Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the highly cultured and deeply reflective physicist remembered today as the director of the Manhattan Project, is enjoying a renaissance of sorts, as the subject of a recent prize-winning biography and the lead character of Doctor Atomic, the much-lauded opera by John Adams, making its debut at the Metropolitan Opera this month.

And what an opera it is. We managed to get tickets for this past weekend, and even though we underwent mild oxygen deprivation from our seats near the rafters, Adams' relentlessly propulsive music made it impossible not to be caught up in the drama, anxiety, and ethical ambiguity of the day and night leading up to the test of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. The libretto, assembled by Peter Sellars, includes poetry from Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser, songs of the Tewa Indians, and reported conversations from Los Alamos. But it's John Donne who has pride of place, as his "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," used here as Oppenheimer's most revelatory moment of doubt, is sung in the ominous shadow of "the Gadget" and set to a throbbing passage of music that dips into momentary calm only to return louder, sharper, and more insistent, refusing to let either Oppenheimer or the audience off the moral hook. In an opera full of fine moments, this one is the most compelling, leaving the audience in wide-eyed horror, but cheering all the same.