'Doctor Atomic'

JOHN ADAMS HAS MADE A career of creating art from recent events. One of the country's most important composers, he specializes in turning the messiness of American politics into grand myth.

Sometimes it works to great effect. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2002 work On the Transmigration of Souls. It was commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Nixon in China, his first opera, was about just that. Critics seemed astounded that Adams had managed to put the president's 1972 meeting with Mao into the grand, primarily European, tradition of opera.

The Death of Klinghoffer, his next opera, followed in 1991. That work, about the hijacking six years earlier of the Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and their murder of a Jewish-American passenger, saw protests as soon as it had its premiere in Brussels, from both Jewish and Arab groups. The one saw the opera as anti-Semitic; the other saw it as pro-Israeli. Many companies that had planned to present the work demurred after the controversy.

The tough reception for Klinghoffer was hard on Adams; he said at the time that he would never write another opera. But artists have always made--and ignored--such pronouncements, and so Adams's latest work based on real events, Doctor Atomic, fittingly had its premiere this past fall at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House.

Adams's ambition has not waned. Doctor Atomic tackles one of the defining events of the 20th century, the creation of the atomic bomb. The action takes place in June and July 1945, as the Los Alamos scientists prepare for (and debate) the bomb's first test. The group had been racing to complete the multibillion-dollar project, convinced that the Germans were doing the same. But, by the summer of 1945, Germany had surrendered; the likely target is now Japan.