Gerald Finley has made the role of Oppenheimer his own — he’s sung it in all the productions so far. With his broad-brimmed hat and relentless drawing on cigarettes, he isn’t the cultured polymath who was proficient in six languages including Sanskrit. Instead, he’s a nervous, authoritarian figure whose tense physical presence covers a repressed emotional and imaginative life. The implication is that it’s these tense, over-rationalistic figures who now pose the greatest threat to mankind that it has ever known.
The inner Oppenheimer, however, is revealed in two scenes. One is where he’s making love to his wife, who is quite as much a mother-goddess figure as Pasqualita, both distrusting the catastrophic interference with nature by the males of the piece. And another is where he pours out John Donne’s sonnet Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God as an act-concluding solo aria.
The stage picture features from time to time the New Mexico skyline, the bomb with its maze of exterior wires suspended center-stage, the Oppenheimers’ living-quarters, and a variety of scientific controls with their knobs, dials, flashing lights and T-shirt-clad attendants. The uncertain weather (a historical fact), with its fast-moving clouds and flashes of lightening, adds to the drama.
The opera is characterized by continual interest. There are dancers, for instance, rare in a Sellars production, and here often looking like people fleeing in panic. And somehow all the disparate elements — the found texts and the eclectic music — manage to cohere into an exceptionally persuasive whole.
The text, shown sometimes at the bottom of the screen and sometimes at the top, is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch, and there are many short bonus items featuring Adams, the Amsterdam rehearsals, the main soloists (who introduce themselves), as well as the long interview with Sellars.
Is this, then, a contemporary masterpiece? Yes, quite possibly. So when will we be seeing a production in Taiwan? Probably not any time soon. The opera being offered this summer by the National Symphony Orchestra is Carmen, albeit in an apparently strong new production.
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