Saturday, November 15, 2008

Doctor Atomic at the Met

I'm such a good boyfriend. On the night Christopher drove eight hours to New York through the pouring rain to see me, how did I thank him? By dragging him to a 3.5-hour-long, 21st-century minimalist opera about the atomic bomb. And here's the best part: we had standing room tickets. (N.B. If it's any consolation, I apologized profusely throughout the night, and Christopher was very forgiving).

The opera, however, was fantastic, despite our aching legs, and I'm really glad we went (I've wanted to see this ever since it first premiered in San Francisco two years ago). It was written by John Adams, and it takes place at Los Alamos lab on the night the first nuclear bomb was tested. The libretto is a compilation of letters and transcripts of meetings between Oppenheimer, fellow scientists, and U.S. Generals. Needless to say, some of the dialogue is less-than-riveting, but I think Christopher got a kick out of all the physics talk (at one point the chorus sings, "The thirty-two points are the centers of the twenty triangular faces of an icosahedron interwoven with the twelve pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron.") The fantastic music made up for any deficiencies in the text, and the set was awesome:


Apparently, Oppenheimer was also brilliant beyond physics: he spoke four languages, could read at least six more, and learned Sanskrit just so he could read the Bhagavad Gita in its original version. He was also a great lover of poetry, and much of the opera's libretto consists of random poetry he knew. Here's a link to the stunningly beautiful aria that ends Act I, "Batter my heart," a setting of a poem by John Donne (apparently the Trinity test site where the first bomb went off was named after the "three-personed god" from this poem). Check it out for the amazing music, if anything:

by Corbett at 4:55 PM |