Doctor Atomic Symphony

Program notes

About the Work

Doctor Atomic, John Adams’s opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the first atomic bomb, was first staged in San Francisco in 2005. Peter Sellars compiled the libretto largely from documents: declassified government papers, the communications of the scientists, officials and soldiers involved, and poetry, the Holy Sonnets of John Donne among it. The action is confined to the weeks and then the hours before the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, and the opera ends in the last stretched moment before the explosion. It is less a history play than a study of people under unbearable pressure.

In 2007 Adams made an orchestral work from it. He conducted the first performance himself, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 21 August 2007, during the BBC Proms. The version heard that night is reported to have been considerably longer and in four movements; Adams then cut it back, and the published score lasts about 25 minutes and runs without a break. David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony took up the revised version and recorded it.

It is called a symphony, not a suite, and the difference matters. Adams did not simply string together the opera’s orchestral passages. A reviewer of the first performance noted newly written music linking them, and the three sections, headed ‘The Laboratory’, ‘Panic’ and ‘Trinity’, are joined into a single span. Adams has pointed to Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, another symphony in one unbroken movement, as his model for the form.

No words are sung, so the plot is gone and its weather remains: dread, haste, and at the end a kind of prayer. In the opera Oppenheimer sings Donne’s sonnet ‘Batter my heart’, with its plea to be broken, burned and made new. In the symphony that music is still the destination, but the voice has become a trumpet.

What to Listen For

‘The Laboratory’ opens explosively, in the word of one review of the first performance, with surging brass, driving strings and thundering percussion. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s note on the piece hears in its timpani and brass a violent force that recalls Edgard Varèse. Another listener found this first section portentous and brooding: it sets a mood of menace before anything has happened.

‘Panic’ is the longest part. The strings scurry, in one critic’s phrase, as if out of control, while wind interjections cut across them. This is the Adams of fast, driving pulse, turned to the purposes of anxiety and not of exhilaration. Listen for how seldom the music is allowed to settle.

The music passes without a pause into ‘Trinity’, which takes its name from the test. Here the solo trumpet takes over the melody of ‘Batter my heart’. The Concertgebouw note hears an almost Renaissance character in the sound of the lament on this instrument, and speaks of Purcell-like music in the score. A reviewer of the Saint Louis recording called the solo bleakly serene and observed that it never quite calms the agitation around it. In a concert that has already put a trumpet concerto at its centre, this second long solo for the instrument gives the evening a shape of its own.