Among the vocal selections in the San Francisco Opera’scentennial concertin June was the aria “Batter My Heart” from “Doctor Atomic,”John Adams’2005 opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb. The aria, which comes at the end of the opera’s first act, is a setting of an important poem by John Donne, and its sinuous, arching melody gives voice to all the character’s anguished ambivalence over the monster he’s unleashed on the world.

It’s a breathtaking stretch of music.

After the concert, I was reminded of the impact that aria can have on a first-time listener. One music industry professional buttonholed me, demanding to know how I was going to find space in my review for anything but the performance by baritone Brian Mulligan. Another friend reported that her husband, who is neither an opera aficionado (yet) nor a notably sentimental man, had been reduced to tears.

I remembered having a similar reaction on my first encounter with “Batter My Heart,” in advance of the opera’scommissioned world premiereat the San Francisco Opera. Adams’ ability to convey in musical terms so much of Oppenheimer’s interior complexity — the combination of pride and shame prompted by the success of his massive undertaking — felt little short of miraculous.

Those memories returned to mind again recently while watchingChristopher Nolan’s expansive and fast-paced biopic“Oppenheimer.”There are huge and important differences between the two works, differences in scope and pacing and medium.

But the central figure, the 20th century Prometheus who brought lethal fire into the world because he could see no alternative, remained deeply recognizable. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer — charismatic, opaque, at once honorable and slippery — was unmistakably the same man conjured up 18 years ago on the stage of the War Memorial Opera House by baritone Gerald Finley.

“Oppenheimer” has never been far from my thoughts since I saw it. (Neither, for that matter, hasGreta Gerwig’s exhilaratingly fine “Barbie,” which I saw the previous day, although I’ve struggled without success to come up with a suitable operatic analogue.) It’s a powerful creation in its own right, but setting it beside “Doctor Atomic” illuminates both works.

The most obvious contrast is that even though Oppenheimer is the title character in both cases, “Doctor Atomic” concerns itself only with the Manhattan Project, the concerted effort out in the New Mexico desert to build the first functional atomic bomb. That’s the opera’s dramatic focus, and once Trinity, the test detonation of the bomb, has gone off successfully, the piece is essentially at an end.

在“奥本海默”,另一方面,炸弹测试takes us only halfway through the narrative. Still to come is the entire latter half of Oppenheimer’s career, in particular the revocation of his security clearance as the rush to victory in World War II gives way seamlessly to the newly urgent security concerns of the Cold War.

That would have been more far more plot than an opera could have handled. Music famously takes time to make its points; an opera encompasses less dramatic action than theater or film, but ideally at greater depth.

There could be no clearer example of this than “Batter My Heart” itself. Oppenheimer was inspired to name the bomb test Trinity by Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14,” with its opening line, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”

In Adams’ setting, Oppenheimer comes back repeatedly to Donne’s relentless strings of verbs (“knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend” is the first of several). There’s a driven, obsessive quality in both the orchestral accompaniment and the melodic line, a simultaneous evocation of Oppenheimer’s ambition and the pain it brings to him and those around him.

It’s akin to the restlessness that pervades Ludwig Göransson’s string-heavy soundtrack for the film, but in the opera it’s distilled into a shapely, eight-minute set piece that shows Oppenheimer’s particular communion with Donne’s theology. Nolan’s screenplay, by contrast, dispatches the Donne allusion in a single throwaway line.

What the opera and the film share most strikingly is a fragmentary style of dramaturgy. Both Nolan andPeter Sellars, who provided the libretto for “Doctor Atomic” and directed its first few productions, operate in brisk, sharp-edged scenes whose jagged contours eventually coalesce into a story.

“Oppenheimer” unfolds across at least three chronological strata, like subatomic particles leaping back and forth between quantum levels. Whatever narrative cohesion the film offers is reconstructed in hindsight by the viewer.

“Doctor Atomic” is more linear, at least as far as time is concerned. But it boasts its own theatrical jumpiness in the form of side ventures and slantwise commentary, including Kitty Oppenheimer’s luminous, half-drunken reveries (featuring the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser) and the always incomprehensible diet advice of Gen. Leslie Groves, the project’s military head. I remember thinking at the premiere that these scenes seemed to be illuminated by flashes of desert lightning.

Each in his own way, Nolan and Adams settled on a creative style for these works that we might call “atomic art.” It’s an approach that entails both shattering material into component pieces, and slamming them together again into an explosive mix. (Nolan tips his hand to this notion, a little heavy-handedly for my taste, by labeling the two principal strains of his film “Fission” and “Fusion.”)

Oppenheimer’s may not be the only story one could tell in this way, but it’s hard to imagine a more pertinent approach for his story than the one these two artists have come up with. It’s a style that knocks, breathes, shines and seeks to mend.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman