Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb. physicist and Manhattan Project director J. Myth and archetype surround Adams’ 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic. There are obvious shades of Faust in the plot, which centers around U.S. I think that’s enough to do me for a lifetime of work. But for me as an American today the myths aren’t King Lear or Odysseus but historical figures and events, cultural focal points often blown up by the media into a mythological dimension in the way that Andromache meant something very specific to the Greeks. Otherwise it’s utterly ridiculous to have these people running around the stage screaming at the top of their lungs. …I use the term archetype because opera, if it’s to be successful, has to function on a mythic level. My Nixon has as much relationship to the real Nixon as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar does to the Roman emperor. If you take that as a given and try to forget the Nixon of Checkers and Watergate, I think it immediately becomes a more interesting opera. It’s a particularly American figure we’ve developed. I take him to be an archetype of an American head of state- maybe not even necessarily a head of state, just any emotionally undeveloped man who finds himself in a position of tremendous power. …My Nixon is not the historical Richard Nixon, he is every President. In a 1987 interview with Edward Strickland, John Adams discussed myth and archetype in relation to his new (at the time) opera, Nixon in China:
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