Volume 56, Number 1 · January 15, 2009
Oppie in New York
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Doctor Atomic
an opera in two acts by John Adams, libretto by Peter Sellars, directed by Penny Woolcock, with stage design by Julian Crouch
at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, October 13–November 13, 2008
Opera, that most extreme of the staged arts, has always made a routine of spectacularly violent endings—inventive homicides and suicides (poisoned bouquets, seppuku), grandiose self-immolations, a post-nuptial psychotic spree, even, as in Dialogues of the Carmelites, the occasional mass-guillotining. But it's probably fair to say that, in terms of sheer destructive power, no finale could ever be as grand as the one that brings John Adams and Peter Sellars's Doctor Atomic to its close: it ends with a nuclear detonation. In some, rather obvious ways, that climax comes as no surprise; in others—not least, the way in which this opera relates to the rest of Adams's work—it's very startling indeed.
Review, 4529 words
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