About the work
John Adams's opera „Doctor Atomic" was premiered in San Francisco in 2005. The libretto by Peter Sellars (also director of the premiere) is a collage of original documents, letters, memoranda, verses from the Bhagavad Gita, John Donne sonnets and witness testimonies. The work depicts the final hours before the first atomic bomb test „Trinity" on 16 July 1945 in the New Mexico desert.
Plot
Act I: Los Alamos, New Mexico, June 1945. The scientists of the Manhattan Project under J. Robert Oppenheimer are preparing the atomic bomb test. There are moral doubts: Edward Teller drives forward, Robert Wilson pleads for restraint. Oppenheimer wavers between duty and remorse. A petition to President Truman is being drafted. In the domestic sphere: Oppenheimer with his alcoholic wife Kitty; Pasqualita, their Native American housekeeper, sings a lullaby for the sleeping child. Act II: the test night — the „Trinity" test. A violent thunderstorm threatens the plan; the bomb is hoisted on a 100-foot tower. Oppenheimer sings the great John Donne monologue „Batter my heart, three person'd God" — one of the densest tenor arias of the modern repertoire, a self-summons to be broken open. Waiting. Countdown. In the final image: detonation. Oppenheimer's famous Bhagavad Gita quotation — „I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" — becomes audible in the musical silence of the layered sounds. A Japanese woman's voice recalls the victims of Hiroshima.
Cultural significance
Doctor Atomic is Adams's most significant work of the second half of his career and is considered an important opera of the early twenty-first century. Christopher Nolan's film „Oppenheimer" (2023) brought the subject to a broad public — the opera preceded it by 18 years. The Donne aria „Batter my heart" is Adams's most-sung tenor solo aria and has been sung by Gerald Finley (premiere), Brindley Sherratt and Lawrence Brownlee. Productions by Peter Sellars (premiere), Penny Woolcock (ENO 2009) and Andriy Zholdak (Lyon 2018) show different readings.