John Adams’s Doctor Atomic will receive its Chicago premiere when it opens this Friday at the Lyric Opera. Peter Sellars, the opera’s director and librettist, recently spoke with the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune about the piece.

Doctor Atomic examines the events leading up to the detonation of the first atomic bomb. It goes behind the scenes of the Manhattan Project, where J. Robert Oppenheimer and a team of scientists worked under the pressures and the paranoia of the Cold War to launch the bomb and, subsequently, the Nuclear Age.

Sellars tells Hedy Weiss of the Sun-Times that many of those tensions remain today. He and Adams are no strangers to tackling topical issues in their collaborations, having done so in Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. But above all else, Sellars contends their aim was to "make this opera a work of beauty,” he tells Weiss. He says: "It is not meant to be depressing, shattering, toxic … The role of artists is to process the toxicity … And John has a deep understanding of the way music is connected to the inner physics of the body and soul."

That Doctor Atomic has come to Chicago is not without its significance. Though it received its world premiere in San Francisco in 2005, it has since gone through a number of changes, and is now coming to the city that played a major role in the science behind the music. As Sellars tells the Tribune’s music critic John von Rhein, some of the texts he chose come from scientists at the University of Chicago “who said nuclear power should not be introduced to the world as a weapon. These were people of profound conscience and courage."

As for Adams’s music itself, Rhein says it is “the most complex and powerful to date to come from the man many consider America's greatest living composer.” He continues "The influences of Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varèse meet and meld in a score that, like Oppenheimer himself, plays with fire. As with Wagner's operas, the principal carrier of the mythic message is the orchestra—the main source of what Adams has called the score's "serpentine, churning inner activity."

To read the complete articles, visit suntimes.com and chicagotribune.com.

The production will run through January 19. For ticket information, visit lyricopera.org.