John Adams- Doctor Atomic- Batter My Heart

But just the fact that that was on the table as a remote possibility, I think, is very expressive of the vast unknown into which these physicists were walking. ADAMS: Teller had been asked by Oppenheimer to do some calculations, some number-crunching, and it was pretty quickly proven that that wouldn't be the case. SIEGEL: Which was a theory that had been advanced at one time. I mean, there's a moment right before the last scene where the scientists are sitting around talking about whether, indeed, this test might possibly ignite the entire Earth's atmosphere. It is definitely, genuinely a sense of people working with the unknown. And they're all, you know, frantically working in the lab trying to get ready for the bomb test. ADAMS: The pounding timpani, which was inspired by science-fiction music, that's when the lights come up and we see the Los Alamos Lab and we see all the technicians and the military police and the scientists.

It's a composition that I made entirely with power tools, and I wanted to give the feeling that we were sort of inside an electron accelerator. SIEGEL: What would we be seeing when we're hearing this? JOHN ADAMS (Composer): You know, I read comic books and I watched science-fiction movies, and a lot of those movies would start with some test in the Nevada desert followed by some strange, unnatural event maybe a monster would appear or animals would start dying or something. The story is based on Richard Rhodes' book 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb,' and John Adams admits that the title of the opera, 'Doctor Atomic,' has the ring of a 1950s B-movie. It's now on stage at the San Francisco Opera. It's about the first test of a nuclear weapon at Los Alamos in 1945. The composer John Adams has written operas about communism and capitalism-'Nixon in China'-and terrorism-'The Death of Klinghoffer.' His new opera continues that trend of addressing big, contemporary subjects.

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

John Adams- Doctor Atomic- Batter My Heart