batter my heart three-personed god doctor atomic

Thus the Oppenheimers' fondness for the French poet Charles Baudelaire inspires a passionate love scene his admiration for John Donne gives rise to a haunting aria that closes Act 1, set to one of the English poet's sonnets, 'Batter my heart, three-person'd God.' Sellars' libretto is adapted partly from original documents of the period - memoirs, scientific journals, government documents - and partly from poetry known to have special meaning to the characters. Leslie Groves, and Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty. Robert Oppenheimer, the guiding genius of the project, but also such real historical figures as Edward Teller, Gen. They have succeeded in dramatizing the internal doubts and conflicts that beset the participants, principally J. Exciting, deeply moving and intensely lyrical throughout its first act, the opera sputters in Act 2 as a series of prolonged, static scenes drain tension just as it should be building through the countdown toward the first test explosion.īut it would be a major mistake to understate what Adams and his librettist, Peter Sellars, have accomplished in bringing to life 1945's world-changing events in the New Mexico desert.

'Doctor Atomic,' which had its local premiere Friday night, is a worthy successor to 'Nixon in China' and Adams' other operatic treatments of touchstone historical events - but it's not a complete triumph. History hovers nearby at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where John Adams' ambitious but uneven work about the creation of the atom bomb is being staged just a few miles from the site of the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction.

Batter my heart three-personed god doctor atomic