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brainwane asked for some context to explain how to listen to John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic.
I am used to music that you might call 'songs'. Like, there is a repetitive rhythm and melody, and the lyrics scan, and usually rhyme. I feel like the lyrics and the music match each other, like a hand in a glove.
I tried to watch some of the Doctor Atomic recording that the Met is offering as free streaming. What are the creators trying to do here with specific choices of notes they're having the performers sing as they say these words? it feels arbitrary, unmatched, in a way that the songs I'm used to don't feel. So I would like help understanding how to musically listen and appreciate what they're doing.
I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer this, I know some music theory and I've seen a lot of opera but mostly I'll be describing subjective experiences, not chord structures. Also, I personally saw Doctor Atomic
fifteen years ago so it's not something I remember everything about particularly clearly.
Opera has always struggled with a fundamental dramaturgical problem, which is that aria (melodic, structured song) is the fundamental building block of opera, but it's hard to tell a clear story through aria. Aria is great for telling essential character moments, it's not great for efficiently communicating "I'm going to hide behind that curtain and spy while you talk to your sister." There have been various solutions. If you aren't trying to tell a clear story, you can just build the opera entirely out of aria- that's what Debussy does in his symbolist opera Pelleas et Melisande, for example, and it works because the opera is a simple love triangle all about emotions and not about intricate plot details. On the other end of the spectrum, you can just speak the dialogue you want to deliver plot with, which is the strategy that has become the basic tool of American musical theater, and today we tend to distinguish between 'opera' as fully through-sung vs. 'musical theater' which has spoken dialogue intermixed, but that wasn't always a distinction and some operas have spoken dialogue.
In between these strategies is Recitative, the most common strategy in opera, which is sung dialogue designed to allow for the rhythms of normal human dialogue. Recitative is at its core a compromise, something that opera requires and composers struggle to do their best with. It exists on a spectrum from spoken dialogue to aria, and there is some vocabulary for the range of things in between, if that's helpful. Recitative secco is sung a cappella, as compared to recitative accompagnato, sung with a musical accompaniment. The musical accompaniment may achieve one or more of several goals: it may underscore the emotional content of the dialogue, or it may contradict or undermine it, or it may simply provide a little more musical interest. And some recitative shades into what's called arioso, which means that even the simplest dialogue is sung to a melody, but not quite as dramatic and structured a melody as an aria. But again, the point is that this is a musical compromise with theater, not a kind of music someone would just write to listen to. No opera diva does concerts offering selections of their favorite recitative passages
Recitative seems to be a particular problem for composers writing opera in English, compared to composers writing opera in French or Italian at least, where words tend to end in nice open vowels that make singing them comparatively straightforward. (I think even clunky Italian recitative has the grace of us Americans not understanding it, in any case.) There's a lot of English language opera that just has bad, clunky recitative, and my memory is that this was part of the problem with the recitative in Doctor Atomic- particularly because they are delivering dialogue that is full of abstruse technobabble and there is simply no graceful way to do it (I feel like
freeradical42 and I were debating whether there was an intention to make the recitative sound a little clunky, either as a distancing move or a characterization move) So I think part of your problem is that this is a flaw in the opera and you are bumping on it because it is flawed, not because your ears are not trained. (And Doctor Atomic does have some memorable arias that should be more musically familiar to you, particularly the John Donne aria) I want to emphasize that in general. I think opera is something that I have found becomes more rewarding the more I understand how it works, but also at a basic level, whether or not art works is a subjective experience and you should trust your own subjectivity even if it's untrained. You are not less entitled to having an opinion about the music than a lifelong opera lover.
But I also think there are deeper structural things happening in the music that take some training and experience to understand. Baroque Opera has this kind of basic Da Capo Aria- Recitative - Different Da Capo Aria - Recitative pattern throughout, which is fine as far as it goes, I think I've referred to Baroque Opera as an Aria Delivery System, but as we move into the late Classical and early Romantic periods one of the distinguishing features is that all of the music starts to get woven together more tightly, the harmony or tonality of a piece of recitative accompaniment linking two arias is thematically linked, so that the audience experiences it all as one connected musical narrative instead of as separate musical objects. This reaches an apotheosis, in different ways, in Wagner and Verdi. Nearly all of the first act of Verdi's La Traviata, for example, is built around a waltz motif and as it moves from aria to aria and takes you to different parts of the party, the waltz never quite goes away.
My memory of how this works in Doctor Atomic is foggy, all I have is my notes in my review (which recalls a sense of attenuation of time through the whole second act), and my sense of John Adams as a composer. Adams is generally classified as minimalist or post-minimalist, he's interested in repeated simple music figures and how they can build out into a large musical structure, and I feel like one of the things this music often does is play with our awareness of time, because you come back to the same place musically and it both feels like no time has passed and also a lot of time has passed. To get this feeling, you can't just listen to a segment of the music, you need to hear the whole thing and try to process the whole structure and how you felt as you were moving through it. So part of me wonders whether your real problem is in trying to watch 'some of the Doctor Atomic recording'. What I do remember clearly fifteen years later is not any particular moment other than the detonation of the bomb, I remember what the whole experience felt like as an experience, the way the opera moves closer and closer, through intellectual struggle and against a backdrop of emotional uncertainty, to its devastating climax. The other thing I remember is that the feeling of being surrounded on all sides by the sounds of Adams's representation of the bomb was otherworldly; the recording cannot possibly capture what it feels like to hear Doctor Atomic live.
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