Robert Oppenheimer is Dr. Atomic

The San Diego Symphony gave a performance of John Adams’s Dr. Atomic Symphony over the weekend of December 3 and 4. It was a great performance but it left me realizing just how rich is the story of the Trinity nuclear test.

Dr. Atomic is a symphonic reduction of an opera of the same title that Adams premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2005. The opera deals mainly with the psychological tension leading up to the Trinity explosion and concerns itself primarily with Robert Oppenheimer as “the father of the atomic bomb.” That’s one hell of a child to have spawned.

In the third movement of the symphonic version of Dr. Atomic the trumpet solo is representative of a John Donne poem, which Oppenheimer used as the source of the code name Trinity. In the opera this is a scene for baritone (Oppenheimer) singing the solo, which the trumpet plays in the symphony. The text is the Donne poem Batter my heart.

One of Oppenheimer’s mistresses, Jean Tatlock, had introduced him to Donne’s poetry in the 1930s. She suicided in 1944 a few months before Oppenheimer chose the name Trinity for the test operation.

The text of Batter my heart is in the tradition of the Bhagavad Gita, which Oppenheimer is supposed to have quoted upon witnessing the Trinity explosion. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” is the now famous line from the Gita.

It is a misinterpretation. The line is “I am become time, the destroyer of worlds,” but Oppenheimer read the Gita in the original Sanskrit so some leeway is in order.

Oppenheimer was as complicated a human being as anyone could imagine. He leaned toward communism his entire life, but his ambition led him to create a device that many of his pacifist colleagues found to be abhorrent. Yet his leftist leanings got him in trouble during the McCarthy era.

In a meeting with President Truman after the war, Oppenheimer claimed to have blood on his hands. Truman did not take it well and ordered that Oppenheimer never be granted another meeting.

Oppenheimer was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize but did not win.

The text of Batter my heart. Trinity was taken from the phrase "three person'd God" in the first line.

Batter my heart, three person’d God; For you
As yet but knock, breathe, knock, breathe,
knock, breathe Shine, and seek to mend;
Batter my heart, three person’d God;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, break, blow, break, blow
burn and make me new.

I, like an usurpt town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy,
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.