Music from Trinity

I'd never heard of John Adams. No, not the president from Quincy, Massachusetts. I'm talking about the composer from Worcester, Massachusetts.

At least, I didn't think I'd ever heard of him until last night, but now I see that he's famous for his 1987 opera Nixon in China, which I guess I have heard of at one time or another. But certainly never seen.

Anyway, last night the Seattle Symphony concluded the evening's program with the Doctor Atomic Symphony, orchestral music adapted from John Adams's 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic. The program notes admonish me that Adams is "widely recognized as the pre-eminent American composer of his generation." So, there you are, my own ignorance notwithstanding.

Despite the extreme conservatism of my musical tastes, I found the symphony -- maybe more a tone poem than a symphony: a single movement, 23 minutes in length -- to be dramatic and gripping and worth my attention. The score was loud and dissonant and heavy on the percussion, as one would expect from a modern work, but also rich in melody in the woodwinds and brass. The conductor -- a visiting conductor from the St. Louis Symphony -- gave us a short and witty pre-performance synopsis of the opera's plot, and explained how the symphony tracks that plot and introduces the major musical themes of the opera.

The opera takes place in 1945 -- the first act occuring shortly before the testing of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, N.M., and the second act immediately before detonation of the Hiroshima bomb. The focus is on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father" of the atomic bomb, whose ambivalence about what he was creating -- and later, what he had created -- eventually led to the government's yanking of his security clearance.

Oppenheimer was a poet as well as a theoretical physicist. It was he who famously recalled his feelings while observing the initial bomb test in New Mexico with a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He gave the code name of "Trinity" to the Alamogordo test site, after his favorite sonnet by John Donne: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God."

Oppenheimer, the "Dr. Atomic" of the opera's title, has always fascinated and impressed me. At one time, back when I had personal heroes, I guess I considered him as such.

The symphonic derivative of the opera that we heard last night combined breathtaking musical elements of fear, anticipation, and explosive violence, with an overall sense of poetry and awe. It was not "easy listening," compared with the Mozart piano concerto that had immediately preceded it, but it was moving and thought-provoking.

If the opportunity ever presents itself, I might actually persuade myself to attend John Adams's opera itself -- just out of curiosity and, perhaps, as my own personal tribute to the life of Dr. Oppenheimer.