![]() ![]() ![]() I don’t believe that at the time of the detonation of the bomb Oppenheimer necessarily felt this kind of remorse, but we know that he did later, when he saw what nuclear weapons had wrought on society. I give these words to Robert Oppenheimer. “The final moments of the Doctor Atomic Symphony bring probably the most famous part of the opera, which is my setting of John Donne’s famous sonnet, ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God.’ This is a sonnet in which the poet talks about the loss of his soul and asks God to come and literally ‘break, burn, batter’ him, that he may regain his soul, which has since been given to the Devil. The scientists are under huge pressure to deliver this bomb, to make sure it works, and at the same time, summons up what a city that’s being bombed might be like. This is music from Act II of Doctor Atomic, where there’s an enormous sense of frenzy and anxiety. The orchestra is very powerful and dissonant and pounding at the beginning, and this gives way to the second part, which I call Panic. I remembered how many of these sci-fi movies started with some nuclear test in the desert and then some terrible thing happens … And I thought, in a way, that really constituted a mythology of our time, that kind of existential angst, the awareness of nuclear war, and particularly the kind of fear that I felt as a kid growing up in the 50s and 60s. “I was inspired by the science fiction movie music of the 1950s, which I watched as a little kid on a black and white television. “The first part is called The Laboratory, and it begins with the music that begins the opera,” Adams continues. Two years after Doctor Atomic premiered, Adams assembled some of the instrumental music from the opera into what he describes as a “compact and high-energy symphony … itself is kind of explosive, as if it were Oppenheimer’s plutonium sphere just about to go supercritical.” Doctor Atomic premiered in the fall of 2005 in San Francisco, and was subsequently staged in Chicago and at the Metropolitan Opera. Adams’ opera, Doctor Atomic, focuses on the days leading up to the first atomic bomb tests in the New Mexico desert outside Los Alamos. As head of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer oversaw the construction and testing of the nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. In 1999, Pamela Rosenberg, general director of the San Francisco Opera, approached Adams with the idea of writing an “American Faust” opera about physicist J. “The atomic bomb had been the overwhelming, irresistible, inescapable image that dominated the psychic activity of my childhood,” John Adams observes in his book, Hallelujah Junction. Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 flutes, 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 4 trumpets (1 doubling piccolo trumpet), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, chimes, crotales, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, 2 tam-tams, thunder sheet, tuned gongs, harp, celeste, and strings Richard Strauss: Death and Transfiguration, Op. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |