The piece is, of course, centred around the personality of J Robert Oppenheimer “The Father of the Atomic Bomb” and is set in Los Alamos in the runup to the first “Trinity” test detonation of an atomic bomb in July 1945. I even went with a group of six physicists to see it. His opera The Flowering Tree, at the Jazz at Lincoln Center facility in 2009, was so flat-out beautiful I have yet to recover.It’s not often that my interest in Opera overlaps significantly with my career in Physics, but this Saturday night (28th March) was a definite example, with English National Opera‘s production of Doctor Atomic by John Adams providing the opportunity. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,ĭivorce me, untie, or break that knot again,Įxcept you enthrall me, never shall be free,Īdams’ Nixon in China will be the next Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast, on Saturday, 2/12. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,īut is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Atomic (about Robert Oppenheimer and the setting off of the first atomic bomb):īatter my heart, three-person’d God for youĪs yet but knock breathe, shine, and seek to mend John Donne’s plea in Holy Sonnet XIV that grace will break his captive will, set to necessarily inadequate but characteristically gorgeous music by John Adams and sung by bass-baritone Gerald Finley in the Adams opera Dr. Mockingbird’s resident opera aficionado Ken Wilson offers forth a truly breathtaking moment of beauty:
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