Returning to the role he created in 2005, Gerald Finley conveyed Oppenheimer’s moral agony with singing of great refinement and subtlety: Batter My Heart, in which scientific wonder gives way to the awareness of the enormity of what he is about to unleash, was overwhelming. There was thrilling playing and choral singing from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Singers. Adams’s conducting, second to none in his own music, had tremendous conviction and unique authority, with every facet of the score’s terrible beauty laid bare. John Adams with BBC players at the Barbican on Tuesday. Towards the end, time seems to buckle, bend and stretch into eternity as we wait in dreadful anticipation for the explosion that will change the course of history.
The Hindu god Vishnu presides over the destruction and creation of worlds in a chorus of horrific ferocity. The storm that threatens to delay the nuclear test sounds like nature convulsing at its own impending defilement. Yet the work also contains some of Adams’s greatest music. The long scene between the increasingly abstracted Oppenheimer and his lonely wife, Kitty, based on alternate settings of Rukeyser and Baudelaire, feels like a self-contained song-cycle, imperfectly integrated into the score. Documentary material doesn’t always lead to clarity of characterisation or motivation. These largely derive from Peter Sellars’s libretto, a collage of quotes from contemporary sources – interviews, letters, declassified government papers – into which literary and sacred texts are strategically inserted: passages from Baudelaire and the activist-poet Muriel Rukeyser John Donne’s Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God, which inspired Oppenheimer to name his test site “Trinity” and the Bhagavad Gita, from which he famously quoted the line: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”ĭramatically, however, the results can be awkward. A noble, probing examination of scientific responsibility, it’s his most visionary and ambitious stage work to date, though it is not without its flaws.
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