"Opera," says composer John Adams, "has a curious ability to handle life's biggest themes in a way no other art form can approximate." Adams has repeatedly used opera to convey some of the major contemporary themes that have engaged him: "Nixon in China" (1987) focused on market economy vs. socialist ideology, "The Death of Klinghofer" (1991) explored terrorism and "Dr. Atomic" (2005), which opens at New York's Metropolitan Opera this week, deals with the creation of the atom bomb. The idea was to create a "contemporary Faustian myth" centering on J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the team of scientists who created the first nuclear bomb in 1945 and who, in his pursuit of ultimate knowledge, essentially made an infernal compact with the U.S. government and its military to deliver the world's most powerful WMD. "What gives me great satisfaction," Adams says, "are those pieces that weave American cultural and historical material … to summon up the essence of America's collective psyche."

The Metropolitan's production of "Dr. Atomic" (the title evokes both science fiction and Goethe's "Dr. Faustus") is stunning. The opera opens with brash, loud, recorded electronic music before the orchestra (conducted by Alan Gilbert) takes over and we find ourselves in the midst of the labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oppenheimer's team is discussing their project in what turns out to be not a conventional operatic libretto but the prosaic words they had actually used: Peter Sellars has created a collage of words culled from memoirs, declassified minutes of Washington meetings and poetry. Oppie, as his friends called him, was a highly cultivated man (magnificently sung by Gerald Finley) who had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, where he had composed sonnets in his first year. He loved Baudelaire (a French copy of "Fleurs du Mal" was in his pocket when the bomb exploded), was interested in Eastern philosophy (he studied Sanskrit to read the Bhagavad Gita in the original), spoke many languages and loved classical music. Adams claims he was the most cultured scientist in the world—more than Aristotle.

In fact, none of the team fits the stereotype of a nerd. The brightest young men of that generation were assembled in Los Alamos, but although Hitler was dead and the Nazis had surrendered, these idealists believed they were "saving civilization." That conflict is at the heart of the Oppenheimer saga: he was consumed by guilt for the rest of his life—after the detonation, he quoted from the Gita, "I am become Death"—but he believed he was going to end the war with the bomb. The lone skeptic was Robert Wilson, Oppenheimer's favorite, who circulated a petition against dropping the bomb (wanting instead to "demonstrate" its strength to the Japanese), which of course never reached President Truman. Oppie believed that it was the responsibility of politicians, not scientists, to decide whether to bomb or not.

But opera is traditionally about love, and Adams does not disappoint: in an erotically charged bedroom scene, Oppie's wife, Kitty (played by sexy new mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke), sings a love poem by Muriel Rukeyser as an aria. Kitty, who was also a scientist, felt lonely and frustrated being a "faculty wife." In the opera, she represents feminine consciousness and moral sensitivity. We see Oppenheimer absorbed in his reports as the neglected Kitty sings, "Am I in your light?" Eventually, he responds with a sensual Baudelaire poem. Then, at the climax of Act I, left alone in the desert, Oppenheimer voices his inner conflict through John Donne's intense, powerful sonnet, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." It is a perfect summing up of Oppenheimer's spiritual struggle: like Donne, he asks God to destroy him because he has been "usurp't by your enemy." Sellars uses Oppenheimer's favorite poem, with its aptly violent metaphors of war, battle, conquest and submission, to reinforce the Faustian leitmotif as Adams abandons atonality for gorgeous music that he describes as an "archaic trope."

Indeed, Adams's music is not unrelentingly modern—it is lyrical, romantic, Wagnerian by turns, and it matches the enormity of his myth. The choral singing is grand as the libretto uses the Bhagavad Gita's horrific descriptions of universal destruction to create the terror of the bomb. This is opera at its most cerebral, and Adams admits he aims to create ecological awareness: man is upsetting the balance of nature even as Pasqualita, the Oppenheimers' maid, sings a Pueblo lullaby about preserving the earth. That is the alternate myth of the Native Americans, embodied in their ethnic costumes and ranged silently over the top of the multilevel set that offers a cross section of the scientists' labs and offices. Outside, the desert is suggested by huge white mountains of cloth and above it all hangs the wired bomb, an exact replica of the real one, but somehow made beautiful, like the moon. The end is suggested, not shown, as the final explosion is heard. The cast gapes at the audience, as if to say: we are the bomb.