and positioning of things.

And what we do, part of my job is going through the transition from straight music rehearsals through staging rehearsals, into performances, is to constantly be aware of the changing needs, the changing musical needs. Because they do change. As soon as you put something on stage, and someone moves or turns a head, there’s a whole different set of parameters at work. And you have to try to preserve the best musical end product that you can get. 111

Which is what we didn’t get in that first chorus, because they were positioned not as well as they might have been.

I’m sure that there’ll be changes for Amsterdam. But you know, it’s always a question of where’s the balance between the visuals and the musical, when you’re in opera. And are you working with the director? Is the director actually working with you? Or is he just concerned about [the stage]? Most directors are very aware of musical issues, although a lot of them are not too aware of choral issues. Musical choral issues.

Crawford: Oh, that’s interesting. Some directors don’t move a chorus well. They’re using movie directors a lot now, it seems.

Robertson: Most of them don’t understand choral music. It’s nice to think that John would give such a critical role to the chorus in a new opera, and know that his music would need to be translated into a staging that someone like Peter Sellars, with his imagination, would stretch the ability of the artists to interpret the music. Pure and simple. But that’s what we do here. And we had a lot of rehearsal time on this. So it was kind of exciting.

Crawford: So that worked out well. Okay, good. It was interesting to me, when I was reading the critical reviews, that people heard everything in this music. What did you hear? Everything from Wagner to Handel, and so on.

02-00:48:14 Robertson: Well, the first thing I heard was the voice of John Adams. And then, you know, there were baroque influences, there were classical influences, there were romantic period influences. And I say, so what? Here we have the poetry of John Donne on that end of Act I, the aria. What was it? Batter my heart?

Crawford: Yes.

02-00:48:41 Robertson: And John had somehow—It was very close to Purcell, that I talked about before, the word painting and the use of the language in the setting of the music. The harmony and melody was very John Adams. But to me, it was redolent of Purcell and that period, in the expressive setting of the text.

Crawford: You said Messiaen as well.

02-00:49:08 Robertson: Messiaen was a composer who went for colors, vocal colors. The chorus in St. Francis [St. Francis of Assisi], for instance, was written as to be onstage, but invisible. And while a lot of what we did in St. Francis—not that we’re talking about St. Francis—was wonderful, I felt the director failed completely, in one of the most critical scenes in St. Francis, in that he had them badly positioned, despite my protestations, and had them doing actions that could only be described as superfluous. And musically, the thing suffered. 112

Crawford: Did he listen?

02-00:50:00 Robertson: No. And I expressed that to Pamela.

Crawford: Are you free to say to a director, “It just doesn’t work for my chorus”?

02-00:50:14 Robertson: Yeah, well, it didn’t make any difference. And let’s not go there.

Crawford: But that brings up another question, about generic problems that you have. Scrims, for instance.

02-00:50:24 Robertson: I don’t mind scrims. You know, nowadays, the modern technology has video monitors all over the stage. They have audio monitors, all hidden backstage, so the artists onstage can always feel in touch with the conductor. Wasn’t always like that.

Crawford: Do you ever run into costuming problems—costumes you feel are not acceptable for the chorus?

Robertson: We had that in St. Francis, as well, where the chorus was being fitted with masks that would reduce the sound by fifty percent. We really talked everybody out of that one as early as we possibly could.

Crawford: The Rigoletto got a big rise out of the audience. As I thought, it doesn’t look right. Women don’t wear those kinds of bare-breasted gowns.

02-00:51:11 Robertson: Yes, well, that’s a whole other conversation. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, Rigoletto, we’d done this production twice before, but it was better this time, because the gentleman who restaged it had an ear for choral sound, as well. And so instead of burying the chorus halfway up the stage, we managed to incorporate them downstage. And so we got a much stronger representation of the choral music that Verdi had envisaged.

Crawford: Well, as the production process goes on, does the chorus come to you and say they are not happy?

02-00:51:47 Robertson: Sometimes they do that, but mostly, I can see that developing, you know, in the first introductory remarks of a director, when he’s starting to stage. And although I don’t like to always within five minutes, say, “Oh, by the way, you know, we shouldn’t be doing this.” I like it when it’s a collaboration, when he and I can talk, or she and I can talk. And that happens. We can talk, and say, “Well, you know, if we did it this way, we would achieve what you’re trying to do, but we would also preserve the musical aspects of it.” So I think it’s best when it’s a collaboration. 113

Crawford: And is that normally the case?

02-00:52:22 Robertson: I would say fifty percent, sixty percent of the time, it’s a good collaboration, and then there are degrees of it, after that.

Crawford: Well, let’s talk about that chorus that didn’t happen in the new opera, the epilogue chorus.

02-00:52:37 Robertson: Oh, yes.

Crawford: What happened with that?

02-00:52:39 Robertson: Well, I never saw any music. All I heard from John was—And we were well into the rehearsal. I mean, we’d practically staged the whole opera by now, and I still didn’t know what the last scene—I didn’t see any music for it.

Eventually, it showed up as a series of chords extended—I think this is when the radiation threat was there. And just big, loud chords in the chorus. [piano] That went on for a while.

But even Peter Sellars, when he first came across this scene—I’m trying to preserve the choral element by saying, “Well, you know, John wrote these chords. [piano] And we want to be able to hear these chords. And it’s marked like this. [piano] How are we going to keep this all together with the orchestra?”

And Peter said, “Oh, they’ll make it work.” And ultimately, in the first staging, it was an inspirational moment on his part when he said, “Well, how do we deal with this?” And they didn’t know how they were going to end the opera. They didn’t know what visual they wanted. They didn’t know what the effect of the end of the opera was.

It was a combination of the dancers, who then ran downstage as all—Was it blue light? I can’t remember. And threw themselves on the floor. And here was the chorus onstage. And they all had to fall on their faces.

They lay there on their faces, trying to sing this music. I said, “This is not going to work. Chorally, this is not going to work.” And Peter said, “Oh, they’ll make it work.”

Crawford: How did they, though?

02-00:54:38 Robertson: It was a dud.

Crawford: How did they project, lying face down? I can’t remember. 114

02-00:54:45 Robertson: Well, they didn’t project, that’s the point. And I felt it was the weaker, because of it. They couldn’t project.

Crawford: How would you have done that differently?

02-00:54:54 Robertson: Oh, well, I’m not a stage director. But if it were my production, I would’ve just placed them more advantageously, so the music would work. But on the other hand, I saw some of the reviews, as well, that said the musical inspiration was maybe running out a little bit by this time.

And so I didn’t fuss anymore. Ultimately, the music took a second place to the visual aspects. And whether that worked dramatically or not is up to individual opinion.

Crawford: That is a dilemma. How do you deal with a bomb blast?

02-00:55:33

Robertson: I know. Do you make a bomb blast? Well, everybody was expecting a bomb blast. You know, because they’d been looking at the bomb hanging over the stage for so damn long. [laughter] This thing’s going to blow up sooner or later. And it didn’t.

Crawford: They expected something, so it was a tough decision. Well, what about the critical reaction? How did you feel about it?

02-00:55:58 Robertson: Well, it was what I thought it might be, and most people thought it might be. It was a mixed bag of high praise for the musical and dramatic aspects, although there were suggestions of many changes.

I’m trying to remember. There was one scene that I thought should go—Act II, in my mind, became kind of diffuse, because of all the concentration on Native American poetry from the nursemaid, oh, and the poetry from Kitty Oppenheimer, of course, who went off in long poetic outbursts, which didn’t seem to have a direct bearing on the matter at hand. I don’t know how else you could do that. You’ve got a problem from day one. This is billed as part of the Faust cycle, right?

Crawford: Yes and no.

02-00:57:00 Robertson: And how do you tell the story and the drama involved in the making of an atomic bomb? How do you translate that into operatic terms? It was a damn good attempt. 115

Crawford: Did John Adams flesh out the characters as much as in other new works you’ve done?

02-00:57:21 Robertson: I think he fleshed out Oppenheimer; he fleshed out Teller, not so much. Kitty, he fleshed her out a great deal, but then there were too many questions, in my mind, as to why is Kitty doing all this poetic text stuff? How relevant is this? I mean in some ways there was more relevance to Pasqualita, because she was a native of the soil.

Crawford: A lot of people found that.

02-00:57:47 Robertson: I think, because we all did a lot of reading about the whole project, the Manhattan Project, we all read about this. And you know, what developed from this project into the future, into the fifties, and all of the political implications and the problems that Oppenheimer had later in his life were not really expressed in the opera.

But maybe that was on purpose. They just went up to the point where there was the first atomic explosion. Although we never saw it. But I realized, only by reading all the relevant literature and going back to the old texts, that there was a hell of a lot more to the story than was presented in the opera. But you know, was there a tension—the relationship between Oppenheimer and Kitty was unclear in the opera, to my mind.

Crawford: Just that one duet, really.

02-00:58:57 Robertson: Yes, and even that had question marks. I wasn’t quite sure what they were trying to explore here. Because she was always off in her poetry, and he was more down to earth.

Crawford: If you read American Prometheus, one of the Oppenheimer biographies, she was really a difficult character, not very poetic.

02-00:59:13 Robertson: I still don’t think I got an impression of who she was from the opera. I got an impression of Oppenheimer. I didn’t get enough of an impression about the conflicts between the scientists. There was a little bit of it, but I don’t think it was that clear.

Crawford: I’m going to change the tape.

02-00:59:37 Robertson: Sure.

Begin Audio File 3 11-01-2006.mp3 116

Crawford: Talk for a minute about the other world premieres that you’ve done if you would.

03-00:00:05 Robertson: Oh, Lord! Now you’re testing my memory.

Crawford: I’m not asking you to get deeply into the music, but more—

03-00:00:10 Robertson: No, no, but you’re testing my memory. I go all the way back to Scotland, where we were doing world premieres of Ian Hamilton’s operas, of Edward Harper’s operas. They had a cycle of operas, brand new. Ian Hamilton is a professor of music in America somewhere. And his music was very dry and serial. And I don’t know what’s happened to him. Lately, what have we done?

Crawford: Dead Man Walking.

03-00:00:44 Robertson: Dead Man Walking, which has a small part for the chorus in it. I think Jake [Heggie]. You know, we were prisoners, of course, in the cells. And we were nuns. Or we were women. But there wasn’t that much choral music.

Crawford: There wasn’t. I remember the staging more than the music, I have to say.

03-00:01:09 Robertson: Uh-huh. Yes, well, you’re not drawing me into that one.

Crawford: [laughs] Okay. And then we had Dangerous Liaisons.

03-00:01:18 Robertson: No chorus in it. What was the Previn one? Streetcar [A Streetcar Named Desire]. No chorus. That’s why I felt it was great that here was—the latest commission involved the chorus to such a degree. And I think John trusted our chorus.

You know, to come up with the goods, and to translate what he was listening to in his MIDI files into something alive—his reaction was quite special. I remember that. Because we weren’t trying to make a point. We were just saying, “This is as far as we’ve got, in terms of learning this.” And it would be interesting to see what his reaction was.

Crawford: But he hadn’t heard it.

03-00:01:22 Robertson: Well, he’d never heard it live. With human voices. And it was like, Oh! It was a combination of, Oh, God, I really got that right; and, Oh, I need to change a couple of things. That’s a good place to be.

Crawford: You mentioned the MIDI technology, could you talk about that? 117

03-00:02:42 Robertson: Well, as we became computer literate, we have programs on our computer that make the writing down of music so much easier than the laborious handwritten thing. You’ve seen the pages of Beethoven manuscript, where there are scores through pages and pages; and then he tries again, and he scores all of it.

Well, with all of this technology, you can make your changes instantaneously, without having to go through a lot of—But also, what came along with that was the development of MIDI files and computer software for writing, music notation software, that would play the notes back to you, through the sound card of the computer. And you could hear, kind of, what you were writing. Although most composers can hear what they’re writing, as they write it.

But nevertheless, this was a checkup. Here was a way to play the music that you’d just put on your computer screen. But it was coming out as a digitized, robotic computer sound, no matter how expensive your sound card or your equipment is concerned, it’s still coming—You know, you can’t make your music sing words. You just hear notes.

Crawford: It’s correct.

03-00:04:09 Robertson: It’s correct. And it’s all in place, and it’s inhuman. But it gives you an idea of [whether] you’re in the right direction. Is this what I want it to sound like? But then to take that and translate it into the live sound of the orchestra, the live sound of the chorus, is a quantum leap and, I think, affects composers.

I’ve never been aware of the closeness between a composer saying, “Okay, I’ve written now twenty pages; I’m going to listen to them on my computer, and record that so I can send that file out digitally to other people and say, ‘This is what it sounds like.’” Whereas in fact, that’s nothing to do with what it sounds like. He’s set the metronome marks on his sound files way too fast, because the computer was capable of doing [vocalizes quickly]. But then when you put words on it, you know, you say, “Whoa! This ain’t gonna work.” You’ve got to pull back.

Crawford: What were the kinds of changes that Adams made?

03-00:05:09 Robertson: Well, initially, the tempo changes. He had certain choruses. The fast one. Oh, Vishnu, Vishnu was originally—the original mark must be here. Ninety-two. [snaps fingers] At the sight of this, your shape stupendous.

Oh, no, that was okay, but there was one of the fast choruses that sounded fine on a MIDI file, but when you added words, it was clearly too fast. Maybe it was this one. It was marked eight-eighty. [snaps fingers] The end of June— 1945—finds us expecting, from day to day, to hear—I can’t remember 118

whether he’d already changed that tempo, that tempo marking. But that leads to problems later on, when you get into—[pause; snaps fingers] A weapon so ideally suited—so sudden, unannounced—that a country’s major—that a country’s major cities—might be destroyed. Overnight. By an ostensibly—It’s too mechanical. You need a bit more time to get those words out.

Crawford: That sort of thing.

03-00:06:36 Robertson: Yeah. Not by the devilish inspiration. Not by the devilish inspiration of some more—you know, so you slow the whole thing down, because you then hear the words. You hear the words.

The computer can’t do that. You can’t set words on a computer, to sing words back to you. So that’s what I mean about—It’s kind of exciting. This is all computer generated. And you know, the software program can then read that as a MIDI file. I’d never been aware of that before, in a new commission, in a new work coming along.

Crawford: What would you have seen before?

03-00:07:12 Robertson: Well, I was surprised that John was—I don’t know how much attention he paid to the MIDI file or the computer generated score. But I’m surprised that was part of the language that we were using in our discussions. I’d never come across that before, where the composer would say, “Well, you know, you can listen to it on this.” And I listened to it and I said, “Well, that’s all very well, but I don’t think that relates much—”

Crawford: What could you hear—intervals?

03-00:07:45 Robertson: You could hear intervals, you could hear rhythms. The computer’s very accurate at doing the rhythms. But even the orchestral music was sounding a bit weird to my ears. That choral entrance at the beginning of Act II, if I could find that, that was certainly a tempo marking that had to be taken down. Act II, scene III, the countdown. The orchestra plays, at one-forty-four, [snaps fingers, vocalizes very quickly]. It was just impossible. You just can’t play it and make any sense out of it at that speed, on the instruments.

So they slowed all of that down. And of course, the singing on top of that. So it was kind of important for us to know what the real tempo of this was. And I remember listening to that sound file, and it was like gibberish. [vocalizes very quickly] Just like gibberish. And it turned out to be quite an exciting moment. Very difficult to play. The orchestra did it really well.

Crawford: Did John Adams sit in with the chorus through your chorus rehearsals? 119

03-00:08:56 Robertson: A lot of them. I remember from Klinghoffer, actually—John was conducting Klinghoffer. But I remember from some of Klinghoffer, John takes a back burner row about what’s developing onstage. He’s completely in tune with what Peter’s doing.

Crawford: In the pre-production panels and discussions that was also the case.

03-00:09:25 Robertson: That came out, too, yes.

Crawford: What’s the future of Doctor Atomic?

03-00:09:48 Robertson: I would hope that there would be clarification in the dramatic structure, in the structure of Act II, especially. And there needs to be some cuts, because it’s too long. Maybe John, at some moments, for Kitty—maybe even Pasqualita— can find new stuff that matches the Oppenheimer “Batter my heart” moment.

That was the stamp of a truly individual voice, and a composer at the peak of his creativity. There were other moments, but that was special.

Crawford: That will live on as a recital piece, no doubt.

03-00:10:42

Robertson: I didn’t hear it until one of the sitzproben, when we were orchestra and singers together. And then I heard that, and I thought, Oh, my God! That’s the apex of the opera. It almost puts the rest of the opera into some kind of shaded perspective. There was so much meaning in this “Batter my heart.” And the agony of the man.

But you know, the approach to it, and the departure from that moment, to me, was weaker than I’d hoped. That moment was clearly the apex of both the man’s problems, his dilemmas, and of the opera. As it should be. And it came at the right moment, right at the end of Act I. But what went before it, and especially what came after it, seemed to me less inspired.

Crawford: Yes. So far, six companies have taken it already for future stagings. Will there be more?

03-00:12:04 Robertson: I think it probably will. I hope it changes. I’m in no great rush to do it again. But I think that’s just me. I like to have these experiences—to put that on, from a choral point of view, took all of my expertise, put it that way. I had to really just, not sit back, but I just had to say, “This is a challenge, a project that I have heavily involved in.” 120

I’m a musician, first and foremost, I’m also an operatic person, and what happens on the stage is exciting; I always want to know what’s going on there. But ultimately, I’m more interested, as it were, in the composer.

I would like to work on other John Adams works. Some that exist, and maybe some—maybe I could persuade him to do his version of the Glagolitic Mass. Or a similar piece for chorus and orchestra. I know he’s done some of those but maybe a new piece. And to explore some of the works that he’s already written. I’d like to be able to explore that more.

I think Nixon in China is in my future. I’ve never done that. But I’ve seen it. I’m not feverish about it, but it’s a project which I will gladly throw myself into. I’d like to explore other avenues with John Adams. I have the San Francisco Boys Chorus. How could I persuade him to write a five-minute piece? Without breaking my budget?

Crawford: Are you the director of the Boys Chorus?

03-00:14:17 Robertson: Yes.

Crawford: Well, you do have a lot to do. Yes. Why not?

03-00:14:24 Robertson: I keep thinking I’m going to just email and say, “Hey, John. Here’s a short text. Could you send us—?” You know, I think I should go with a text.

Crawford: Well, he did so well with John Donne, didn’t he?

03-00:14:34 Robertson: He certainly did.

Crawford: Anything you’d like to add?

03-00:14:44 Robertson: No! Thank you very much.

Crawford: Thank you, Ian.

[End of Interview

121

The following text is an excerpt of a 2004 interview by UC journalism professor Jon Else and composer John Adams for a documentary film Else made about Doctor Atomic.

John Adams: When I first started thinking about this opera, I did what I always do with my operas, which is to just go deep into the reading. I read a huge amount bout China and the cultural revolution, and Eden, his memoirs, and Nixon’s writings, to prepare myself for Nixon in China.

For this I read a lot of books about nuclear physics. Now, needless to say I had to read mostly books that didn’t have equations in them, because once you even go near this, if you don’t have a background in math and physics, it’s hard to deal with the real nitty-gritty.

I believe the first book I read, and still in many ways the best book, was The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Which is a great book. I almost regret the title, because while it is about the making of the atomic bomb, the book is also the history of nuclear physics starting about 1895, and it’s a tremendous romance.

One of the first things I said to Peter was, I don’t want this opera to be all about the morality and the politics. I think that there has never been an opera about science, about the way people think. Well, in the event, unfortunately my desire has had to play back seat to the more moral and personal issues in the opera. But there are some moments where the scientists do describe things.

One thing I found I put together from several sources included a description of how the fuses were tied around the plutonium globe. Which I thought was one of the things about the nuclear bomb that’s so puzzling, is that it’s so sexy. You know, the image of the cloud is both terrifying and fearsome, and it’s also very beautiful.

And this plutonium sphere, this sphere that was made of this manmade material that was unbelievably toxic and at the same time precious, more precious than any other material, is very beautiful to behold. And I found this description from Luis Alvarez, who was one of the scientists who, though not working at Los Alamos, was involved in nuclear engineering. And this is how the fuse was designed around the plutonium globe.

I set this for chorus. We surround the plutonium core from thirty-two points based equally around its surface. The thirty points are centers of the twenty— ah, I have to say it again. I think there is a mistake in this actually. I think it has to be thirty-two points. 122

The thirty-two points are the centers of the twenty triangular faces of an isocahedron, interwoven with the twelve pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron. We squeeze the sphere, bring the atoms closer, until the subcritical mass goes supercritical. It’s almost as good as Baudelaire, and yet it’s simply a description of how fuses are arranged around a plutonium core.

John Adams: When I started thinking about the opera, I imagined a lot more science, a lot more discussion. And you know I live here in Berkeley, and a lot of our friends are scientists. In fact one of our closest friends is a professor of chemistry who is a specialist in magnetic resonance. And his wife came over with all these books about physics which she thought I’d like to read.

I opened them up, and I could read some of them, but much of it is beyond me. I have this wonderful memory of a dinner that a scientist friend of ours arranged at a local restaurant, because he said, “Well, this is a great possibility, because I have three friends, two of them who are nuclear physicists and have won the Nobel Prize, and they all love music. I told them that you’re writing an opera about Oppenheimer and the bomb, so let’s have dinner.” So we went to dinner at a local restaurant, and I met all these scientists. And I couldn’t get them to talk about physics at all. All they wanted to do was talk about music.

One Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is here in Berkeley, Donald Glaser, who invented the cloud chamber, took me quite seriously. I said to him, “Could you explain the theory of relativity to me?” And he said, “Yes, I can explain that to you in about ninety minutes.” And then I thought, gee, ninety minutes. I wonder at what point I’ll get totally lost.

So I’m intending to take him up on that. But I’m a little intimidated even by the thought.

Interviewer: Before it gets away from me, let’s go back a year or two ago when you and Peter, and Alice was still part, you were just getting this thing going. Can you tell me what has changed or what has gone wrong since then? I don’t know if you’ve used that term, but how are things different now than when you started so we have sort of a baseline.

John Adams: Well, the principal need for me is poetry. I can’t set just plain old prose, and I think one of the problems with most contemporary operas is that the librettos are so weak. Either composers make the mistake of thinking they can write them themselves, or they get indifferent librettists.

So I naturally asked Alice Goodman, who had given me two wonderful libretti, Nixon in China, which I think is one of the all-time great librettos, and Death of Klinghoffer, which is also a great work of poetry. 123

Alice was very drawn to this story, and she worked very hard on it, and read probably more than Peter and I did together. But her life had changed in the ten years between now and the creation of Klinghoffer, and she simply wasn’t able to work on it.

So rather than going shopping around for a librettist that I didn’t know, I said to Peter, “Do you think we could actually put together a libretto from all the sources?” There is so much written about this. And then use poetry and interweave it, because we know that Oppenheimer particularly had such an ear for poetry. He loved John Donne, he loved the Bhagavad Gita, he loved Baudelaire. Quoted poetry all the time.

So Peter and I began to meet periodically, and usually in this same café on Bancroft Way in Berkeley whenever he was in town. And we’d always show up at the meetings, each of us with a big backpack full of books, and just share things we’d read, and talk about structure, the idea, how the piece would flow.

It was over a period of time in these meetings that we realized we had to confine the timeline of this opera drastically. And then very much in the same way that Peter helped me make the El Niño libretto, he sort of disappeared with all these texts and what he does is that he literally cuts and pastes. I’m not talking computer cut and paste. I mean scissors and tape, and he takes these quotes, they might be anything from a declassified government document to a contemporary account of how to build a bomb to poetry by John Donne, and quotes from Teller and Oppenheimer, and he puts them together in this amazing sequence of quotes. And then what I do is, the first thing I do is I take all those sources.

Here’s the first version of what it looks like. With Peter’s assemblage, so to speak, to use a nuclear term. Here you can see a quote from Edward Teller, and then there is a quote from Oppenheimer, which we’ve given to—excuse me, here’s a quote from Baudelaire which we’ve given to Oppenheimer. Another Teller quote. And then this quote which is a famous letter that Leo Szilard wrote. And on and on. How about this, here’s a top-secret document.

I take these and I go through them and first of all I have to do a huge winnowing job, because usually what Peter gives me is just way way more than I can—I love this page here with all these government documents put in—here is a quote from an interview given to Jon [Else] by Robert Wilson, who was one of the physicists who worked on it.

Here is a quote from Teller’s memoirs. Followed by this Leo Szilard thing. Then some poetry, and then later on, we even have top-secret government documents.

Here’s what I just read, the description of how implosion is done, and then that’s followed with more quotes from Teller, the Robert Wilson transcript. 124

So what I do is that I take this, and I massively winnow it down, because it’s much more than I need. And then I make it look like poetry. You know, it’s very funny, I need to have a feeling that the lines are short and that there is a certain poetic metrical form even for this.

So here is a book that was published in 1945 called Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. And when this book was published it caused a panic at the Pentagon and all the security services because it literally described how an atomic bomb was made.

It was written by a very articulate person, I assume a professor, Henry DeWolf Smyth, chairman of the Department of Physics at Princeton, written at the request of Major General Leslie Groves, who is one of the characters in our opera. Peter and I were both drawn to this book, because first of all it, it had been so eloquently written.

Peter found this general summary at the end of the book, which created a perfect opening chorus, and it is right here. It starts: “The end of June, 1945, finds us expecting from day to day to hear of the explosion of the first atomic bomb device by man. All the problems are believed to have been solved, at least well enough to make a bomb practicable. A sustained neutron chain reaction resulting from nuclear fission has been demonstrated, et cetera, et cetera.”

So what I did was to take that and put it more into a sort of faux poetry, faux verse. But this allowed me to sort of organize it musically, and this is the opening chorus. It’s preceded by one other wonderful sentence in this book, which literally explains what E = mc2 is, and that is the first text that you hear in this opera. “Matter can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form.”

And then I launch into this kind of newsreel high-energy bustling busy active kind of music, the kind of music you’d hear in the background of some—

Interviewer: Launch into the chorus, read it again for us.

John Adams: Well, I can’t sing it.

Interviewer: No, I didn’t mean sing it. Just as you did out of the book, same words that were in the book.

John Adams: Yes. Well. So that’s how we make it. And I think that there is no libretto that ever has been constructed this way. I suspect that opera purists and critics looking for something to hate about this will probably first latch onto the libretto, and they’ll say, “Well, you know, this libretto wasn’t created by a librettist, it was cobbled together,” and yes, we know, sure, I can’t deny that. 125

But I think that the way that Peter put it together has enormous theatrical tension. And these people actually do speak to each other. I mean when you think about Wagner, people are basically giving speeches to one another. Here’s a forty-minute speech and you answer with a forty-minute speech. But in this opera the scientists really are arguing.

Interviewer: As someone who has told this story before, I have the right to ask you, why does this story have to be told again? Hasn’t this been told many times before?

John Adams: Well, you know, why did Bach have to write the Passion? Why do we tell the Christmas story?

Interviewer: Why do we keep painting the crucifixion?

John Adams: Yes, this is a story, it’s one of those moments in human history when knowledge and morality came together in this moment of intense crisis, and that’s why the Faust analogy does hold. I’m not interested in making too many connections with it, but that’s really what Faust is about. Faust is this brilliant young scientist who just can do anything.

The devil comes to him and says, “Okay, now I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll give you everything you want providing you give me your soul.” In a sense, the U.S. Army went to Oppenheimer and said, “We’ll give you all the materiel you’ll need, we’ll give you all the money, and we’ll bring every brilliant scientist in the Western world and put them under your command, so long as you make us a weapon of mass destruction.”

Interviewer: Before it gets away from us, I want to ask you, we’re preserving this moment in this opera right now, is there anything that you want to be sure we get that I haven’t thought of about where this thing sits right now?

John Adams: No. I’d like to describe where I am musically, but other than that, I think I should talk about getting permissions, that’s kind of interesting.

There is a serious paper chase involved in using all these quotes. It’s one thing to go cut and paste and take a line from Baudelaire and a line from somebody’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, and a lot of the government stuff is public domain, so I don’t have to worry about that.

But for example right now I’m in communication with Edward Teller’s daughter and son, who when we asked them if we could use his words, were immediately suspicious. They just assumed that the treatment of Teller in comparison to Oppenheimer would be negative. And I would like to be able to use the exact words because I think it gives much greater authenticity to what’s being done. If in the end I don’t get their permission then I have to paraphrase, which is too bad but that’s life. 126

Interviewer: So are there opera lawyers around now who are involved in this process?

John Adams: Well, [it’s] not as serious as the Death of Klinghoffer, where the entire libretto had to be seriously vetted by a lawyer, because there were all sorts of possibilities.

Interviewer: Before we move to the process of the composition, finishing up, can I ask you, and you can answer this if you want to, what can go wrong here?

John Adams: What can go wrong?

Interviewer: Yes, what can go wrong before the curtain goes up? Big things, subtle things.

John Adams: What can go wrong? Well, going from worst case scenario to least worst case, I suppose the worst thing that could happen is that I could get sick or something and couldn’t finish it, or the opera company coudn’t afford to produce it, which is even a more likely thing.

There are many operas that composers never heard during their lifetime because opera is a very expensive undertaking. And opera companies always live on the edge. I know that San Francisco Opera and Pamela Rosenberg are utterly committed to this, so I believed it would happen.

Interviewer: There could be a nuclear war.

John Adams: There could be a nuclear war. Yes. Other things that could go wrong. I don’t think of things as going wrong, I think of things as problems. I mean for me probably the biggest problem always has to do with being able to hear the voices.

I’m a very rich orchestrator, and for me the emotional content, the mood and the emotional precision of what’s being said, is in the orchestra. And I always have shock the first time I hear the singers with the orchestra, because the singers sound that big, and the orchestra sounds that big. So that’s always a crisis. But I’ve had enough experience now so I’m more confident about how this is going to sound.

Interviewer: Will you conduct? No.

John Adams: No, I try not to conduct my premieres. I love to conduct, and I love to conduct my operas. But I do everything I can not to conduct, because there are so many decisions to make. Donald Runnicles will conduct, and I will sit out in the hall and I make just copious notes.

This is how I’m making Doctor Atomic. Here is the source material, in this case it is Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. From here we go to Peter’s cut-and-paste draft. And then I make my own draft, which I call the faux 127

verse, where I sort of make the text a little more manageable by making it look like verse.

And then my first step musically is I usually do it at the piano, where I set the text, and sometimes it’s extremely crude. It will just be a chord, or a chord cluster, and a setting of the line. Here, here in this case, actually this is the setting of the Rukeyser poem, and you can see me struggling and trying to find pitches to fit with the nature of the melody. So that’s the very, very rough sketch.

And then the next step is that I enter this material into the computer, into a software system, which was originally written for movie composers. It’s a system I’ve been using for twelve years now, and it’s a very flexible system, and that allows me to hear the music, and I will give you a tape of that at some point.

Then I go from there to what I’ve set into the computer, it gives me a very crude printout, which looks like that. This is the result of what I put in here, for example, this is the Smyth book. “The end of June 1945 finds us expecting from day to day to hear of the explosion of the first atomic bomb designed by man.” You can see that I’ve already put it in and I put a rhythmic value to it.

Then I go from there to my working orchestration autograph. And this is where the worst work goes in. Because every one of these bars here becomes a bar this big, or in some cases, a bar that big, and I do the whole thing by hand.

This page here goes by fast. [Conducts briefly]. That’s how long that page went by. And that’s like an afternoon of work!

This is the autograph of the orchestra score. And this is pathetically 2A, which means that there is another page. I estimate that there probably will be about 300 to 400 pages by the time eighteen months roll around. So that’s why composers tend to be slightly irritable.

The next step is to make the full score autograph. I don’t do this. I have a person named David Ochre, a wonderful copyist and musician himself, who’s been working with me now for twenty years.

I send him that and he does these beautiful full scores. This is what the conductor will read off, and this is an orchestra score, with all the parts. This is one measure of music, and it has all the parts for all the different instruments. Piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpets, all the way down to trumpet, Kitty Oppenheimer and the strings. It’s a full symphony orchestra, and probably will have as many as they can fit in the pit. 128

This is Peter’s text, and you can see where I cross things out, because I often just have to drop things out. I put the whole thing into a word processor.

And the next step is what I call my piano sketch, which unfortunately I’m not showing you the same opera—I mean the same scene, this is a different scene. But this is what it looks like. And here, these are some chords that I have, and some melodic modes that I was interested in using and then setting a text.

Then that goes into the computer and from that I get the printout of my very rough sketch. I would say that the principal creative act, musically, is somewhere between here and my working on a computer.

And then I take this very rough printout of what I put into this sequencer program, which is software, and I make the orchestral score.

You can see the piccolos and the flutes and the clarinets and all the brass and percussion. And then there is Kitty.

Interviewer: Please say “my name is John Adams and you have permission to make this documentary.”

Adams; My name is John Adams, and everything I’ve said is public domain.

129

THOUGHTS ABOUT DOCTOR ATOMIC

By Peter Sellars

(Remarks made at the Dr. Atomic Workshop, October 30, 2004, transcribed by Clifford “Kip” Cranna)

“What’s beautiful about opera is that you’re able to treat subject matter in all of its dimensionality—and frankly, the History Channel is just not up to this! There just has to be a little more meat on the bone. There has to be a little more sense that there are higher stakes, that there is a bigger picture, that there are large historical sweeps, and that there are also emotional crises. There are also spiritual crises, and spiritual breakthroughs. And there are also terrifying steps [taken] which can never be withdrawn, and which we are living with.

“And in order to sense that scope, and to finally have a chance in our own lives to turn off the cell phone, not to listen to any more messages, we come and sit in a beautifully upholstered chair in the middle of town, with an orchestra and chorus in front of us, and actually allow ourselves to come up for air, and breathe much more deeply in this world of deep music-vision on stage.

“And [we watch] human beings who have themselves worked every day of their lives for twenty- five or thirty-five years to master their own selves, and sing—with this kind of refinement, this kind of beauty, this kind of idealism that the act of right singing represents. And hope for the world is actually embedded in one person’s ability to go into a rehearsal room for that many years and listen to this note until it is so beautiful and so refined, and until their voice reaches a place that the rest of the world would not know how to touch. This singer has cultivated the finest that any human being has to offer, and brings it to us with all of its illumination, depth, courage, and heartfelt beauty.

“And [now we] ask these artists to go into an area of such deep toxicity, and out of that bring something of beauty—of lasting beauty—which is why which the libretto consists of classified documents that were meant to be buried alive forever. And now that very thing that President Truman was not allowed to read—because the security apparatus kept it away from the President of the United States—is being sung in the clear light of day by chorus and orchestra . . . which again offers some hope for the world.”