Doctor Atomic

John Adams has created several operas built around the psychological implications of seismic historical events in the 20th century, whether Nixon’s fraught 1972 visit to China (Nixon in China, 1987) or the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship by the PLO (The Death of Klinghoffer, 1991). None match the grandeur and scale of his 2005 epic Doctor Atomic, which examines the development of the atomic bomb. The inventive theatre director Peter Sellars constructed the libretto from a vast array of archival documents and texts as varied as the Bhagavad Gita and a Tewa Pueblo lullaby alongside poetry by John Donne, Charles Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser, bringing a nuanced depth to the key characters beyond the historical record. Cumulatively Doctor Atomic toggles between discussions among the scientists behind the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and conversations between lead engineer J. Robert Oppenheimer, ineluctably wedded to Faustian legend, and his wife, Kitty, and their family. The music builds in intensity and tension as the bomb gets closer to its first test, but the plush orchestrations swing variously among elation, dread, excitement, wonder and terror, deftly limning the ebb and flow of the vocalists and setting new scenes with spot-on portent. Alas, history has proven the opera’s existential quandaries around annihilation to be timeless.