This month Great Performances will air The Metropolitan Opera’s premiere of Doctor Atomic, composer John Adams’ powerful portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist presiding over the creation of the atom bomb. In anticipation of the broadcast, Thirteen.org spoke to Adams about audience reactions to the opera, the tension inherent to the creative process–whether in science or art, and opera’s role in contemporary culture.

Note: Doctor Atomic airs Monday, December 29 at 9:00 pm ET as part of Great Performances.

A lot has been written (and filmed) about the making of Doctor Atomic, but I’m curious to know your thoughts on the reaction to the opera from audiences, critics, or anyone else you’ve encountered. Were you surprised by anything? Pleased? Disappointed?

Opera has the singular ability to raise people’s emotions. When all the elements are working, it can be an overwhelming emotional and sensory experience. But precisely because of this capacity to affect, it not only excites but also can disturb the listener’s darker impulses. So if you have the temerity to compose opera, you have to be able to endure the extremes in audience response.

Right from the start, twenty one years ago, when Nixon in China was premiered in Houston, I learned that every aspect of what I or my collaborators might do would be sliced and diced and pored over not just by the critics, but by nearly everyone who had a ticket. It took me some time to develop a thick skin — to not get too enchanted with the raves and hopefully not too alarmed by the condemnations.

There was a huge amount of criticism written about Doctor Atomic, and it ranged from glowing raves to utter dismissal. Doctor Atomic was especially vulnerable because of its unique and provocative libretto. No one had ever encountered a libretto drawn from original sources and interwoven with very lofty poetry. People had nothing to compare it to, and so many just couldn’t make an adjustment.

Things are different now than ten or twenty years ago, because now we have not only the official press with their newspaper and magazine articles but also the added delight of the blogosphere, a realm in which negative writing is posted often without any editorial constraints. It can get very personal. I’m always amazed at how much people have to say when it comes to my stage works: everyone sees flaws, imperfections, inconsistencies and missed opportunities. One young blogger said “I liked 75% of it.” That would be a rave, I guess. I would have to judge The Met’s production the same way one would judge a presidential election. If 55% liked it, we had a landslide!

How has The Met’s production compared to past productions of Doctor Atomic? Did The Met bring anything new to the opera? Did you notice things you hadn’t before?

Penny Woolcock was in a terrifically difficult position of having to take on a cast that had largely learned the opera with Peter Sellars. She got the benefit of having singers who knew the opera thoroughly — singers like Gerald Finley, Eric Owens, Meredith Arwady, Thomas Glenn — but she had to find a way to make the story new and different. I was very impressed with how she took the story of the bomb’s creation to heart. She immersed herself in the characters and the science as deeply as anyone of us had. I thought she brought out Kitty Oppenheimer’s frustrated personality, her alcoholism and her sensuality, in a new and meaningful way.

The Met’s set, designed by Penny and Julian Crouch, brought to the fore the theme of science — its imagery and its mystery. I met several physicists who were thrilled by it and who felt that it was a rare case of a work of art taking what they do seriously. Peter Sellars’ and Adrienne Lobel’s set evoked the spaciousness and the solitude of the New Mexico desert, whereas Julian’s set for The Met was more compact and compartmentalized.

There was a static quality to some of the stage movement that appears to have been intentional on Penny’s part. (And of course she did away with the dancing, something that was symbolically important to Peter Sellars.) Her approach was different from Peter’s minutely and painstakingly choreographed gestures of every character. To have had two very different productions of such a huge opera in the space of three years is something quite rare for any composer, and I felt myself extremely fortunate to have seen such imaginative and powerful interpretations.

You’ve said before that you still don’t know whether dropping the bomb on Japan was the right thing to do, but the final sounds in Doctor Atomic — the voiceover, spoken in Japanese, of the mother asking for water for her child — viscerally reminds us of the human cost of using the weapon. And yet the opera does not feel like anti-nuclear propaganda.

Was it a challenge to keep the opera from becoming didactic? How did you set out to accomplish this?

I didn’t “set out” with any moral or ethical issues to promote. My intentions couldn’t be further from those who want to use art to promote social goals. The original sketch for the ending of Doctor Atomic was a kind of coda, an actual transcript of a phone conversation that General Groves had about two weeks after the Nagaski strike with a US Army doctor. The conversation was about press reports coming back about the horrific suffering that radiation victims were experiencing. It appears that Groves was incredulous about these reports and even suggested that it was just more Japanese propaganda. I didn’t want to close the opera with this. I felt it was too ironic, too freighted with implied criticism of the US position on the war. So I looked around for something that expressed my own admittedly confused emotions (I couldn’t articulate anything more than raw emotion), and I found those very short phrases that a Japanese mother had been heard speaking in the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima blast. All she asks for is water and that someone help her find her husband. She doesn’t really know what has happened yet. I found her words to be powerfully expressive of the final result of all the technology and warfare that had been brought to bear on these helpless civilians. I think it proved to be the right way to end the opera. How else could I have done it?

Throughout Doctor Atomic, Oppenheimer expresses pessimism about the bomb even working. As the Trinity test draws near, he estimates “the gadget’s” yield at a lowly 300 tons of TNT. And yet he’s driven to see the experiment through at all costs. Is this a tension you also experience as a composer?

I always have a feeling of tension when I’m having to bring a big work home on a deadline. This one, given the topic, was especially intense. But I had felt from the beginning it was an American opera that ought to be written, so I felt a real privilege to be the one who was going to compose it.

A recent critic had this to say about the inclusion of a Donne sonnet and verses from the Bhagavad Gita in Doctor Atomic: “some of the greatest lyrical poetry already contains so much music in the words, that to add sung music in an attempt to transcend it succeeds only in diluting its power.” How do you respond to that? And whether you agree or disagree about music diluting lyrical power, was it nevertheless a unique challenge setting music to Donne’s poetry?

I didn’t see that comment about the music “diluting” the poetry. I think that’s ridiculously pedantic and would cancel out a lot of other composers use of great poetry, including Handel, Debussy and Benjamin Britten. But it’s certainly proof that a new opera can elicit just about any kind of opinion.

You told Salon.com back in October: “People, much to my extreme annoyance, continue to refer to my operas as CNN operas. Even the positive New York Times review of my book said, ‘Mr. Adams is the composer of so-called CNN operas.’ But Sophocles and Shakespeare wrote political dramas. Oedipus is a political drama, and all the Shakespeare history plays are about kings and the human drama of pitting one vision of life against another. I don’t think Nixon in China or Doctor Atomic or The Death of Klinghoffer are any more political than what Shakespeare or Verdi or Sophocles did.” Why do you think the label — ‘CNN Operas’ — exists at all? Is it just because your work depicts real, contemporary events, or is it something else?

It was a cute tag, especially when Nixon in China came out. And of course that opera was very much about a media event — the presidential trip to China. So, I suppose “CNN opera” may have been appropriate. But thoughtless journalists and critics have continued to refer to my later operas with the same tag, and I think it shows how superficial their understanding of what I do is.

What are your thoughts on opera’s role in contemporary culture? How do you keep the form relevant in the age of the ringtone? I’m not just talking about choosing contemporary subject matter, though that is certainly part of it. More importantly, in what ways are you consciously working to push opera forward musically?

I draw my subject matter from my contemporary experience as an American. I find these stories, whether they be about presidential politics, or terrorism, or the atomic bomb, to be at the psychic core of our collective unconscious as Americans. We are defined as a nation and as a culture by how we respond to these themes. Creating works of drama, music, and poetry from the events of our collective experience has a tradition that goes back to the ancient Greek playwrights. I’ve always felt it a noble undertaking.

Independent Lens‘ “Wonders are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic” airs Dec. 19 at 10:00 pm.

An American Experience episode about the life of Oppenheimer will air at the end of January.