Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

In his epic moral work about the dilemmas of nuclear scientist J Robert Oppenheimer in the countdown to Hiroshima, US composer John Adams challenges preconceptions about opera. But for Penny Woolcock, director of ‘Doctor Atomic’, this is what makes Adams’s art important, writes HELEN MEANY

COMMISSIONED AS “an American Faust opera”, John Adams’s latest work, Doctor Atomic, cannot be so neatly summarised. Portraying the final weeks in the US military’s secret development of the atomic bomb in July 1945, it raises the kind of moral questions that this audacious American composer has been drawn to in previous works. Here, as in Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1990), he favours multiple perspectives and interpretations of real historical events, breaking new ground in terms of what operatic form can encompass. Doctor Atomic focuses on the heated discussions that took place among the leading physicists of “the Manhattan Project”, who were working at the test site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J Robert Oppenheimer.