The story of how an opera came to be made from the legacy of J. Robert Oppen­heimer and the Man­hat­tan Project, as recounted by John Adams in his new mem­oir, began with a call to the com­poser from the San Fran­cisco opera, ask­ing if he’d like to do some­thing for their series of pro­duc­tions based on the “Faust” story. It’s not an inap­pro­pri­ate metaphor, but I feel that the best way to see Oppen­heimer and his story — and now hav­ing seen both the SF Opera and Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera pro­duc­tions of “Doc­tor Atomic” — is that he is Prometheus, empow­ered by the gov­ern­ment to bring nuclear fire to mankind, and then ruined by that same gov­ern­ment when they came to dis­trust his own power.

That’s a story for another day. The story in the opera cov­ers a brief period just prior to the test of the “gad­get” at the Trin­ity site in New Mex­ico, and lit­er­ally ends at the moment of that explo­sion, just before Oppen­heimer uttered that phrase (his own mis­trans­la­tion — the actual text in the Bha­gavad Gita is “I am Time, destroyer of worlds” — but true nonethe­less). In the nar­ra­tive scheme of human exis­tence, Prometheus trumps Faust in terms of impor­tance. The lat­ter seeks knowl­edge, but his use of it is lim­ited to his own petty human­ity, while Prometheus gave us power! And Oppen­heimer gave us the power to wipe mankind off the face of the earth with the fire of exis­tence itself. In the com­pe­ti­tion over who’s god is big­ger, the play­ers are really fight­ing over scraps, in Amer­ica the Chris­t­ian God is not even in sec­ond place; Mam­mon has a firm hold there. The god that Amer­ica wor­ships more than any other is Prometheus, who comes to us in the form of technology.

The Man­hat­tan Project per­verted so much. The cur­rent hagiog­ra­phy over The Great­est Gen­er­a­tion and The Good War has a dark hole at its cen­ter where the slaugh­ter of civil­ians lies. It is prop­erly moral to not say war is great, even if it may be nec­es­sary, and to do so by point­ing out what is so awful about it, espe­cially in con­tem­po­rary times; the indus­trial slaugh­ter of life, and, since before the 20th cen­tury, con­cen­tra­tion camps and the delib­er­ate killing of civil­ians. If the only jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for Dres­den, Hiroshima and Nagasaki is win­ning, then that says every­thing about the moral­ity of war. Instead we have the dan­ger­ous idea that every­thing Amer­ica does is right, and so the actual con­sid­er­a­tion of right­ness, or even wis­dom, is thought trea­so­nous. Also, his­tor­i­cal mem­ory is per­verted into think­ing that wars end with a final, uncon­di­tional sur­ren­der, when that is the excep­tional moment in his­tory. Wars end with exhaus­tion and irres­o­lu­tion. And we have Prometheus, who tells us that tech­nol­ogy solves all prob­lems and makes mankind bet­ter. Could he be the Trick­ster god?

Oppen­heimer and Prometheus meat in Alan Moore’s Watch­men (com­ing some­day to a the­ater near you), where the char­ac­ter of Doc­tor Man­hat­tan is a direct amal­ga­ma­tion of the two; a physi­cist who is lit­er­ally decom­posed in an acci­dent, and then reassem­bles him­self as a per­fect phys­i­cal reflec­tion of the unlim­ited power of this beau­ti­ful sym­bol: E=mc2. Like the bomb, he is all pow­er­ful and amoral, help­ing win the war in Viet­nam and main­tain­ing order more out of a sense of abstract, intel­lec­tual inter­est rather than any conviction.

Oppen­heimer was not like that, of course, of at least not like that all the time. The Man­hat­tan Project had a strate­gic goal and so was immune to mor­al­iz­ing, and for his part he naively felt that shar­ing the tech­no­log­i­cal infor­ma­tion imme­di­ately with the Soviet Union would fore­stall an arms race and enable inter­na­tional con­trol of nuclear weapons. This bal­ance, this ten­sion between tech­ni­cal ded­i­ca­tion, some sense of patri­o­tism or at least defense of soci­ety, and moral reck­on­ing is the essen­tial nature of the opera. It is sung-through and Adams’ lan­guage is mostly semi-abstract; it is not atonal in the way of 12-tone music, but it resists tonal cen­ters and cadences, and moves along in dream­like fash­ion sim­i­lar to “Pél­leas et Melisande.” The music is not specif­i­cally adapted to char­ac­ters, instead it brings the char­ac­ters along with it towards the dra­matic goal of the opera, like indi­vid­u­als caught help­lessly in the flow of his­tory, seek­ing to con­tribute to events around them by lit­er­ally mak­ing their voices heard — the con­cep­tion is much like Alban Berg, and this is the heights of Adams Roman­tic style. The effect is mel­liflu­ous, cli­max­ing musi­cally at the end of the first act, with Oppen­heimer singing a wrench­ing set­ting of John Donne’s “Bat­ter my heart, three person’d God,“which in the two very dif­fer­ent stag­ings of it I’ve seen proves itself one of the great moments in oper­atic literature.

The stag­ing of the Met pro­duc­tion, directed by Penny Wool­cock, is very dif­fer­ent than Peter Sel­l­ars’ orig­i­nal work, more con­crete and nar­ra­tive yet effec­tively abstract in that it seeks abstract means to con­vey the biggest ques­tions of the opera, the ones that can­not be lit­er­ally staged; mean­ings of work intended to pro­duce death and destruc­tion, the test itself. It is the stag­ing of this great aria that the dif­fer­ences between the two pro­duc­tions can be clearly drawn. In San Fran­cisco, Oppen­heimer lit­er­ally stag­gers around the stage, while behind him, enclosed in a cur­tain, hangs the bomb. At the end of his singing, he turns and goes back to the cur­tain, draws it enough so we have our first peek, and slips inside. On the Met stage, the bomb appears clearly, descend­ing from the ceil­ing, and the stage is cleared of all but the char­ac­ter, and he sings, lit­er­ally, in the shadow of the gad­get, and then gazes up at it, mes­mer­ized in some way. There is a feel­ing of awe and ter­ror. In Adams’ mem­oir, he dis­cusses the dif­fi­cul­ties of stag­ing this work, but I feel that Wool­cock and the Met have solved them — the pro­duc­tion is a musi­cal, dra­matic and emo­tional pow­er­house. “Doc­tor Atomic” is not just an inter­est­ing con­tem­po­rary opera, it is a great opera and belongs in the stan­dard lit­er­a­ture. It is one of the few works of music I can think of that means to evoke our Mod­ern con­cep­tion of the sub­lime, which is ter­ri­fy­ing beauty. Regard, it is beau­ti­ful, and terrifying:

Work­ing from mem­ory, I detect some changes in the score from the orig­i­nal as well. The char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Kitty Oppen­heimer was the weak spot orig­i­nally, and that may have had a great deal to do with Adams writ­ing the part orig­i­nally for Lor­raine Hunt Lieber­son. She was a singer with excep­tion­ally rare charisma, and Adams may have under­writ­ten the part with her in mind. Cer­tainly the part as sung now by Sasha Cooke is full and able to com­pare to the tremen­dous part of Oppen­heimer, partly cre­ated and absolutely owned by Ger­ald Fin­ley. His singing, his pres­ence on stage, the music all present a ques­tion with no ready, easy answer, which is the only way to treat Oppen­heimer and his endeavor. It was Oppenheimer’s genius that brought us the bomb, and his cul­tured per­son­al­ity that gave us the proper way to think of our­selves once we pos­sessed it, as gods and destroy­ers. Those aren’t the only apt words for the Trin­ity test, though. One of Oppenheimer’s col­leagues replied: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”