It’s no surprise because the opera-which seeks to dramatize certain events leading up to the first successful test of an atom bomb, in July 1945, and to ponder the ethical and political questions inevitably raised by that event-premiered several years ago, in 2005, at the San Francisco Opera (which had commissioned an “American Faust” in 1999). In some, rather obvious ways, that climax comes as no surprise in others-not least, the way in which this opera relates to the rest of Adams’s work-it’s very startling indeed. But it’s probably fair to say that, in terms of sheer destructive power, no finale could ever be as grand as the one that brings John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Doctor Atomic to its close: it ends with a nuclear detonation.
Opera, that most extreme of the staged arts, has always made a routine of spectacularly violent endings-inventive homicides and suicides (poisoned bouquets, seppuku), grandiose self-immolations, a post-nuptial psychotic spree, even, as in Dialogues of the Carmelites, the occasional mass-guillotining. The Manhattan Project laboratory and staff in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in Act 1 of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, directed by Penny Woolcock at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, October 2008 1.
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