World Premiere: August 21, 2007
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 3 flutes with 3rd doubling piccolo, 3 oboes with 3rd doubling English horn, 3 clarinets with 2nd doubling E-flat clarinet and 3rd doubling bass clarinet, 3 bassoons with 3rd doubling contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets with 4th doubling piccolo trumpet, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta and strings. 
Duration: 25 minutes

John Adams is one of today’s most acclaimed composers. Audiences have responded enthusiastically to his music, and he enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron Copland’s career: a recent survey of major orchestras conducted by the League of American Orchestras found John Adams to be the most frequently performed living American composer; he won five Grammy Awards between 1989 and 2004; he received the University of Louisville’s prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 1995 for his Violin Concerto; in 1997, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and named “Composer of the Year” by Musical America magazine; he was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks; from 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and since 2009 has he been Creative Chair with the LA Philharmonic; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society,” and in 2019 became the first American composer to receive the Erasmus Prize “for notable contributions to European culture, society and social science”; he has been granted honorary doctorates from the Royal Academy of Music (London), Juilliard School, and Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Northwestern universities, honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and the California Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts; in June 2023, the Library of Congress announced that it was acquiring Adams’ manuscripts and papers for its Music Division, which also holds the papers of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, George and Ira Gershwin, Martha Graham, Charles Mingus, Neil Simon and other distinguished American artists.

The vexing relationship between technology and the human spirit has been played out nowhere in more powerful and stark terms than in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II at a secret, isolated facility in Los Alamos, thirty miles northwest of Santa Fe, under the direction of a brilliant, obsessive and intellectually unsettled theoretical physicist from Berkeley, J. Robert Oppenheimer. After three years of intensive work by some of the world’s foremost scientists, a plutonium-based nuclear weapon was successfully tested in the desert near Alamogordo in southern New Mexico at dawn on July 16, 1945. On August 6th, an atomic bomb was detonated above the city of Hiroshima; nine days later Japan’s surrender ended World War II 

John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic, commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and premiered on October 1, 2005, is concerned with the personal and moral issues confronted by Oppenheimer and his colleagues during the final days before the crucial test at Alamogordo. The libretto was created by Adams’ long-time collaborator Peter Sellars, director of the premiere, who drew on original source material, including personal memoirs, recorded interviews, technical manuals of nuclear physics and declassified government documents, as well as the Bhagavad Gita and verses by Baudelaire and John Donne that were fundamental to Oppenheimer’s thinking. (Extensive background on the opera is available at Adams’ web site: http://www.earbox.com.)

In 2007, Adams drew the Doctor Atomic Symphony from the score of the opera and led the BBC Symphony Orchestra in its premiere at London’s Royal Albert Hall on August 21, 2007; David Robertson conducted the work’s first American performance with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra on February 7, 2008. The Doctor Atomic Symphony is in three continuous movements that distill the opera’s dramatic essence into purely instrumental terms. The Laboratory, adapted from the opera’s prelude, evokes a devastated post-nuclear landscape with its hammered timpani notes, blaring brass chords and howling strings; the fragmented melodic phrases that close the movement’s brief span offer little expressive relief. The second movement — Panic — derives from the tense music that accompanies the final preparations for the test at Alamogordo: the fierce electrical storm that almost delays the experiment and raises apprehension that the bomb, already armed, might explode accidentally if hit by lightning; the boorish cajoling of General Leslie Groves, Army commander of the project (impersonated by the solo trombone); and a recognition of the native Tewa people of northern New Mexico with a suggestion of their traditional “corn dance.” The finale is based on Oppenheimer’s deeply reflective aria Batter My Heart (played in the Symphony by solo trumpet), whose text was taken from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 14 (ca. 1610): Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. Adams viewed Batter My Heart as “a poem of almost unbearable self-awareness, an agonistic struggle between good and evil, darkness and light.” Donne’s verse not only summarized Oppenheimer’s own ambivalence over the fundamental morality of his project but also suggested to him the name for its culminating test site: Trinity.