An opera that hovers on threshold of the nuclear age

Canadian baritone Gerald Finley as Robert Oppenheimer in ''Doctor Atomic.'' (suzanne dechillo/the new york times)

NEW YORK - The composer John Adams writes operas that exist at the junction of history and modern mythology. Taking an event such as Nixon's visit to China, or the creation of the first atomic bomb, he has shown how this centuries-old art form can be used to reimagine seminal moments of a more recent national past and bring to those over-chronicled episodes a new multidimensionality and resonance.

It's a curious brand of alchemy Adams has mastered, one that transmutes the dry, hard factness of the past into something more vital and vibrating, something that hints at the psychological states of history's protagonists, that taps underground reservoirs of emotion, and that plumbs the mythic dimension of moments that - even as they unfold - seem to stand outside the normal flow of time.

Such is certainly the case with Adams's recent opera "Doctor Atomic," a hauntingly powerful, deeply humane and eloquent work that opened in an effective new staging at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday evening. (It is to be simulcast to local movie theaters on Nov. 8.)

It would be hard to invent a fictitious sce nario for a modern opera more gripping than the one that is taken here straight from the history books. It is June 15, 1945, with the Manhattan Project building to a climax in Los Alamos, N.M. The atomic bomb is ready for its first test. Truman will soon meet with Stalin and Churchill in Potsdam to carve the contours of postwar Europe, and the president is demanding a successful test of the weapon to strengthen his hand.

But the young scientists assembled in the desert, led by the brilliant Robert Oppenheimer, are growing restless and wavering in their conviction. What had begun as a race against Nazi Germany has become something much more morally hazy. Germany has surrendered, and the weapon is to be used on Japanese civilians. Oppenheimer pushes through his team's resistance but wages a private war with inner demons. The test-bomb hangs ominously in a tower. A dangerous electrical storm breaks out. Scientists wonder whether the bomb's blast will ignite the earth's atmosphere. The storm subsides by dawn. There is a lengthy countdown of almost unbearable tenseness. The bomb is dropped. The nuclear age has begun. The opera is over.

Adams rightly approaches this history as the "American myth par excellence," a Faustian story of the human intellect deciphering the secrets of nature to create a weapon with a destructive force beyond its wildest imaginings. In his newly published memoir, the composer describes the atomic bomb as "the overwhelming, irresistible, inescapable image that dominated the psychic activity of my childhood." No wonder the subject drew out some of his most compelling and imaginative music to date.

The score of "Doctor Atomic" weds a cool Stravinskian precision and rhythmic vitality with a kind of seething Wagnerian dread. Rapid caffeinated figures dart around the orchestra like hyperactive electrons. Strange, darkly glowing woodwind chords hover like a vapor. Low brass notes rattle ominously as if marking the edge of an abyss. At various points, loudspeakers positioned throughout the hall project prerecorded sounds - truck engines, snatches of period pop music, and, in the end, a long, loud digitally distorted timpani roll whose vibrations rise from the floor like an earth tremor.

The libretto is itself a remarkable document assembled by Peter Sellars entirely from historical sources: popular and technical scientific writing, memoirs, interviews, declassified government documents, apocalyptic passages from the "Bhagavad Gita," and poetry by Baudelaire and John Donne (both beloved by Oppenheimer) as well the poet Muriel Rukeyser.

Taken as a whole, this unusual brew of sources has a paradoxical two-pronged effect. It creates an air of authenticity - the physicists converse in their own actual words, the chorus sings about the plutonium core and the "twelve pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron" - while at other moments it wisely distances the opera from any notion of small-minded documentary reenactment, as Oppenheimer suddenly expresses himself in ecstatic quotations from Baudelaire or the chorus frantically apostrophizes the Hindu God Vishnu, "shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow/ With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring."

The opera's original production, directed by Sellars, premiered in San Francisco in 2005, and was later performed in Amsterdam and Chicago. It was a viscerally powerful staging that seemed intent on reproducing a version of the complex interpenetration of history, science, and mythology found in the libretto. The chorus deployed an arsenal of primal physical gestures and the whirling choreography by Lucinda Childs was freighted with symbolism.

For this newest staging, the British director Penny Woolcock, who had never worked in opera before, tacks in the other direction, making clarity and simplicity her mission. There are stacked rows of tiny cubicles with blackboards, and stage projections of the endless rain and of scientific equations scrawled like modern hieroglyphs. An assortment of exploding debris hovers frozen in the air, and of course the bomb itself, a giant sphere crisscrossed by wires like veins on an eyeball, hangs oppressively above the test site.

Overall, it is an effective production less for any novel interpretation Woolcock brings, than for the way she showcases the layers of this already complex work with minimal intrusion. This fortunate modern opera now has two viable stagings in circulation.

The excellent cast was anchored by the Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who created the role of Oppenheimer for the San Francisco premiere. On Monday night, his performance was focused and disciplined, portraying the genius scientist and learned man of culture as a leader functioning under immense psychological strain, in the fray but also above it, that is, with a tense awareness of his own historical moment. With his colleagues he projected a single-minded confidence.

But such a facade also exacts a punishing psychic toll, which he made clear in Oppenheimer's wrenching aria that concludes Act I. On stage alone with the bomb, he poured out his torment through the words of Donne's sonnet "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." Adams's writing here is inspired in its somber lyricism, and Finley sang with a deep tone and a deeper sense of spiritual anguish. Beneath it all, this Faust is a broken man.

The other principals were universally strong, with the robust bass-baritone Eric Owens in the role of General Leslie Groves, an impassioned Sasha Cooke as Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty; and the husky-voiced Meredith Arwady as the Oppenheimers' knowing maid Pasqualita. Among the scientists, Richard Paul Fink was Edward Teller; Thomas Glenn was Robert Wilson, and Earle Patriarco was Frank Hubbard. Making his Met debut in the pit, conductor Alan Gilbert drew wonders from the Met Orchestra. This was an exceptionally clear reading but also one with an intuitive feel for the music's broader emotional arc. We do not "hear" the final nuclear explosion, yet Adams finds a way of dramatizing it to harrowing effect.

"Doctor Atomic" is not a work that bangs you over the head with its moral verdict, but one that bears sensitive witness to the crossing of a threshold in world history. The opera maintains a kind of dual-consciousness: We are drawn into the moment, full of empathy for these young, brilliant, and often conflicted scientists caught up in events much larger than themselves. And at the same time we watch, of course, from the future, looking back at an immensely fateful hour with a mournful knowledge of how this story will unfold.

And it's all within the music. Friedrich Schlegel once described the historian as a "prophet facing backwards." John Adams is a composer with a rare gift for creating works that look in both directions at once.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.