"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds..." John Adams and Peter Sellars's opera about Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, stuns at the Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam.
What better subject could Adams and Sellars have chosen to illustrate the fall of the modern world? The atomic bomb and its inventor, Robert Oppenheimer (Gerald Finley), are at the heart of the action in this opera, which premiered in 2005 at the San Francisco Opera. The world after Oppenheimer, inexorably shifting toward the nuclear era, will never be the same again—yet Sellars's immersive staging works also on a human scale, with love stories and broken hearts.
The title of this opera reminds us of the beloved film by Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), and features fantastic artists such as Gerald Finley who originated the role. It is, without any doubt, a seismic masterpiece of modern opera.
© Picture: Marco Borggreve
