I have two places where I work: my studio at our home in Berkeley and another studio, a mirror image of the first, in our place in northern Sonoma. The Sonoma studio is in a very rural, densely forested part of the county right on the Mendocino border and just a couple of miles inland from the Pacific. I don’t work anywhere else, largely because over the years I’ve become joyfully tech-addicted, and I like to work in an environment where I can mock up ideas with a sampler and a software program. I’ve never been the kind of composer who can work at an arts colony or in a hotel room or on an airplane or whatever. I’d love to be able to have that freedom, but I can’t. I also tend to be extremely protective of my time, to the point where I sometimes feel like I’m so absorbed in my art that I’m not a very good citizen. I see people I know who have very complicated lives but who still manage to serve on boards, do charitable work, teach or donate their time for a public cause. Yet I seem always to be fighting a constant uphill battle to finish one piece, and that’s pretty much my life—jumping immediately from one large project into the next.

I hope so. I’ll have to satisfy myself by knowing that the way I do my public service is by creating good art. I work very much blue-collar hours: I tend to start about 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning and I work all day, maybe with some time off to deal with correspondence or proofing. It’s a very regular, very predictable routine. I am amused to think that Kant’s daily habits were so unchanging that the citizens of Königsberg could confidently know to set their clocks when he went out for his late afternoon walk. I usually work weekends too, which is a tiresome bore--and I think it’s a burden on the family. I’m trying to stop doing that, but projects sometimes are just so huge and time is so limited. Work tends to fill the available space. I take deadlines very seriously and rarely am late delivering.

I usually get my first ideas when I’m walking or on a hike in the mountains. There’s something about physical movement that’s very productive for creative thinking. When I see pictures of Beethoven walking, I can understand what was going on inside his head. But when it comes time to write something down, I usually start with improvising. I might improvise at the piano. I’m a very poor pianist, but the piano nevertheless tends to give me a helpful harmonic picture. Then shortly after that I start making extremely rough sketches on manuscript paper with a pencil. The next step is to move over into the computer environment where I have a very flexible software system, Digital Performer, a program originally developed for film scoring. It has flexibility of the sort that allows me to take musical structures and stretch them, transpose them, squeeze them, distort them—move large or small structures around in ways that would be extremely tedious on paper. I’ve become very adept at using it, and of course I don’t use the software in the way that its developers intended. I can move around in that environment very fluidly...I can do it almost without thinking.

For the last step, after I’ve made a MIDI realization of my piece, I go back and do a pencil score on manuscript paper, something that most younger composers find charmingly old-fashioned. Nowadays the majority of composers younger than I never move out of the virtual realm until they output the music on a laser printer. For them manuscript paper and pencils are relics of the past.

That was the first book I read. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a very influential book, and far more than a mere description of the bomb. It is, in fact, a history of physics in the first half of the twentieth century.

I read the Rhodes book and its sequel, Dark Star, which is less about science and more about the Cold War, thermonuclear weapons and Soviet-American espionage. I’ve read a collection of Oppenheimer’s letters. When some people see this opera and hear Oppenheimer singing Baudelaire, the Bhagavad Gita and a John Donne sonnet, they’re likely to think that its creators are being much too arty. But in fact, if you read about Oppenheimer and read his own letters, you see that he was quite possibly the most cultured scientist who ever lived--more so than Newton or Einstein or Neils Bohr. He did indeed quote the Sanskrit poetry (which he read in the original!), and he and his wife Kitty had little coded signals to each other that were based on Baudelaire lines or some such text. When he was a 17-year-old undergraduate at Harvard, he and his roommates would have sonnet-writing contests. So it’s appropriate, and no stretch of the imagination, that in this opera Oppenheimer would express his deepest thoughts in great poetry.

No, I didn’t use any of Oppenheimer’s letters, but at the end of the first act I set John Donne’s sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-personed God” as a soliloquy for him. He is alone—a rare moment of solitude for him—and feels a very deep dissonance within himself over the fact that he is about to bring forth this terrible weapon, something that is going to introduce an unknowable amount of pain and destruction into the world. The Donne sonnet, which Oppenheimer later said prompted him to name the test site “Trinity,” is a poem of almost unbearable self-awareness, an agonistic struggle between good and evil, darkness and light.

[The poem:

Holy Sonnet No. 14

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.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.]

The poet speaks as one whose soul, “like an usurped town,” has been taken captive by dark forces—the dark “shadow” of his own self. The real God must come forth and batter him and break him and bend him and destroy him, and make him whole and new again. It’s a very profound moment in the opera. Later, after I’d set this sonnet to music, I read in a new biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, how Oppenheimer went into a deep depression after the initial euphoria of the bomb’s success wore off.

Yes, that’s right. It ends with the Trinity test. We’d originally planned an epilogue, a setting of a declassified transcript of a phone conversation between General Groves and an Army doctor about two weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. It’s clear from this phone conversation that General Groves considered all the stories about horrible death from radiation as nothing more than Japanese propaganda. He, like many others in the government, refused to believe that radiation could cause such devastating forms of suffering and death. He was, as we’d say today “in major denial.” People were only just beginning to realize the horrific long-term effects of a nuclear attack.

I thought about the art, music and films that emerged out of the immediate postwar period--in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s--and how it expressed a chilling awareness of man’s ability to destroy himself. Science fiction movies started appearing, and a typical plot would involve a nuclear explosion in the desert--in Nevada perhaps. This would result in some disturbing phenomenon, something frightening and threatening. Nature would go awry or a monster would appear. And of course, the truth is, some of the physicists working on the bomb in Los Alamos were not 100% certain that their invention wouldn’t ignite the entire earth’s atmosphere.

So I had several ideas. One was to evoke science fiction movie music, which was one of the reasons why I decided to call it Doctor Atomic--I wanted to give that sense of science fiction, plus of course the backdoor reference to Doctor Faustus, a book which comes from the same postwar era. But actually the first really strong musical idea came to me when I thought about the late music of Varèse— a work like Déserts, which suggests to me a post-nuclear holocaust landscape. That was my first inspiration, and I went with those ideas--Varèse and science fiction music. You can hear it in the very opening bars of music. This comes after one of several musique concrète preludes that are interwoven into the operatic structure.

I’ve used some sound effects that will come up on loudspeakers--weather sounds mostly, rain, thunder, wind. It’s very eerie when you hear it-- both eerie and mysteriously beautiful, just the sound of rain, for example. On the night before the scheduled test, on the 15th-16th of July, 1945 when they were getting ready to detonate the first plutonium bomb, a tremendous electrical storm came out of nowhere. It was completely unseasonal and fearsomely dangerous, as the bomb had already been hoisted up on scaffolding, ready to detonate. You’d be hard put to deny that there’s something mythic and portentous about a storm of this magnitude suddenly appearing right as the world’s first atomic bomb was about to explode.

One of the things I came across in the course of reading about nuclear energy was a homely little analogy, perhaps a bit oversimplified, but nevertheless very vivid: it expresses how much energy is involved in keeping an atom stable. If you imagine that there is roughly enough energy binding the atoms in a glass of water to power the Queen Mary across the Atlantic and back you can get an idea of the forces involved. That is an astonishing thing. It expresses how vast is the amount of energy in a very small amount of mass. And if all of that mass can be liberated into pure energy, think of how much power is unleashed. You’ve seen these pictures of a thermonuclear explosion, or even just the bomb that was detonated at Trinity? That plutonium explosion had the force of a hurricane and for a moment approximated the heat of the sun. And it was nothing more than a very small mass that caused it, a plutonium sphere the size of a grapefruit. Even that sphere itself was not entirely solid—it was packed with tamper. So the actual material that fissioned was very small. The understanding of that interchangeable relationship between energy and matter, e=mc2, is what revolutionized twentieth century thinking and what made the bomb possible.

These scientists and their wives all found ways to unwind, but life was undeniably difficult. The men all worked six days a week, and the wives who were not themselves scientists were either given very menial jobs or were just left to cope with the primitive living conditions. Remember that Los Alamos was almost entirely created by the Army slapping together rickety housing with poor plumbing and only a single, wood-burning stove in each cabin. They were very young people, remember, mostly in their twenties and thirties. I read accounts of life on the mesa. Everyone was cooped up and under guard by Army MPs. Most unwound with big parties on the weekend, heavy drinking, practical joking, and doubtless for those fortunate enough, plenty of sex. But this is basically a male story: Oppie and General Groves were the “elders,” and Oppie himself was only in his early forties. Teller and most of the other people were in their thirties and even twenties. So, by and large, you have to imagine the sound of men, male energy, male thinking, male voices, the violence that this male activity is going to produce. The two women in the cast-- Kitty Oppenheimer and her Navajo maid, Pasqualita—almost by default become prophetic voices, in contrast to the men and their science. Do you know the term das Ewig-Weibliche?

That’s right. The “eternal feminine,” sort of a German equivalent to “Gaia knowledge.” The phrase das Ewig-Weibliche appears at the very end of Goethe’s Faust Part II. In Doctor Atomic Kitty Oppenheimer assumes the role of eternal feminine, a Cassandra, channeling human history in her long soliloquies. She carries a deep moral awareness of the consequences of what is being done there on the mesa, an awareness that was much slower to dawn on the men.

Of course women were not allowed on the actual test site at Alamagordo; they were not even supposed to know what their husbands were doing. There’s something very symbolic about that as well: as much as to say “You can’t know. I just want you here in my bed when I get home.”

Kitty has her own Brangäne, a female soul mate, in the Navajo maid, Pasqualita. A lot of what Pasqualita sings verges on the incomprehensible-- poetry by Muriel Rukeyser that has vague references to some tribal past, some prehistoric consciousness, with a hint of land being corrupted and a people being destroyed. The second act poetry for both women is richly ambiguous, provoking for me a strange and mysterious quality. There’s a line for Kitty:

“To the farthest west, the sea and the striped country
and deep in the camps among the wounded cities”

Of course, you know it’s 1945, and “camps” makes one think of concentration camps. But then just before we have the image “striped country.” Anyone can have his own reaction to the mysterious “striped country,” but for me it evokes the Southwest, the canyons and their rock formations. And “striped” also made Peter think of the striped uniforms that concentration camp prisoners were made to wear. Poetry like that is very nonlinear, purely imagistic, skirting the irrational, but it’s immensely evocative.

Well, I fear becoming a kind of Hamlet about the fate of contemporary classical music. The warning signs of its demise as a living art form are all over the place. Yet I persist in thinking that there are some aspects of the human record on this planet that can’t be satisfied by popular music alone, no matter how sophisticated it may be. I was powerfully affected, for example, by the fact that, in the weeks right after September 11, many people needed classical music to access a part of themselves that other forms of music were powerless to satisfy.

As far as the many new operas being composed now, I haven’t heard a lot of them. They might be good, but my sense is that we’re not experiencing some incredible moment in musical history, one that’s giving birth to a host of great new, meaningful operas. I’m very grateful that there is interest and that people want to commission artists. That’s an undeniably healthy environment, even if it turns out that only a couple of lasting works resulted. Certainly the scene for commissioning new work is infinitely better than it was 30 years ago, when almost no major composer in this country had an opera commission. But the test is whether people want to have an opera come back after a hiatus of a couple of years-- whether an opera, once it’s written, has “legs.”

Yes, but I think it’s a cumulative thing. Art is so vast a human activity that it’s really foolish to try to sum up its meaning. Nevertheless I think it’s probably right to say that art sensitizes us in the deepest of ways. I like to listen to baseball games on the radio. It’s fun and puts me in an agreeable mood. But my deeper self tends to go to sleep, as if I’d hit the “Pause” button on my psyche. That’s fine for a time, but it’s no comparison to what goes on in my inner self when I listen to a Bartok quartet or the Well-tempered Clavier, or when I watch a Bergman film.

Certainly a person can be very sensitive to other human beings’ feelings and not be an artistic person. And, conversely, you can have highly sensitized aesthetes who are nevertheless rude, self-absorbed and unfeeling people. But art, even in its baser forms, speaks to the better part of ourselves. That’s why everyone has a need for it, even if they think they don’t.

I think that a lifetime of being exposed to art, and particularly making art, makes for a fuller person. Certainly if you have children and you give them training in the arts – theater and painting, poetry and music – they grow up to be more interesting and more fulfilled and especially more sensitive individuals.