MANY DIFFERENT SAMPLES OF REVIEWS

December 1, 2006 Music Review | Miró Quartet A Favored Foursome Steps Outside the List of Favorites By ALLAN KOZINN

It often seems surprising that, as vast as the string quartet repertory is, most ensembles draw from a relatively circumscribed well of favorites and acknowledged masterworks. The young musicians of the Miró Quartet set the core canon aside on Wednesday evening, when they played a concert at Alice Tully Hall. The program, presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as part of the quartet’s 2005 Cleveland Quartet Award, included less frequently traveled works by Shostakovich and Dvorak, and a score by Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, a 19th-century Spanish composer whose works are now finding their way into the repertory.

The group opened its program with Arriaga’s String Quartet No. 3, a work that it is also playing tonight on an otherwise unrelated program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can’t have too much Arriaga: this Spanish composer died in 1826, just shy of his 20th birthday, but the pieces he left — the quartets and some symphonic works — have a true spark of originality. He was called the Spanish Mozart, but his spirit and style are more akin to Beethoven’s; the opening movement of this Third Quartet bears a passing resemblance — in its rhythms and the shape of its main theme — to Beethoven’s Quartet No. 1 (Op. 18, No. 1). Even more striking are the later movements, which point toward Schubert, Brahms and Dvorak in both their melodic and textural richness.

Whether or not the Miró players find the Mozart comparison apt, they wisely played the Arriaga with the sumptuousness better suited to Arriaga’s time than to Mozart’s. That warmth, appropriately magnified and cast in darker hues, returned at the end of the concert, in Dvorak’s Quartet in A flat (Op. 105). This was a reading that had everything right: the big-boned chordal punctuation in the first movement was unified and precise; the slow movement had a lilting, vocal quality; and the finale, though certainly vigorous, bore this comparatively late work’s weight of maturity.

Between the Arriaga and the Dvorak, the Miró players gave a resolute, thoroughly focused account of the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 14 (Op. 142). This is philosophical, rather than bitter, Shostakovich. It catches him, two years before his death, thinking about mortality, much as he does in his Fourteenth Symphony.

As in the Arriaga, the musicians produced a rich, textured sound but wisely resisted the temptation — in, for example, the hushed intensity of the Adagio — toward sheer beauty. Instead they gave the music an inner glow, which is just as irresistible.

The Miró Quartet is playing an all-Spanish program with the guitarist Eliot Fisk tonight at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (212) 570-3949.

November 30, 2006 Music Review | 'London Philharmonic - Kurt Masur' An Affectionate Homecoming for Masur By BERNARD HOLLAND

If psychologists ever made a study of post-departure syndrome, they might begin with Kurt Masur’s return to New York with the London Philharmonic. In his time as music director of the New York Philharmonic Mr. Masur was received as something of a drill sergeant in charge of a wayward platoon, a kind of bitter medicine designed to purge the orchestra of its loose ways.

But waves of friendship greeted him at Carnegie Hall on Monday and Tuesday nights, a genuine warmth like nothing he experienced during his years in New York. Were all those happy listeners remembering with a new perspective, or had they simply forgotten? Maybe affection grows as the sustained power to influence our musical lives goes away. I was always a fan, and it was good to have him back.

A year ago illness forced Mr. Masur to cancel a similar visit. At 79 he is erect but frail. The vigorous conducting technique is now withdrawn and minimal, but other means have been found. While the physically active conductor goes out and gets performances, Mr. Masur has learned to stand quietly and let performances come to him, the positive electric charge becomes a magnet. In two concerts of repertory standards, this appealing orchestra seemed to know what was on its conductor’s mind and also to like him personally. Rough edges and inexact entrances on Monday were a small price to pay for music making of such good will.

“Les Préludes” by Liszt — big-boned and hearty — began Monday’s program; the Brahms Second Symphony ended it. Mr. Masur likes to divide long phrases into shorter ones, producing semi- detachments that are not quite full breaths. Created is an austerity seemingly aimed at preventing passionately lyrical music from sinking into sentiment.

Between Liszt and Brahms came Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. Its soloist, Elisabeth Leonskaja, was to be thanked for halfway humanizing music of such open hostility. She was in confident command of Prokofiev’s florid, often vicious sieges of technical difficulty, and the nastiness lesser musicians bring to this music was softened to something almost moving, occupying a place somewhere between regret and resentment.

On Tuesday Sarah Chang played the Sibelius Violin Concerto. The purity of her tone and its broad, deep carrying power was fitting, indeed touching in exposed moments, as was the recklessness with which she attacked the difficult finale. At other times the throbbing vibrato and almost theatrical bowing sounded more like beautiful violin playing than Sibelius.

Tuesday also brought Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, a piece that has also been occupying the New York Philharmonic a few blocks to the north this week. The mileage on this well-traveled masterpiece precludes anyone saying anything new about it, but the London players were involved down to their toes in an honest and deeply earnest performance.

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November 29, 2006 Music Review | 'La Passion de Simone' An Earnest Meditation on a Life Devoted to Human Suffering By ANNE MIDGETTE

VIENNA, Nov. 27 — The problem lies in the title: “La Passion de Simone.” In a work described as “a musical journey in 15 stations,” Kaija Saariaho, the Finnish composer, and Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese- born writer who also provided the librettos for Ms. Saariaho’s other two operas, follow a traditional religious model in a homage to someone they compare to Jesus. But in doing so, they effectively distort what Simone Weil, the French philosopher, mystic and activist, was about.

Weil, who died in 1943 at 34, is notoriously difficult to summarize. Devoted to the study of human affliction, she worked herself to the point of illness at various factory jobs to understand better the workers’ lot; she developed a profound relationship with Christianity, but felt that to actually be baptized (she was Jewish) would be to betray the unsaved masses. She died in England when, sick and weak, she refused to eat more than her compatriots were getting in war-torn France: the cause of death was starvation.

A contradictory and off-putting figure, she is best understood through her own words, which have a lucidity that Mr. Maalouf’s heightened second-person text, an apostrophe to Weil from an imaginary sister interwoven with quotations from Weil herself, largely obscures.

“La Passion de Simone,” which opened on Sunday evening at the Jugendstiltheater in an outlying district of Vienna (at the center of a hospital complex renowned as a headquarters of Nazi medical experimentation), is a centerpiece of Peter Sellars’s New Crowned Hope festival, which is all about social relevance and working to improve society: goals to which Weil devoted her life. So she would seem to be an ideal subject. But at New Crowned Hope, interpretations of social relevance are filtered to yield tones of heartfelt, teary-eyed sincerity in attempts at the beautiful and the good. In short, they bear the stamp of Mr. Sellars himself.

Mr. Sellars, who also directed Ms. Saariaho’s other operas, kept this one appropriately spare and dark. He had the vocal soloist, Pia Freund, enact the things she was describing (ending by writhing on the floor in her final death agony), and added a silent dancer as a personification of grace, the masses or anything else that needed personifying. Adding a figure was a reasonable response to the challenge of trying to stage a piece that is not inherently dramatic.

For what Ms. Saariaho has produced is a meditation rather than an opera, with music that is mystical, angular, episodic, surging. Sustained tones in the strings or brasses, burnished with a kiss of gongs and electronic boosts, spread out a carpet of sound to support individual incidents, in which the energetic conductor, Susanna Malkki, often whips Klangforum Wien into an anguished frenzy. But like John Adams in his new opera-oratorio for New Crowned Hope, “A Flowering Tree,” Ms. Saariaho seems to have set out to create something beautiful and moving, and thereby achieved a self-conscious lushness that may be an aural hallmark of Mr. Sellars’s stamp.

The piece was written for Dawn Upshaw, who had to cancel her New Crowned Hope commitments to deal with early-stage breast cancer, according to a statement from her manager earlier this month. Her replacement, Ms. Freund, offers a workable, straightforward voice, whose limitations are blurred by passionate intensity and smoothed away to some extent by the microphone. Amplification is necessary; the action plays on a raised platform at the back of the stage, with the orchestra spread before Ms. Freund and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir literally beneath her feet: an ocean of loud sound.

What comes across is incidental music, since the story being told lies outside the piece itself. It is an accompaniment to Weil’s thought rather than an elucidation of it.

The work shows yet again that it is hard to make cutting-edge art in a genre that is no longer inherently cutting edge. In fact, this piece represents many things Weil wanted to get away from; even if it is conceived in a spirit of breaking down barriers and challenging the status quo, a work presented in this form will reach only the elite it ostensibly sets out to reach past.

“La Passion de Simone” repeats tomorrow in Vienna and will later be presented by Lincoln Center, the Barbican in London and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

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November 23, 2006 Music Review | 'Da Capo Chamber Players' World Premieres, Sure, but Room for Older New Music Too By ALLAN KOZINN

The Da Capo Chamber Players, like most new-music ensembles, do plenty of commissioning, and no doubt just as much filling out of grant applications to cover the expense. At its performance on Tuesday evening at Merkin Concert Hall, the group played a half-dozen of the scores composed for it since 1979. Two of the works, Gene Pritsker’s “Self Laceration” and Chandler Carter’s “Conversation Piece,” were world premieres, and a third, Eric Chasalow’s Flute Concerto , was given its first New York performance.

Of the new works Mr. Pritsker’s “Self Laceration” (2006) was the most immediately striking, its off- putting title notwithstanding. It begins with a rhythmically insistent, irresistibly zesty movement in which the focus moves briskly around the ensemble. The clarinet, violin, cello, flute and piano each have exposed lines that capture the character of the instrument and create a lively dialogue. The individual instruments speak in distinct, idiomatic voices.

Mr. Chasalow’s Flute Concerto (2005) packs a lot of ideas into 15 minutes. Its movement titles — “Flight and Confusion,” “Eggshell, More Like a Heart” and “Feather, Breath, Mirror” — look impressionistically vague on paper, but Mr. Chasalow’s appealingly symmetrical writing evokes them in a painterly way, by making vibrant, sharply articulated textures morph into stretches of wispy lyricism and back. Patricia Spencer played the solo line with a deft command of both technique and timbre.

Mr. Carter’s “Conversation Piece” (2006) is based on his chamber opera, “The Sister,” and has a decidedly operatic quality: as in Mr. Pritsker’s work, the instruments suggest specific, sharply drawn characters in a fluid drama, and their lines have the angular, anxious quality of contemporary vocal writing. The players also make fragmentary spoken contributions, and if they offer only the barest glimpse into the missing libretto, the real action is in the shapely instrumental dialogues.

All three new works drew on a rigorous harmonic and rhythmic language, tempered by a lyrical eclecticism that rounded off the potentially harsh edges, and gave the pieces a direct appeal. The older scores worked similarly, with the exception of Philip Glass’s “Modern Love Waltz” (1980), which burbled along pleasantly in Mr. Glass’s consonant style, in an ensemble arrangement by Robert Moran. Philippe Bodin’s “Peal” (2000) opened the program with an explosion of brash timbres and insistent rhythms that gradually melted into softer textures. And Stephen Jaffe’s three-movement “Nonesuch Serenade” (1984), an essay in constant textural shifting, prefigured the essentially vocal style of Mr. Carter’s score.

Besides Ms. Spencer, the group’s superb players are Meighan Stoops, clarinetist; David Bowlin, violinist; André Emelianoff, cellist; and Blair McMillen, pianist. In Mr. Chasalow’s work Michael Adelson conducted, and Thomas Kolor was the percussionist.

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November 22, 2006 Music Review | 'Chamber Orchestra Kremlin' 12 Exercises in Tonality by Composers of Today By BERNARD HOLLAND

The Chamber Orchestra Kremlin played 12 new pieces in the space of an hour at Weill Recital Hall on Monday, the experience somewhat resembling a Reader’s Digest condensation of contemporary musical thought. The pieces come by way of Misha Rachlevsky, a conductor from Moscow who has wandered the world and founded this 17-musician string ensemble in 1991. Mr. Rachlevsky recently held a competition called “Homage to Mozart,” and these composers were the finalists.

Arranging them by nationality, I counted five Americans, three Russians and one each from Lithuania, France, Serbia and Israel. Their common bond was a lack of interest in anything beyond tonality. Piece after piece snarled and bit with dissonance but always said goodbye with a big major chord. Busy, sometimes fierce rhythmic patterns occupied a lot of these minds (Beth Denisch, Alexey Larin, Dov Carmel). Philippe Bodin’s “Swirl” liked to do just that, sometimes with superimposed time schemes.

Some pieces moved slowly and darkly (those by Zhanna Plieva and Arvydas Malcys). Others showed affection for popular-music syncopations and dance movement (works by Kate Sullivan and George Higgs). I very much liked Mr. Higgs’s “Famine Dance,” with its syncopated, hoe-down humor and slow waltz-time fading in and out. Eskender Bekmambetov’s “250 Years in 250 Seconds,” in which Baroque style turns rococo turns Romantic turns 20th-century, was a clever idea not quite realized.

After intermission came an arrangement of the Brahms Sextet in G, music that really works better with one on a part than with four or five. A majority of these good, ardent young players looked barely out of their teens, and if the Brahms did not have the tight ensemble it might have, addressing 13 different styles in the space of two hours must be exhausting.

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The New Yorker April 24, 2006 SECTION: THE CRITICS; Musical Events; Pg. 176 Vol. 82 No. 10 A new opera from the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. BYLINE: ALEX ROSS BODY:

Kaija Saariaho, whose new opera, "Adriana Mater," had its première in Paris earlier this month, once said that she likes to explore the boundary between music and noise. Many of her large-scale works, "Adriana" included, begin with a great, heaving expanse of intermingled timbres, like a landscape turned molten, or an ocean boiling. Instruments cry out at high or low extremes; pitches are bent or broken apart; violins are bowed with such intensity that they groan; flutes are blown until they emit an asthmatic rasp. It's the kind of sound that boxes the ears and maxes out the brain; information pours in on all frequencies. But Saariaho is something other than a sonic terrorist out to shock whatever remains of the bourgeoisie. She makes her eruptions of noise seem like natural phenomena, the aftermath of some seismic break. Shapes emerge from the chaos, and the shapes begin to sing. The latter sections of her pieces often bring apparitions of rare, pure beauty-plain intervals that sound like harmony reborn, liminal melodies that disappear the moment they are heard. They are like the wildflowers that bloom in Death Valley, their colors intensified by the nothingness around them.

Saariaho, who is fifty-three, has had a fascinating career trajectory, moving from the hothouses of the European avant-garde into something like the cultural mainstream. She was part of a ridiculously gifted class of Finnish music students that included the composer Magnus Lindberg and the composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (who led the "Adriana" première). She has been living in Paris since 1982, and from the start her music has been marked by ideas that have been circulating in French music for several decades: the derivation of melody and harmony from overtones, and the blending of instrumental and electronic timbres. She has long been associated with IRCAM, the electronic-music institute that was founded by Pierre Boulez, in 1977. (New Yorkers will have a chance to hear IRCAM 's gadgetry in a mini-festival at Columbia University on May 6th and 7th.)

Saariaho's chief French models were Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, who, in the nineteen-seventies, developed a compositional process that came to be called "spectralism." By way of computers, they analyzed the overtones that accompany any resonating tone-say, a low E on a trombone. They then tried to capture that spectrum of tone color in novel forms that unfolded in shimmering waves. The resulting music sounds exotic on first encounter, but its foundation in acoustical reality gives it a certain "rightness," in contrast to previous compositional systems, such as twelve-tone technique, which imposed alternate realities on unwilling audiences. After all, the lower end of the overtone series supplies the building blocks of Western music-the octave, the fourth, the fifth, the major third. Seminal spectralist works, such as Murail's orchestral piece "Gondwana" and Grisey's evening-length instrumental cycle "Les Espaces Acoustiques," have epiphanic moments in which grand harmonies coalesce from the ether-the same effects of emergence that are central to Saariaho's aesthetic.

Composers who have taken inspiration from spectralist methods-among them Saariaho, Julian Anderson, Georg Friedrich Haas, and the late Claude Vivier-aren 't tune-happy populists by any means. But they have brought a new sensuousness to European music. In place of the spastic gesturing that was de rigueur during the Cold War era, their work often unfolds in meditative, deep-breathing lines. While spectralist music would hardly serve as the soundtrack to a yoga session, it does have the capacity to generate a state of eerie calm. In a way, it is the European counterpart to American minimalism, which, back in the nineteen-sixties, returned emphatically to musical ABCs. It was interesting that while Salonen was rehearsing "Adriana Mater" in Paris, his home orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was mounting a festival of minimalist music. Perhaps a new lingua franca is emerging, one that reunites a fractured compositional scene. The title of Murail's "Gondwana," after all, suggests a vision of music as a single giant continent.

Saariaho never imagined herself an opera composer. But, after seeing Messiaen 's monumental sacred opera "St. Francis of Assisi" at the Salzburg Festival in 1992, she realized that she could engage the genre as slow-moving ritual rather than as event-packed drama. Eight years later, her first opera, "L'Amour de Loin," or "The Distant Love," was unveiled at Salzburg. It is based on a libretto by the Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf, who, like the composer, is a longtime Paris resident. The story has the simple power of an ancient tale, which it is: Jaufré, a twelfth-century troubadour, falls in love with the idea of a far-off Tripoli countess and, after a long, dread-filled journey, dies in her arms. Saariaho's music captures with magical immediacy the drastic emotions that swirl around this romance, which is different from standard operatic melodrama in that the action is largely psychological. There is a riveting DVD of a Finnish National Opera performance, with a beautifully restrained Peter Sellars production, roof-rattling orchestral sounds under Salonen's direction, and great lead performances by Dawn Upshaw, Monica Groop, and Gerald Finley. Saariaho's stroke of genius is to keep the melodic lines spare and direct amid the orchestral phantasmagoria; Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande" is her vocal model. After watching the DVD, you may find yourself writing a letter to your local opera house, pleading for a production. This one is addressed to Peter Gelb, Metropolitan Opera.

"Adriana Mater," which also has a Maalouf libretto and a production by Sellars, is at once a more political and a more personal piece. It is rooted in the composer's memories of her first pregnancy, during which she thought often about the person whose heart was beating next to her own and studied the sonogram for clues. She described that feeling to Maalouf, who added to it his own long-standing obsessions with the agonies of modern identity, with the intertwining of religious fanaticism and political violence. He wove a modern fable about a woman named Adriana, who, amid the chaos of a modern regional war (in the Balkans, perhaps), is raped and impregnated by a fellow-villager. Seventeen years later, the child becomes an angry young man, and when he meets his father he has to decide whether he will exact vengeance. When, finally, he shies away from violence, Adriana says to him, "We have not been avenged, but we have been saved."

The story of Adriana has obvious contemporary resonances, suggesting how a nation at war can harm itself as much as it damages its enemies. The music begins with a typical Saariaho assault: an eight-note chord, marked disperato, blaring brightly and cruelly in the brass. Yet there's something different about Saariaho's use of the "noise" mode in this opera. It lacks the enveloping mystery that distinguishes "L'Amour de Loin." Instead, the dissonance feels more like the standard barrage that professionally anguished composers have been unleashing since the nineteen-fifties. It makes for a sullen first act, short on contrast. On the other hand, there may be a specific reason that Saariaho has chosen to employ this harsh and limited palette in setting out her scene. For centuries, male composers have been subjecting female characters to humiliation and death onstage. It is different, somehow, when a woman composer enacts the same ritual; there is no element of fantasy about the violence, as there is even in such a complexly compassionate work as Berg's "Lulu."

In the second act, a deeper agenda comes to the fore, which has little to do with war, the Balkans, the Middle East, or other present-day contexts. It has to do with the core idea of the opera: Saariaho's experience of the pain and beauty of birth. Ultimately, the outer events of the story seem like an elaborate metaphor for a more everyday but no less extraordinary story of becoming a mother in a hostile world. When, at the end, Adriana rests her head on her son's shoulder, and simple intervals sound in the orchestra (notably the elemental open fifth, as in Grisey's masterpiece "Transitoires"), the feeling of resolution is immense. It is a stupendous ending, all the more so for taking the audience out of darkness into light.

The première production, at the Bastille Opera, was involving, but not at the level of "L'Amour de Loin." George Tsypin's sets underused the vast spread of the Bastille's stage; an array of walls, huts, and domes made for a frustratingly limited stage picture. James Ingalls's lighting effects were uncharacteristically predictable (blood-red for violence, etc.). Sellars got urgent performances from the singers, but his usual leaps of dramatic imagination were absent. Patricia Bardon sang the role of Adriana with a sometimes edgy voice but with emotional vitality; Stephen Milling gave a gruff, black-voiced presence to the rapist, Tsargo; Solveig Kringelborn was luminous as Adriana's sister, Refka; Gordon Gietz sang passionately and accurately as young Yonas. Unfortunately, the sound design, by IRCAM technicians, periodically swallowed up the voices; the Bastille is not made for electronic effects. Despite Salonen's dynamic conducting, the greatness of the opera was more sensed than heard. Still, the audience rewarded Saariaho with a tumultuous ovation.

The première of "Adriana Mater" was delayed for several days by one of the various strikes that have recently immobilized France. While waiting, I went to the Théâtre du Châtelet to see Wagner's "Die Walküre," in a Robert Wilson production, with Christoph Eschenbach conducting; Wilson's staging of the complete "Ring" has been running at the Châtelet this season. As in Wilson's all-blue version of "Lohengrin," which returns to the Met this week, the working to death of a tiny handful of motifs, poses, and color schemes (hint: it wasn't magenta) makes for a long night. Endrik Wottrich, Petra-Maria Schnitzer, Linda Watson, and Jukka Rasilainen were in varying degrees inadequate to the roles of Siegmund, Sieglinde, Brünnhilde, and Wotan. It's never good news when Fricka, Wotan's querulous wife, becomes the heroine, but Mihoko Fujimura's performance dominated the stage, not only because her voice is lustrous in tone and precise in diction but because her stylized attitudes of rage and rectitude gave life to the pseudo-Kabuki mannerisms of Wilson's production. It somehow seemed appropriate that in the vicinity of "Adriana Mater," a new feminist masterpiece, the clearest theme in "Die Walküre" was that a woman had had enough of her husband's lies.

LOAD-DATE: April 24, 2006

The New Yorker March 28, 2005

SECTION: THE CRITICS; Musical Events; Pg. 80 HEADLINE: KAFKA SINGS; Two new operas: Ruders's "Kafka's Trial," Adamo's "Lysistrata." BYLINE: ALEX ROSS

BODY:

The Danish composer Poul Ruders is one of contemporary music's free agents-a lover of sweet melodies with a yen for dark chords, a comedian with a flair for apocalypse. His previous opera, "The Handmaid's Tale," made sonic thunder out of Margaret Atwood's novel of a dystopian America ruled by Christian fundamentalists. His major orchestral pieces-"Thus Saw Saint John," the "Solar Trilogy," a First Symphony subtitled "Rejoicing from the Heavens, Grieving Unto Death"-unfold hypnotically wayward narratives that reel from antic joy to frozen despair. (There are excellent recordings on the Bridge and Da Capo labels.) Ruders has a special knack for reinventing familiar tonal harmonies and styles; he uses them sometimes to mourn lost worlds, sometimes to suggest otherworldly innocence, sometimes to convey the banality of evil. All these devices are hurled at the audience in his latest work, "Kafka's Trial," which had its premiere on March 12th at the Royal Danish Theatre.

Composers are mysteriously drawn to "The Trial," Kafka's tale of a bank clerk randomly hounded by the Law. Perhaps, like poor Joseph K., they feel persecuted for no reason. Gottfried von Einem produced a straightforward, solemn adaptation in 1953. A decade later, Gunther Schuller, in "The Visitation," boldly transposed the action to black America. Ruders, in tune with modern times, makes the story all about sex and guilt. The libretto, by Paul Bentley, blends scenes from Kafka's life with scenes from the novel. The plot is framed by the author's crazed epistolary engagement to Felice Bauer, who, in July, 1914, convened a family tribunal in a Berlin hotel room to confront her fiance with his neuroses. In the wake of that fiasco, Kafka wrote "The Trial." Bentley believes that Kafka considered himself guilty of misleading Bauer, and that the killing of Joseph K. at the end of the novel is a form of self-criticism. Kafka scholars may not buy that theory, but there's no harm in rewriting history if it makes for good theatre.

Alas, it doesn't. Ruders has said in interviews that he wanted to write a Kafka comedy, or, rather, a comic nightmare. The problem is that the material of both the novel and the life is, at best, morbidly amusing, and Ruders can't make it funny by force. The score has too many grotesque, wheezing episodes, too much infernal-machine music. The parodic touches are stale: klezmer references in the Kafka sections (the only sign of the writer's Jewishness), a groaningly obvious quotation from "Don Giovanni" ("Joseph K.! Joseph K.!," a la the Commendatore). Kafka's air of gnomic mystery, his Hebraic awe before the inexpressible, fades away. The climax of the novel is the chapter "In the Cathedral," where Joseph K. glimpses fate in all its hostile majesty. Ruders ordinarily thrives on gothic atmosphere-he once made a bone-chilling setting of Poe's "The City in the Sea "-but his cathedral scene feels strangely attenuated, as if he were afraid of losing comic momentum. The music acquires the right dark magic only at the end, when Felice confronts Kafka. Here, finally, is urgent word-setting over pungent chords, such as Ruders supplied throughout "The Handmaid's Tale." (Both Ruders operas, by the way, can be performed in English.)

I hesitate to render a final judgment on "Kafka's Trial," because the opera was hobbled by a spectacularly stupid production, which erased the distinction between real life and fiction and buried all the characters in an onslaught of puerile sexual imagery. Both Kafka and Joseph K. became idiots of id, desperate to try out every imaginable sexual act-anal, oral, you name it-with every woman who sauntered past. Watching it was like being trapped at a really gross Eurotrash orgy. There were also four Kafka doppelgangers wandering about the stage; at one point I thought they were about to get it on with each other, which might at least have brought us closer to Kafka's real sexual issues. Johnny van Hal soldiered bravely through the unsympathetic title role(s), but the standout in the cast was Gisela Stille, lending a warm, rich soprano to Felice.

The premiere took place at the Royal Danish Theatre's new opera house, on an island in the Copenhagen harbor. It is a sleek, cool, thoroughly Danish building, with bulbous glass walls and a severe overhanging roof. The acoustics are vivid, though lacking in focus and bass. From the look of things, the management wants opera to be racy, hip, not too deep. Coming next season is a world premiere by Elvis Costello.

At the beginning of the month, the Houston Grand Opera gave the first performance of Mark Adamo's "Lysistrata." Like "Kafka's Trial," it is an opera based on a familiar literary source, in this case the comedy by Aristophanes. And, as in the Ruders opera, a certain amount of creative violence is done to the original. Adamo wrote his own libretto, and he shows little interest in the political issues that have made "Lysistrata" a favorite of left-leaning theatre companies since the invasion of Iraq. In Aristophanes, the women of Athens and Sparta go on strike against the men of those two belligerent city-states, demanding that their endless war end. The "sex strike" still happens in Adamo's version, but it becomes the backdrop for the central drama of a relationship-the one between Lysia and the Athenian general Nico (a character that Adamo invented for the occasion). A brittle antiwar satire becomes a sumptuous love story, poised between comedy and heartbreak.

And it works. I can imagine a roomful of European progressives snarling at Adamo's bourgeois sensibility, but I relaxed a minute after the music began, knowing that I was in the hands of a brilliant theatre composer. Adamo's effortless expertise was on display in his 1998 maiden effort, "Little Women," alongside spells of cutesiness and clumsiness. He still indulges in cloying gestures-enough with the jokes in the supertitles!-but he has taken several big leaps forward, particularly in integrating his proudly tonal melodies with more dissonant connective material. Adamo's accompaniments would make a good primer for any young composer learning to write for and around singers. Each strand of the vocal line is punctuated by some perfect short gesture: cello pizzicatos and a smattering of harp; a four-note horn solo; a vaguely Balinese rustling of mallet percussion and string glissandos. The orchestral writing is often little more-or nothing less-than a play of light around the voices.

Act I is stocked with pratfalls and silliness. In Act II, the story takes a much more serious turn. Lovers on both sides fall into melancholy contemplation of the competing demands of private love and public life. The audience is invited to read "work" for "war" throughout. "Our will is not our will," sings Nico. "I am not my own," sings Lysia. Slow dotted rhythms, reminiscent of Britten in his ceremonial mode, give the music a sudden grandeur. As the cities work their way toward reconciliation, the women sing radiant, flowing chorales around the Greek word "Evoe!," the exclamation of praise in the Bacchanalia. At the end, the gods descend to warn the humans of their folly: "Never will it end. Never will it end. Time to time, it may suspend, but never will it end." The orchestra constructs a huge passacaglia based on intertwining downward scales, and the chorus gathers for one last chant of "Evoe!" It's almost shocking how deep this seemingly lighthearted opera goes.

The Houston production was on the ugly side, with cartoonish sets colored orange and bright blue. But it didn't sabotage the drama, as the Copenhagen production did. The singers were excellent: Victoria Livengood, Myrna Paris, Chad Shelton, and, especially, Emily Pulley, as Lysia, who mastered every nuance of the opera's wide emotional range. Opening night was a bittersweet occasion, for it was the last Houston premiere presided over by David Gockley, the company 's visionary general director. Gockley has introduced thirty-three new works in about as many years, writing himself into musical history in the process: Adams 's "Nixon in China," Meredith Monk's "atlas," and Bernstein's "A Quiet Place" came into being on his watch. Next year, he decamps to the San Francisco Opera. Too bad he isn't moving to New York.

LOAD-DATE: March 28, 2005

The New Yorker September 1, 2003

HEADLINE: DEEP SONG; Lorca inspires an opera by Osvaldo Golijov.

BYLINE: ALEX ROSS BODY:

Osvaldo Golijov's chamber opera "Ainadamar," which had its premiere at Tanglewood earlier this month, lasts about an hour, but it feels like a surreally extended moment, a long blink of an eye. The libretto, by the playwright David Henry Hwang, places us in a theatre in Uruguay, in the nineteen-sixties, where a venerable actress is about to step onstage for what will turn out to be her last performance. As she waits in the wings, she is overcome by a surge of memories, both happy and harrowing. The character is based on a real figure: Margarita Xirgu, the great Catalan tragedian, who, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, collaborated with Federico Garcia Lorca on several of his most famous plays. Joining her, in a series of dreamlike flashbacks, is Lorca himself, whose high ideals and dark passions dictate the opera's tone.

Golijov is a forty-two-year-old Argentine-American composer who has an uncanny ability to don the masks of age-old musical traditions. Born in La Plata, he is descended from Eastern European Jews, and he first made his name with works derived from klezmer and other Yiddish styles. Three years ago, he unveiled the "St. Mark Passion," a singing, dancing Crucifixion drama, which revels in Latin-American and Afro-Caribbean sounds. His works arouse extraordinary enthusiasm in audiences, because they revive music's elemental powers: they have rhythms that rock the body into motion and melodies that linger in the mind. Golijov lacks the intellectual caution that leads composers to confine a quasi-tonal melody within knotty, twelve-tone-ish figures. Instead, he lets his melodies wing their way into the open air.

Lorca makes a natural subject for an opera. His famous death-he was executed by Fascist soldiers early in the Spanish Civil War-was a scene out of "Tosca." He also supplies countless cues for music in his writing. No other poet could have compared the crescent moon to a fermata, a held note interrupting the harmony of the night. He was an accomplished pianist, a part-time composer, and something of a musicologist. He worked with Manuel de Falla to stage a festival of the authentic form of cante jondo, or "deep song," as the most substantial branch of flamenco is known. Of the siguiriya form of cante jondo, Lorca wrote, "The melody begins, an undulant, endless melody. It loses itself horizontally, escapes from our hands as we see it withdraw from us toward a point of common longing and perfect passion." This description also captures the essence of Golijov's music.

The first lines of "Ainadamar" come from Lorca's historical drama "Mariana Pineda," whose heroine died for liberal ideals in nineteenth-century Granada. The aging Xirgu, preparing to play the role for the umpteenth time, recalls her pioneering performance back in 1927; it was this production, with sets by Dali, that launched Lorca's dramatic career. The relationship of author and actress was not a physical one-neither opted for the heterosexual life style-but they worked together in a kind of creative ecstasy. As the opera tells it, she is deeply haunted by Lorca's death, which she believes she could have prevented. It happened in August, 1936, in the place that the Moors called Ainadamar, or Fountain of Tears. According to Lorca's biographer Leslie Stainton, Xirgu heard of the killing just before performing "Yerma"; in a rage, she changed her final line from "I myself have murdered my own child" to "They have murdered my child. "

The opera begins with prerecorded sounds that contain traces of the Lorca world. You first hear gurgling water, presumably from Ainadamar's springs, then furious galloping patterns, which evoke the violent hoofbeats that the poet heard in his nightmares. In a brilliant stroke, three percussionists pick up the beat with drumming and clapping, in a dynamic pattern of four against six against twelve. Over this a chorus of six girls cry out the opening ballad of "Mariana Pineda"-"How sad it was in Granada / The stones began to cry." When Xirgu reflects on her younger self, the flamenco furor gives way to a rumba, and we fall into a languid, late-summer suspension of time. The part of Lorca is played by a handsome young mezzo-soprano; this, perhaps, is a nod in the direction of Xirgu's (or Lorca's) sexuality. The poet once imagined a version of "Romeo and Juliet" in which Juliet became a fifteen-year-old boy.

For all his provocations, Lorca had no fear of exploiting traditional images of Spanish culture. As a dramatist, he knew that cliches could thunder if spoken in the right tone. Golijov, likewise, invests himself ardently in the most familiar flourishes of Spanish music. He understands better than his exoticizing European predecessors-think of Bizet, with his castanets-that the so-called "Spanish sound" is a fiendishly complex blend of European, Arabic, and Hebraic influences, and he teases out all of them in turn. The Fascist functionary Ramon Ruiz Alonso condemns Lorca in a wailing cantillation that sounds more like a muezzin's call to prayer than like a salute to Franco. The writer, whom Ruiz Alonso branded a maricon, or "faggot," is led to his death in a fantasy reenactment of the Crucifixion, which is solemnized by intimations of a Gregorian chant. Golijov even makes music of the guns that end Lorca's life, transforming the sound of the shots into a percussive electronic ballet.

In the closing section of the opera, composer and librettist took a considerable risk that didn't quite pay off on opening night. The action becomes almost entirely inward: Xirgu, musing further on her life, comes to accept the role of survivor that she has played. "I have done my best to keep you alive, to pay for my crime: the crime of living," she sings. She walks onstage to sing Mariana's final monologue, and falls dead. The Tanglewood production, which was directed by Chay Yew, strained to find visual cues in this last part. The young Xirgu and Lorca wandered on and off the stage, a blown-up photograph of the poet descended, and Lorca came back for a final pantomime appearance. Despite many poetic touches, Yew's production failed to differentiate reality from fantasy, the elderly Xirgu from her complex of memories.

Something different should be done with the ending when the opera comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, at the end of October, and to Los Angeles's new Disney Hall, in February. It is difficult to think of anything that could be cut; the music is sensationally beautiful throughout. Xirgu's epiphany takes the form of two spellbinding orchestral crescendos, one called "Delirious Sunset" and the other "I Am Liberty." While Golijov was working on the opera, he found himself listening to the not very Spanish strains of Richard Strauss's "Daphne," and in particular to the sublime Transformation Scene, during which the nymph of the title turns into a laurel tree. Although there are no outright echoes of "Daphne" in "Ainadamar," you can sense the kinship: in each, a heaving polyphonic climax gives way to a quiet release. At the very end, Golijov asks his brass players to improvise freely on the single note C, creating a strange, shimmering drone, while the chorus repeats in muted tones the lament of the opening.

Tanglewood has a limited but excellent track record with modern operas. In 1942, Serge Koussevitzky, the music center's founder, gave Benjamin Britten a thousand dollars to write "Peter Grimes." The singers and players at the "Ainadamar" premiere, most of whom came from Tanglewood's student ranks, were at a fairly exalted level. Robert Spano, who led the "St. Mark Passion" in Boston two years ago, once again showed staggering control of Golijov's genre-busting variety of styles. Dawn Upshaw, in the role of Xirgu, dropped some of the cutesiness that she has lately favored and sang with unaffected intensity and thrust. Kelley O'Connor and Amanda Forsythe, both Tanglewood Vocal Fellows, showed crystalline, finely expressive voices in the roles of Lorca and Young Margarita.

On the same evening, Tanglewood presented another new chamber opera with a hot-and-heavy Spanish theme. This was Robert Zuidam's "Rage d'Amours," which told of the strange, obsessive love of Queen Juana, the nominal ruler of Castile, for her unfaithful and later lifeless husband, Philip the Handsome. In a climactic set piece that one-ups Salome's sickening love for John the Baptist, Juana holds Philip's decomposing corpse in a desperate embrace. If it sounds ghoulishly entertaining, it wasn't; the music was weirdly solemn and static-a little corpselike itself. Zuidam showed impeccable craftsmanship, but he leaned heavily on hoary devices of twentieth-century technique, making much, for example, of the gruff bass-clarinet arpeggios from "The Rite of Spring." Unlike the flamenco touches in "Ainadamar," these intellectually gratifying references carried with them no dramatic specificity or strong emotional charge. The frustrating sense of distance was not helped by the fact that the part of Juana was divided up among a trio of sopranos. Lucy Shelton, Rochelle Bard, and Amy Synatzske all sang beautifully, but as a kind of diva committee they were never entirely in sync. The student players, under the direction of Stefan Asbury, played with extreme virtuosity.

The trouble with having two premieres side by side is that the evening inevitably became something of a popularity contest. Zuidam received respectful applause; Golijov won a shouting, stomping ovation. No doubt a few old-school Tanglewood cerebralists went away complaining that Golijov had pandered to the audience. If so, they were pandering to their teaching assistants. The composer is triumphing not because he uses an accessible language-anyone can string together superficially pleasing chords-but because he speaks it with dire conviction. His sincerity is avant-garde.

LOAD-DATE: September 2, 2003

The New Yorker March 31, 2003

HEADLINE: TO HELL AND BACK; The savage genius of Berlioz.

BYLINE: ALEX ROSS BODY:

"Berlioz believed neither in God nor in Bach, neither in absolute beauty in art nor in pure virtue in life," his friend Ferdinand Hiller recalled. The composer of the "Symphonie Fantastique" retains a fashionably satanic aura, and the reputation is well earned. The "Fantastique," his masterpiece, anyone's masterpiece, remains a totally shocking work after all these years, and no modern music has ever really matched it. The symphony's inexhaustible novelty comes not from the discovery of new sounds-although there are many-but from the diabolical manipulation of familiar ones. The C-major coda is brilliant, triumphant, and horribly wrong, the God-given natural scale smeared with flat notes. Thus ends a voyage into Hell undertaken not for moral reasons but for the sheer joy of going under. As Satan remarks in "Paradise Lost," explaining why Hell is better than Heaven, "Here at least we shall be free."

Lincoln Center's festival in honor of the bicentennial of Berlioz's birth, which began with three astonishing concerts by the London Symphony Orchestra, is called "Fantastic Voyages: The Genius of Hector Berlioz." This hits the mark, although it was genius of a particular kind. Unlike Mozart, Schubert, and other prodigies born with music in their blood, Berlioz came to the art from the outside, in a spirit of intellectual adventure. He read about it in encyclopedias, imagined it in his dreams, and, in adolescence, decided to conquer it. He grew up in a small town in the South of France, where his musical diet consisted mainly of marching tunes, comic-opera ditties, and Gregorian chant. Not until around the time of his eighteenth birthday, in 1821, did he hear a full-scale classical work-"Les Danaides," by Salieri. He had come to Paris to attend medical school, and he alarmed his fellow-students by singing Salieri's arias while sawing the skulls of cadavers.

Berlioz's understanding of music was all up in that big, hawklike head of his: reality had to be bent to accommodate his ideals. In his youth, he would stand in the stalls of the Paris Opera and rage against every small inaccuracy and embellishment. "Who has dared to correct Gluck?" he would shout during a pause. "Not a sign of a trombone; it is intolerable!" Conductors began to heed his pronouncements, and soon enough he himself was the dictator on the podium, forcing musicians to follow the letter of the score. He also earned money in the field of music criticism, and his slashing commentaries set the standard for this little art. His compulsively readable "Memoirs" are at once a picaresque narrative of a wild life and a mockery of the very idea of putting a life on paper. After telling us how he taught himself to play a tune on the recorder, he sardonically adds, "What biographer worth his salt could fail to detect here the germ of my aptitude for large-scale effects of wind instruments?" When you talk about Berlioz, you can't escape the feeling that somewhere he is sniggering at every earnest word.

The "Memoirs" suggest that in some perverse way Berlioz saw his failures as his greatest successes. In a threepage description of the disastrous premiere of his "Sardanapalus" cantata, in 1830, he writes, almost exultantly, "The decrescendo begins." He devotes only three sentences to the subsequent triumph of the "Symphonie Fantastique." The last pages of the "Memoirs" are particularly striking in their bid for antipathy. The first draft ends with the sentence "I despise you all, and trust to have forgotten you before I die." The second version ends, "I have neither hopes, nor illusions, nor great thoughts left . . . I say hourly to death: 'When you will!' Why does he delay?" The final manuscript ends with Macbeth's remarks about life signifying nothing. Berlioz accomplished the rare feat of putting the last nail in his own coffin.

The "Symphonie Fantastique" was written in 1830, within the space of about six weeks, although the idea had been germinating for years. Program notes invariably emphasize the symphony's connection with Berlioz's imaginary love life at the time of its composition-his unrequited passion for the English actress Harriet Smithson, a supporting player who came to Paris in 1827 and made a great impression on French intellectuals. Smithson rejected Berlioz, or, more precisely, avoided his stalking advances. In the end, she was only playing a role that the composer had written for her-she was "an ideal which I created myself," as he later admitted. It was a passion destined to fail, so that the artist could vault all the extremes of feeling and land in the hell of his imagination. A little later, Berlioz actually succeeded in marrying Smithson, and began to lose interest.

As David Cairns argues in his huge biography of the composer, "Symphonie Fantastique" is really a Faust work, possibly the remnant of a Faust symphony that Berlioz had been planning. Faust's journey begins not with an affair of the heart but with an affair of the mind-a passion for the dark and the strange. The "Fantastique," likewise, starts with a vague longing and ends in an inferno. As in Goethe's version, all these demonic doings are contained within strict, rigorous forms. Some passages are actually quite anachronistic for the year 1830; the composer's concept of the "fantastic" is more Baroque than Romantic. As Cairns puts it, "Berlioz writes nineteenth-century music with an eighteenth-century sound." In other passages, the music sounds brand-new, as if it had been written last month by a young genius of postmodernism.

Colin Davis is a supremely good conductor of Berlioz, and his rendition of the "Symphonie Fantastique" was one of the most gripping orchestral performances I've heard in years. Davis began the piece in a wondering, sensitive, almost hesitant mood; by holding down dynamic levels, tugging back on the beat, and letting Berlioz's long lyrical phrases hang for an extra moment in the air, he created a sense of music afraid to go over the brink. In the middle movements, "A Ball" and "Scene in the Fields," the orchestra produced textures of remarkable clarity, so that one was constantly aware of the stray flutes and sinister tubas prowling at the edges of the picture. In the "March to the Scaffold," Davis straightened out the tempo, stripped away the color, and let the brass and percussion run rampant. Right through to the end, the orchestra played like a cold, fatal machine; there was none of the carnivalesque, Halloween atmosphere familiar from standard interpretations. The final effect was overwhelming, and more than a little frightening-the man on the podium, standing in for the protagonist of the symphony, seemed to have undergone a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. In this, Davis was faithful to the spirit of a composer who chose to live on the mental edge, without illusions.

By the end of the bicentennial year, New Yorkers will have heard, in the opera house or the concert hall, almost all of Berlioz's major works. The Metropolitan Opera, having mounted a monster production of "The Trojans," has announced the grandly ebullient comic opera "Benvenuto Cellini" for next season. The London Symphony, under Davis's direction, has already given us "Harold in Italy," "Damnation of Faust," and "Romeo and Juliet"; next month, Davis will return to lead the New York Philharmonic in "Beatrice and Benedict," Berlioz's autumnal Shakespeare comedy. Last month, Charles Dutoit led the Philharmonic, the Westminster Symphonic Choir, and the tenor Paul Groves in a cool, masterly performance of the "Requiem." I only wish that someone had taken on the "Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale," in which Berlioz raises the military band music of his youth to awesome heights.

It used to be said that the "Symphonie Fantastique" was Berlioz's sole masterpiece, and that his later works unmasked him as a "genius without talent "-a dilettante who mixed magnificent orchestral effects with inept fugues and insipid arias. Berlioz scholars, such as Cairns, Jacques Barzun, Hugh Macdonald, and Peter Bloom, have argued forcefully that the composer knew exactly what he was doing, and that whenever he sounds awkward he is actually ahead of his time. Indeed, pieces like "The Trojans" and "Beatrice and Benedict" show Berlioz fast-forwarding through the entire modernist revolution into the world of the neoclassical Stravinsky. Their austere vocal lines and gossamer textures sound strange only if the listener is waiting for a reprise of the "Fantastique." Berlioz specialists, like Davis and Dutoit, know how to sustain tension over long lyrical paragraphs, which otherwise threaten to meander into a meta-stylistic nowhere.

The challenge in listening to this composer is to resist the preconceptions that we bring to nineteenth-century music, especially those derived from Wagner. It is a tricky thing to do, since Berlioz and Wagner resembled each other in so many ways. Both sought unheard-of masses of sound, and both used isolated orchestral timbres as themes in themselves. What's more, Wagner ripped off many of his ideas directly from Berlioz, as a side-by-side comparison of "Romeo and Juliet" and "Tristan und Isolde" attests. But the two Romantic revolutionaries were opposed on almost every aesthetic question of the day. Wagner wanted to break down historic musical forms; Berlioz wanted to preserve them. Wagner threatened to discard melody as a concept, whereas Berlioz wrote easy-flowing tunes of almost aggressive sentimentality and naivete.

Berlioz's music should somehow be played and heard in an alternative universe in which Wagner never existed. This is what Davis understands so well; instead of marking time until the next sonic spectacular, as James Levine sometimes did while conducting "Trojans" at the Met, Davis exulted in all the oddities and incongruities. In "The Damnation of Faust," he whipped up Hungarian marches, student songs, and peasant rounds as enthusiastically as he did the shimmering string effects and jagged assaults of the brass. He convinced us that this stop-and-start narrative-in which Faust never advances far into the realms of the sublime without being interrupted by some form of street music-came out of a dramatic, keenly ironic sensibility. His singers, the tenor Stuart Neill, the mezzo-soprano Petra Lang, and the bass Alastair Miles, took up the idiom without a trace of awkwardness or self-consciousness. Lang's singing of "The King of Thule"-gentle on the surface, tense and sad beneath-afforded a glimpse of the composer's innermost world, where, for once, no shadows fell between the music and the heart.

For decades, modern French composers have been devoted to precisely the sort of stylistic purity and progressive ideology that Berlioz disdained. But a recent concert of the music of Marc-Andre Dalbavie at the Guggenheim Museum suggested that a new diversity may be emerging in the world so long governed by Pierre Boulez. The Dalbavie concert was part of a monthlong, citywide festival called Sounds French; still to come are Pascal Dusapin's opera "To Be Sung," an eerie blend of voices and electronics, and Olivier Messiaen's opulent piano cycle "Catalogue d'Oiseaux," to be played bravely in one sitting by Roger Muraro.

Dalbavie, who is perhaps the most widely performed of French composers younger than fifty, has written a fair amount of music of the twittering, skittering, Boulezian kind. But the three pieces heard at the Guggenheim broke free of modernist cliches. "Palimpsest," for violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano, conjured an extraordinary variety of sounds from fragments of a Gesualdo madrigal, at one point erupting into furious scales right out of a Vivaldi concerto. "Sextine Cyclus" was a beautifully arranged though somewhat overextended anthology of medieval songs; Jean-Paul Fouchecourt sang them with loving eloquence, and members of the Orchestre de Paris provided a glistening accompaniment.

Most striking was "Chants," for six singers and a chamber ensemble, based on Ezra Pound's adaptations of classical poetry and troubadour songs. This was a world premiere, and a significant one. Tonality seemed to dissolve and reform several times, as if a new language were struggling to be born. The splendid vocalists of the New York group Lionheart, for whom the piece was written, stood in a ring around the audience, answering each other antiphonally or uniting in high, unearthly harmonies. I thought for a moment of the Tuba Mirum of Berlioz's "Requiem," in which the trumpets of the Last Judgment sound from all corners of the hall. Dalbavie's music felt like the last echo of that catastrophe as it dissipated into empty space.

LOAD-DATE: March 31, 2003 The New Yorker March 5, 2001

HEADLINE: RESURRECTION; The Passion according to Osvaldo Golijov.

BYLINE: ALEX ROSS BODY:

When Osvaldo Golijov's "La Pasion Segun San Marcos," a setting of the Passion of Jesus Christ according to St. Mark, was presented by the Boston Symphony two weeks ago, the crowd made a sound that will echo in the musical world for some time. It was a roar of satisfaction, rising up from all corners of Symphony Hall. At first, the ovation seemed to be directed mostly at the performers-a throng of Venezuelans, Brazilians, and Cubans, augmented by Boston Symphony musicians, and conducted by Robert Spano-but the noise turned to thunder when the composer walked onstage. This level of euphoria is sometimes encountered at the Met, when a favorite singer has an exceptional night. It is not found at concerts of new music.

Skeptics may ask whether there is anything newsworthy about an ovation in Symphony Hall, where the audience rises to its feet a little too routinely. As rumors swirl that James Levine is poised to take over the orchestra, Boston is enjoying the sensation of being once again at the center of things. But Beantown boosterism doesn't suffice to explain the scale of Golijov's triumph. When "Pasion" had its premiere, in Stuttgart last summer, audiences reacted with even greater abandon, applauding and shouting for twenty minutes. "War Madonna im Saal?" asked the Stuttgarter Nachrichten. "Oder wenigstens Michael Jackson?" No-in the house was a thirty-nine-year-old Argentinian of Eastern European Jewish descent, who, until "Pasion," was known as the composer of a piece for string quartet and klezmer clarinet.

Any work that causes hysteria in both Boston and Stuttgart is worth a close look. And this Latino Passion carries two messages: one is that Golijov is a huge talent, with limitless possibilities in front of him; and the second is that Latin America has a fabulously rich tradition, one that will become a dominant force in coming decades. "Pasion" drops like a bomb on the belief that classical music is an exclusively European art. It has a revolutionary air, as if musical history were starting over, with new, sensuous materials and in a new, affirmative tone.

The Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas was the first to signal that Latin-American music would follow its own path. He died in 1940, at the age of forty, leaving behind a handful of masterpieces and a mess of possibilities. An alcoholic leftist, he revelled in the noise of the street, re-creating the sounds of mariachi bands, military marches, and Amerindian percussion. His best work was, fittingly, a film score, "Night of the Mayas," which ends with one of the sweatiest rave-ups in the literature. The power of Revueltas's accomplishment can be measured against that of his more disciplined contemporary Carlos Chavez, who made compelling abstractions out of primitive and popular sounds. Chavez's music is thought out, logical, composed; Revueltas's sounds as if it were being improvised on the spot.

In the middle of the century, Latin-American composers tended to follow Chavez's lead, weaving homegrown folk melodies and dance rhythms into classical genres. After the Second World War, with musical nationalism going out of style, many younger Latin Americans made dutiful appearances at the intellectual fashion shows of the European avant-garde. Others, however, immersed themselves in the overlapping worlds of Latin folk and pop, finding work as film composers or arrangers. The Cuban-American composer Tania Leon, for example, studied at N.Y.U. in the seventies and also served as musical director for "Godspell." Ricardo Lorenz, a Venezuelan now based in Chicago, writes for orchestra and also plays Latin jazz. The Mexican minimalist Javier Alvarez has written works for the Brodsky Quartet, the Mexico City subway system, and the horror-film director Guillermo del Toro.

Something in the Latin world-perhaps its respectful collision of cultures-prompts artists to overrun the borders between genres. In the case of the tango composer Astor Piazzolla, the distinction between classical and pop vanished completely; Piazzolla's tangos are small expressionist dramas, laced with dissonance and circumscribed by irony. A different kind of genre meltdown was seen in Brazil in the sixties and seventies, as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Hermeto Pascoal, and Egberto Gismonti leapfrogged impudently from folk to pop, or from classical to jazz and back again. On his most recent album, Veloso sings a twelve-tone row over a techno beat, calling for a "gay Chicago Negro German bossa nova." This is as coherent a vision of the music of the future as any that has recently been offered.

Osvaldo Golijov is himself a polyglot creation: he was born in Argentina, grew up in the culture of Yiddishkeit, and now lives in the Boston suburbs. He first made his name with a hyperkinetic klezmer composition entitled "The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind." The Latin-American element of his heritage came to the fore in the cantata "Oceana," a setting of texts by Pablo Neruda. The Bach conductor Helmuth Rilling, who had commissioned "Oceana" in 1995, subsequently asked Golijov for a St. Mark Passion, to be presented in Stuttgart alongside new Passions by Wolfgang Rihm, Tan Dun, and Sofia Gubaidulina. Golijov had to buy a copy of the New Testament in order to begin work.

"Pasion" poses a question: How might Bach have composed if he had been born in Latin America toward the end of the twentieth century? Most likely, he would have steered clear of the late-modernist abstractions of Rihm; every bar of Bach 's output is marked in some way by the airs and dances of his day. His first order of business might have been to learn the mambo. In any case, Golijov's work begins with a hypnotic montage of Latin sounds: Brazilian shakers and musical bows, conjuring an ancient world; eerie moans from the accordion, representing the voice of God; then the entry of the chorus, braying in Africanized Spanish over bata drums. The listener is thrown into the middle of a Lenten street festival, with three processions of singers converging in an antiphonal clamor.

Twentieth-century composers dreamed of a new kind of theatre that would bridge the gap between opera and ritual. This was Stravinsky's aim in constructing "Les Noces," and it is no accident that Stravinsky-like devices of hieratic repetition recur throughout "Pasion," alongside rippling minimalist canons in the manner of Steve Reich. But Golijov doesn't feel the need to assert himself with "wrong-note" sophistication, as Stravinsky did; instead, he trusts in the power of his material and in the instincts of his collaborators. Among them are the Brazilian vocalist Luciana Souza; the Afro-Cuban singer and dancer Reynaldo Gonzalez Fernandez; the percussionist Mikael Ringquist; and, most important, the Schola Cantorum de Caracas, a Venezuelan choir whose repertory extends from the Middle Ages to the present day. In places, the printed score simply records improvisations for posterity.

"Pasion" is too specialized in its demands to become a repertory piece, at least in the short term. Its creative team plans to travel from place to place, like a Broadway troupe on tour. It might legitimately be asked whether Golijov is still writing classical music or whether, as one Harvard professor complained, he is merely transcribing sounds that can be heard in any marketplace in Mexico. Take your pick. Ultimately, I think, "Pasion" is more imagined than observed, more dream than reality. Toward the end, Souza sings a Bachian-Brazilian aria entitled "Agonia," and the piece moves for a long spell into the interior world of Jesus's suffering. At the very end, Kaddish is sung for the man on the cross, and the music undergoes an even more mysterious metamorphosis: the language is now Aramaic, the cantillation is Jewish, and the centuries have slipped away like sand. (c)

LOAD-DATE: March 5, 2001

The Boston Globe July 31, 2006 Monday THIRD EDITION

HEADLINE: MUSIC'S INNER MAP REVEALED, WITH SOME HELP FROM GEOMETRY BYLINE: BY GARETH COOK, GLOBE STAFF

BODY:

It started with a simple question faced by every composer: From one chord, where can a piece of music go next?

To answer it, Dmitri Tymoczko turned not only to music theory, but to multi dimensional geometry.

A lover of mathematics as well as music, Tymoczko (pronounced tim-OSS-ko) was able to construct a theoretical space filled with every possible chord, with similar chords near each other. Any piece of music from a Chopin piano prelude to Deep Purple's hard-rock anthem "Smoke on the Water" can be represented as a path through this space.

His musical map could have a variety of applications, specialists said. It could be used to help computers compose music, to teach music theory to students, or perhaps even to develop a musical instrument in which a player drags a pointer through musical space. Since it was published last month in Science the first music theory paper to run in the journal's 126-year history Tymoczko has even heard from a man interested in building a high-tech lava lamp, with lights that move through space as the music does.

But the work's main importance is much broader. It will give scholars a powerful new tool for understanding how Western music functions, as well as how it has developed over time. And the paper also serves as a striking confirmation that the deep connections between music and mathematics in an intuition that goes back at least to Pythagoras extends to the many dimensions of modern mathematics.

"It is very, very exciting work," said Richard Cohn, a professor of music theory at Yale University. "It is an age-old problem, but people have been limited by the limits of the two-dimensional page."

For many centuries, people have devised ways to understand music using visual guides, from simple dots on a staff to more complex constructions with names like the circle of fifths. What Tymoczko has done for the first time is create a kind of ultimate map of musical space that contains all the maps that have come before, and that reveals a deep geometry and rich set of connections that have never been seen before.

"It was like you had a little map of a couple of blocks of Dorchester, and a few blocks of Brookline, and some of Cambridge," said Tymoczko, who just finished a year of research at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. "Now we have a map of all of Boston."

Much of Western music, from classical to jazz to pop, follows what Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg once called the law of the shortest way. From one chord, composers generally try to move the individual notes as little as possible to get to the next chord.

This tradition seems to be tied up in how the brain processes music, Tymoczko said. If notes make large leaps, we don't tend to hear it as a single melodic line. But if the steps are small, we can hear many lines of melody at once. Indeed, the Western musical tradition can be thought of as a long exploration of the ways that melodic lines can be combined to make a series of satisfying harmonies, he said.

Although Tymoczko eventually ventured into difficult mathematical territory, he started with the simplest possible chords, made up of two tones. He imagined placing these chords on a flat map, but instead of latitude and longitude, it has two axes representing the tones. At any point on the map, then, would be the chord made up of two tones, just like any point on a traditional map has a latitude and longitude.

Making a musical map this way puts each chord next to the other chords that use nearby notes. However, he had to make two changes to make the map reflect the unique nature of music. The map listed every chord twice, with the notes reversed for example the notes C and G in one spot, and the notes G and C in another. So he folded one half of the map onto the other half, so chords were not repeated.

Next, there are many keys on a piano, but it is divided into octaves of twelve notes that cycle around like the numbers on a clock: Moving up twelve notes from C, you end up back at another C that has a very similar sound quality to the first C (though higher in pitch). A chord of C and G sounds similar even if the C is moved up an octave. To handle this problem, he took two edges of the map, gave it a clever twist, and then mathematically "glued" the edges together. Move twelve notes on the map in one direction, and you end up back where you started.

The resulting space, with a fold and glued edges, is an example of an orbifold, a mathematical structure devised 50 years ago that is now used by physicists to do string theory, an effort to devise a unified explanation for the forces of nature.

On his website is an animation of this two-note chord map, with the opening chords of "Smoke on the Water." When the dark dot representing the chord being played slides off one end, it appears on the other side.

His paper then extends the same method to higher dimensions a three-dimensional space for three-note chords, a four-dimensional space for four-note chords, etc. Another animation on his website shows how the chords in a Chopin prelude move around in space. Seen on Tymoczko's map, it is clear that Chopin is mostly making small moves in one part of space.

This mapping technique helps show the choices that a composer has in moving from one chord to another. One of the more interesting insights, Tymoczko said, is that the familiar chords that sound most pleasant sit like a column, right in the middle of the map. Being in the middle means that the chords are in easy striking distance of many other chords.

It is a fascinating fact, he said, that the very chords that sound nice are also the ones that make it easy to reach other chords in small steps the central idea of Western music.

"We have a powerful, systematic language for tying together 1,000 years of musical practice, for expressing what music is about in a very core way," Tymoczko said.

Gareth Cook can be reached at [email protected]. Animation and free software can be found at www.music.princeton.edu/~dmitri/

GRAPHIC: PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: July 31, 2006

The New Yorker October 3, 2005

HEADLINE: COUNTDOWN; John Adams and Peter Sellars create an atomic opera.

BYLINE: ALEX ROSS

BODY:

At the northern end of the White Sands Missile Range, in the semi-arid desert of central New Mexico, a road stretches toward the charcoal-colored rockface of the Oscura Mountains, which rise to nearly nine thousand feet. At the end of the road is a neat circular shape, about a half mile in diameter. This is the site of the first atomic explosion, which took place on July 16, 1945. When the bomb went off, it obliterated the creosote bushes that had been growing here, along with every other living thing inside the circle. When plant life returned to the spot, grass and yucca plants took the place of the creosote. The change in vegetation explains why the site is visible from miles away, and probably from space.

White Sands is a mesmerizing place-an outdoor museum of mankind's highest ambitions and deepest fears. The missile range is still an active facility. Lately, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency has been using an area nearby to study the effects of explosives on underground bunkers. One corner of White Sands is occupied by linear, the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research project, which scans the skies for errant asteroids, particularly those big enough to cause mass extinctions. At the same time, the range functions as an unofficial wildlife refuge, the secrecy of the place serving to protect various species. It is home to herds of oryx, an African antelope. They are noble animals with horns like medieval spikes, and they can go for extended periods without water.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who oversaw the building of the first atomic bombs, called the test site Trinity, in honor of John Donne's sonnet "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." The poem contains the words "break, blow, burn, and make me new." Oppenheimer was made new by the explosion, or, at least, was not the same afterward. The terrain beneath the bomb-Ground Zero, it was called-also underwent a transformation, which scientists are still trying to understand. When Trinity personnel came back to inspect the site, they found a green, glassy substance covering the ground. The latest hypothesis is that this artificial mineral, which was named trinitite, formed when soil, water, and organic matter were lifted off the ground and fused in the heat of the blast. Over the years, tourists have carried away much of the trinitite in their pockets-the site is open to visitors twice a year-and most of the rest was buried beneath the soil. Looking down at the ground, you would never know that anything out of the ordinary had happened here.

What happened at Trinity is the subject of "Doctor Atomic," a new opera, with music by John Adams and a libretto by Peter Sellars. The opening scenes take place at Los Alamos, the headquarters of the Manhattan Project, two weeks before the test. The rest takes place on the night of July 15th-16th, in the hours leading up to the detonation. It will have its premiere at the San Francisco Opera on October 1st.

"Some people claim that it's the world's first countdown," Sellars said to me, in a hotel lobby in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a few days before the rehearsals for "Doctor Atomic" began. "Every second is charged, because it is a new thing in the history of time-this massive pressure behind every minute and every second in a way that never counted before. At the end of the opera, you can feel the passage of time in the most real way, as with the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, showing how many minutes remain until midnight. You get the hands of that clock, and inside every minute is a universe. A twenty-minute countdown takes forty minutes. From zero minus one minute up to the explosion takes four minutes. The music actually connects with the most formative experiences in your life, which you want to never live again yet you're living over and over-those moments when you were more alive than you ever were alive before or since. This is 'Gotterdammerung' for our generation, with our speed, with our tension points, with our nervous energy, but with nothing being a metaphor and everything being a reality."

Sellars-director of opera and theatre, activist, professor of "art as moral action" at U.C.L.A.-actually does talk like this. He speaks better than most writers write, moving through thickets of erudition toward exact epiphanies. His orations and incantations well up without warning, and break off with a giggle, or a profanity, or a burst of California slang. He has a compact, almost elfin body; his shoulders slope down sharply from his neck, and his feet pad the floor in short, quick steps. His hair shoots straight up, giving him the air of being perpetually electrified. He has a boyish quality, and dresses in boyish clothes. A typical ensemble may consist of cargo pants, an oversized flannel shirt, and a track jacket. Yet, when he is in the grip of one of his rhetorical tours de force, he takes on the look of an elderly sage: his head turns toward the heavens, his arms stretch upward in supplicant gestures, his face twists into an attitude of ecstatic pain. The blend of mental power and depth of feeling in one man is almost fearsome. But the most distinctive thing about him is his warmth: his customary way of greeting a stranger is to wrap him in a hug.

It was the peak of the atomic season-midway between the sixtieth anniversary of Trinity, on July 16th, and the sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima, on August 6th. Books about Oppenheimer and the bomb were being published, seemingly, at the rate of one a week. Sellars, who was in town to direct a production of Osvaldo Golijov's "Ainadamar," at the Santa Fe Opera, pointed out that there were traces of atomic history all around: we were sitting a few hundred feet from 109 East Palace Avenue, the studiously inconspicuous front office for Los Alamos, where Dorothy McKibbin, Oppenheimer's gatekeeper, took in bewildered emigre physicists and sent them on the road to the laboratories, twenty-five miles to the northwest.

Sellars has long been in the habit of dragging opera into dangerous places.When he was an undergraduate theatre prodigy at Harvard, in the late nineteen-seventies, he staged an abridged version of Wagner's "Ring," with lip-synching puppets. In the eighties, in a series of productions both notorious and revered, he placed "Don Giovanni" in Spanish Harlem, "The Marriage of Figaro " in Trump Tower, Handel's "Julius Caesar" in Beirut. His first collaboration with John Adams was "Nixon in China," in 1987; the title more or less explains the plot of the opera, though not its dreamlike atmosphere. His second Adams collaboration, "The Death of Klinghoffer," ventured into the even riskier territory of Israeli-Palestinian relations and international terrorism. The librettist for both of those projects was Alice Goodman, who also was to have written the text of "Doctor Atomic." When Goodman backed out, Sellars decided to write the libretto himself. Or, rather, he decided to assemble a libretto from extant material, because he realized that the subject resisted a conventional treatment.

"My mother lived in Kobe, Japan, for five years, one hour away from Hiroshima," Sellars told me. "I went there several times, and there's a whole museum filled with bad Holocaust art. The great material is Kenzaburo Oe's 'A Personal Matter,' where the word 'Hiroshima' appears once. How to make a Hiroshima piece or a Holocaust piece-that's a really serious question. Art can't get above itself. It has also to recognize its own limits." He went on, "The nightmare of all art, as well as of all politics, is generalities. You cannot generalize. You've got to keep things as specific to the minute, as down to the wire, as possible."

The classic book on the Manhattan Project is Richard Rhodes's "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." Rhodes wrote it only after he had tried and failed to produce a fictional work on the same theme. Rhodes recently appeared at a panel discussion in San Francisco with Sellars and Adams-an event sponsored by the Exploratorium, which was founded by Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank-where he reflected on the dangers of treating the bomb melodramatically. "This whole story is slowly moving into a mythological compressed state," Rhodes said. "You have one person, Oppenheimer, and his scientists, and one place, Los Alamos, and one city, Hiroshima. Poor Nagasaki-we always forget Nagasaki every August. But, in fact, this was a huge project of a hundred thirty thousand people, on a physical plant on the scale of the American automobile industry by 1945."

Rhodes was impressed to hear of Sellars's prolonged immersion in the Los Alamos story. The libretto is an ingenious collage, stitching together declassified documents, transcripts of meetings, interviews with participants, and standard histories. Events are sometimes condensed, but almost every line can be checked against a source. The cast of characters includes Oppenheimer, in all his brilliant, arrogant, magnetic, cryptic glory; his wife, Kitty, seething against the confines of Los Alamos and losing herself in drink; Robert Wilson, an idealistic young scientist, who opposes the use of atomic bombs on Japan; General Leslie R. Groves, the oversized bulldog in charge of the entire operation; and Jack Hubbard, the Trinity meteorologist, whose predictions of thunderstorms drive Groves into an impotent rage. Lurking to the side is the Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller, who is beginning to feel the resentment that will lead him, at the height of the Communist hysteria of the nineteen-fifties, to denounce Oppenheimer as a security risk.

Oppenheimer reveals his inner life by reciting poetic texts that had special meaning for him. In addition to Donne's "Batter my heart," the libretto features Baudelaire-a volume of whose poetry was in Oppenheimer's pocket at Trinity-and the Bhagavad Gita, which the physicist had read in the original Sanskrit. (He later claimed to have thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita-"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"-after the bomb went off. Jack Hubbard's diary has Oppenheimer saying, "My faith in the human mind is somewhat restored.") There is little record of what Kitty Oppenheimer was doing or saying in this period; Sellars fleshes her out by giving her lines from the mid-century poet Muriel Rukeyser, whose life overlapped with that of the Oppenheimers in fascinating ways (wealthy New York background; hard-left politics; visionary tendencies). And there is one semifictional character, a Tewa Pueblo maid named Pasqualita, who babysits for the Oppenheimer children. Many Native Americans were employed at Los Alamos, including, Sellars says, a maid with this name. It is not implausible that, during a summer storm, a servant would have comforted a baby with a Tewa song: "In the north the cloud-flower blossoms / And now the lightning flashes, / And now the thunder clashes, / And now the rain comes down! "

In Sellars's "Doctor Atomic" libretto, as in Oe's "A Personal Matter," the word "Hiroshima" appears once. In the first scene of the opera, which depicts a staff meeting at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer goes through a list of potential Japanese targets with Teller and Wilson. (Some of the dialogue is taken from a Washington, D.C., meeting that occurred a few weeks earlier.) When the physicist gets to Hiroshima, the strings, trombones, and horns play a soft groan of a chord, A major and F minor combined, and then the dialogue moves on. That same chord returns, in modified form, at the end of the opera. Here the advantage of opera as a dramatic medium becomes clear. The characters do not know what is coming. The orchestra, brooding from the start, knows everything.

The first person to theorize nuclear weapons was the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who, as Richard Rhodes relates, pictured an explosive chain reaction while crossing a London street in 1933. The first person to theorize "Doctor Atomic" was Pamela Rosenberg, who was appointed the general director of the San Francisco Opera in 1999. An administrator of sharp intellect, Rosenberg arrived with the conviction that opera should be more than an opulent entertainment. She decided that a new work by John Adams should be central to her tenure. Rosenberg has sometimes been a controversial figure in San Francisco, but her productions have had a strong impact, and few have faulted her for launching "Doctor Atomic, " which will travel to at least four opera houses over the next few years, including the Met. Rosenberg leaves next year to become the general manager of the Berlin Philharmonic. She will, as she says, go out with a bang.

"I was doing this Faust series here, and wanted to commission an American Faust," Rosenberg told me one day, at a picnic table in the Presidio. She presented the idea to the opera's board of trustees; afterward, Michael Harrison, a professor emeritus at the University of California, at Berkeley, approached her. Rosenberg recalled him saying, "You know, all your subjects are sitting over there, and they can't sleep at night because of the genie they let out of the bottle." She told him, "The man I have been thinking of is Oppenheimer."

Rosenberg zeroed in on Adams because she considers him "the greatest composer alive." Adams's ability to attract lofty epithets has aroused envy among his colleagues, but he has won his eminence fair and square: he has aimed high, he has addressed life as it is lived now, and he has found a language that makes sense to a wide audience. As a music student at Harvard, in the late nineteen-sixties, he received the gospel according to Arnold Schoenberg, who held that composers of integrity should flee the profaned temples of mass culture and cry out in a wilderness of dissonance. Adams bought into all that when he was young, and even wrote a letter to Leonard Bernstein chiding him for the tonal simplicities of "Chichester Psalms." He then began to find his way outside academic language, investigating the chance methods of John Cage and embracing New York minimalism. Most important, perhaps, he moved to Northern California, settling eventually in a house in the hills of Berkeley.

Adams and Sellars met in 1983, in the composer's home state of New Hampshire, where they talked over the idea that became "Nixon in China." That opera and the later Sellars-Adams collaborations ("Klinghoffer," "I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky," and "El Nino") delved into what Adams calls "psychic complexes of American consciousness-Communism, the market economy, Presidential politics, terrorism, racism." Adams matches these sprawling themes with sprawling musical vistas, in which multiple forces are in motion. He can react to a huge variety of dramatic stimuli, and is as comfortable creating the peculiar Chinese-accented big-band jazz of "Nixon" as he is writing the hieratic Bachian chorales of the Exiled Jews and Palestinians in "Klinghoffer." His method is often to link a character or a situation to a favorite musical gesture or texture in his memory bank; he then extrapolates from that kernel to fashion his narrative. Mozart, Verdi, and Britten did the same.

Adams took a long break from large-scale opera after he finished "Klinghoffer." The protracted controversy over that work, in the course of which he was called both an anti-Semite and a terrorist sympathizer, left him discouraged; he began to think that the genre was not worth the trouble. When I interviewed him five years ago, he said that he didn't think he had another opera in him.

But the Oppenheimer story proved irresistible. It offered him the psychic complex to end all psychic complexes. At the "Doctor Atomic" panel at the Exploratorium, Adams said, "I knew almost within the hour of first talking to Pamela that this was what I wanted to do." He went on, "The atomic bomb was the ultimate archetype, the ultimate looming presence. And I do remember, as a kid-I don't know how old I was, maybe seven or eight years old-living in the most secure, Steven Spielbergesque, idyllic village in New Hampshire . . . getting into bed one night, and my mother gave me a kiss and turned out the light. I heard a jet plane way, way high up in the sky, and I went into a panic, because I wondered if that was the Russians coming to bomb us." He said that the bomb represented a "dividing line in human history, when the human species was no longer riding along with the rest of God's creation . . . but suddenly was in a position to destroy the nest, to literally destroy the planet. That seemed to be a theme that was worthy of my time."

When Adams sat down with Sellars and looked through the sources, his eyes soon landed on some sentences in Henry DeWolf Smyth's pamphlet "Atomic Energy for Military Purposes," which was published just after Hiroshima: "The end of June 1945 finds us expecting from day to day to hear of the explosion of the first atomic bomb devised by man. All the problems are believed to have been solved at least well enough to make a bomb practicable." A fast, relentless eighth-note figure-what Sellars would later call "the Stravinsky emergency music "-darted through the composer's head. A less promising verbal cue could hardly be imagined-had the word "practicable" ever been set to music?-but Adams had found his groove.

The working relationship of Adams and Sellars is intimate and complex. Each has his fiefdom, and negotiations between the two regimes are unending. Adams's control of musical matters is absolute. He entertains suggestions from Sellars, which are sometimes very detailed-"Give me something like the Adagio of the Bruckner Fourth," Sellars said of one passage in "Doctor Atomic"-but when Adams sits down to write, his inner voice often takes him elsewhere. The passage that was supposed to sound like Bruckner-Jack Hubbard's final weather report, shortly before the detonation-came out sounding like, well, John Adams. When the score was finished, Sellars was puzzled that certain choice lines had been unceremoniously dropped. But he was too thrilled by the over-all result to fret. Adams, for his part, retires from the battlefield once rehearsals begin. As he watches Sellars at work, he comments on the musical execution rather than on the stage action. He may have reservations about the sheer amount of activity that Sellars sometimes unleashes onstage, but if he were to say anything Sellars would likely become all the more convinced that his instincts were right-the director is sunny and steely in equal measure. Adams is usually won over, and his gratitude is immense.

The strength of the partnership lies as much in its opposing traits as in its similarities. Sellars is pure charisma, enthusiasm, happy intensity. Adams is wry, folksy, detached, a self-styled and very agreeable curmudgeon. Sellars is outspoken in his politics, Adams more reserved. Sellars talks about the atomic story in terms of a battle between light and darkness, although he is too intelligent to confine his characters to one side or the other. In Adams's telling, the bomb bears down like Fate incarnate, inevitable and irrevocable. Sellars sees unexpected grace and hope blossoming around the explosion; his motto for this opera is Muriel Rukeyser's line "Love must imagine the world." Adams, too, supplies moments of dizzying beauty, but in the end he has written a three-hour symphony of dread.

It would be a stretch to compare the staging of "Doctor Atomic" to the Manhattan Project, but the undertaking is gigantic all the same. Under the troika of Adams, Sellars, and Rosenberg, a miniature city has been working to bring the opera to life. Some five hundred people are contributing to one or another aspect of the production. Only in the final week do all the components-singers, chorus, orchestra, costumes, scenery, lighting, and the rest-come together onstage; before that, most components are prepared separately. This being a Sellars show, there are extra complications. Lucinda Childs has been devising fluid, geometric choreography for a squad of dancers. At the core of the production team are three people who have worked with Sellars since the nineteen-eighties: Adrianne Lobel, the set designer; Dunya Ramicova, the costume designer; and James F. Ingalls, the lighting designer. They have devised an overarching color scheme for the show. Graphite represents the will to kill; "true blues" represent whatever remains of the human impulse; gray and ochre tones represent the muddled middle. The colors were inspired in part by a photograph of the mountains and sky at Trinity on the eve of the test.

The San Francisco Opera costume shop is in a cavernous three-story building on Ninth Street. Twenty-eight stitchers, drapers, and tailors are running up period garb for the singers, chorus, supernumeraries, and dancers. The supervisor for "Atomic" is Jai Alltizer, a soft-spoken art punk with a red-and-purple Mohawk and a long goatee. He has spent the past year trying to reconstruct the way people at Los Alamos dressed, and to master such arcana as the project's system of I.D. buttons, which were coded white, blue, or red to identify levels of clearance, and of temporary passes-"to let you come to the after-party," Alltizer joked. He showed me Teller's suits (graphite), Kitty Oppenheimer's dress (a watery-blue silk number, made from leftover Valentino fabric), and Oppenheimer's hat-a rakish porkpie, which was famous enough in its day to be pictured on the cover of Physics Today with no caption. It is being stretched and distressed to simulate the effect of conditions on the mesa.

The scene shop is in the Potrero Hill neighborhood, in an old steelyard warehouse. Last November, Jay Kotcher, the head scenic artist, and Jack Kostelnik, the foreman of the construction crew, worked with eight carpenters, four scenic artists, and a sculptor, building the scenery for the show: the huts and fences of Los Alamos; the tower at Trinity, on which the bomb was placed; an enormous protective container called Jumbo, which was never used; and the hundred-and-two-foot-wide sloping floor on which the action takes place. And, of course, Kotcher and Kostelnik built the bomb itself. For the frame, they used wood; for the shell, Styrofoam; for the skin, fibreglass. Lobel asked them to paint it a dull silver color, to give it a suitably ominous sheen.

Sitting in a cramped, dusty office next to the carpentry shop, Kotcher told me, "The fun part was coming up with all these doodads, these mysterious electrical things that come out of the shell. Lori Harrison, our master of properties, did some shopping and came in with a carful of miscellaneous weird stuff. A colleague of hers had gone to a restaurant-supply place down the street, where she found some liquor pourers-those spigots you see sticking out of liquor bottles at a bar. We just glued them in the wooden box and stuck wires on them."

Kostelnik called up a spreadsheet on his computer to check how much the entire thing had cost. The original Gadget, as it was called, consumed hundreds of millions of dollars. The Kotcher-Kostelnik Gadget came in at $30,164, including parts and labor. It had been moved to the backstage area of the opera house, where it sat under a transparent plastic tarp, glowering at passersby.

In a rehearsal space one block from the opera house, Sellars was working with a group of singers in a piano rehearsal. Adelle Eslinger, one of the music coaches, was at the keyboard, trying to summon up the sound of a hundred-piece Adamsian orchestra. Donato Cabrera, the assistant conductor, gave the singers their cues and sang the part of the chorus or vocalized a significant instrumental solo. Props were scattered around the room, to give the singers inspiration. There was a blackboard with a daunting equation written on it:

2 + 2 = x2 + 2x (3<1>[root]CO) / 102

Sellars and the singers amused themselves by scrawling new equations each day.

The session focussed on Act I, Scene 1, in which Oppenheimer, Teller, and Wilson debate the wisdom of deploying the bomb in Japan. The dialogue begins with a line adapted from Teller's memoirs: "First of all, let me say that I have no hope of clearing my conscience. The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls." In Adams's setting of the words, the melody moves along in shadowy, groping fashion, the notes drawn generally from the whole-tone scale.

The man singing Oppenheimer is Gerald Finley, a forty-five-year-old Canadian with a firm jaw and a hypnotically expressive baritone voice. In the past few years, he has scored international triumphs in such mainstream roles as Don Giovanni and Figaro. He has also worked steadily in the less glamorous realm of contemporary opera, and seems happiest when taking on thorny, elusive characters. In the "Atomic" rehearsals, he was tireless in his pursuit of nuances, and often could be seen in the corner, puffing on a fake cigarette-Oppenheimer's chain-smoking is a leitmotif of the opera-and trying out different readings of a line. Like almost everyone involved in the production, he had become an enthusiast of the atomic literature, and, naturally, he had thought harder than most about the central character.

"He wanted to believe in the beauty of natural forces," Finley told me at lunch one day. In the opera, Oppenheimer speaks of the "brilliant luminescence" of the explosion. "When there was an imperfection, it would drive him crazy," Finley said. "Faust is the obvious connection-the craving for knowledge and the cruelty of having that knowledge, if you like, and the punishment of having that knowledge."

Teller was being sung by Joshua Bloom, a young Australian baritone. He was one of a group of cover singers who were attending all the rehearsals, studying the principals' every move in the slender hope that they might be called to do the same onstage. Today, Bloom was happy to be standing in for Richard Paul Fink, who had been assigned the role at the last minute and was not yet in town. Bloom sang his opening line elegantly, with perfect accuracy of pitch. Sellars stopped him, seeking more.

"This whole night is about the atomic bomb," Sellars said, "and I want actually to begin with the most important words-that, at the end of the day, yes, it's wrong, and everyone knows it. Yes, it's wrong. When you say 'terrible, ' terrible is"-Sellars paused-"terrible. Look at it in the eye."

"Terrible"? "Wrong"? As a New Yorker who thinks regularly about the possibility of a stray nuclear bomb wiping out not only my life but everything I love, I didn't doubt him for a moment. But I wondered whether the director was politically stacking the deck. He was, however, merely setting up one pole of the debate.

Oppenheimer answers Teller by archly quoting Baudelaire: "The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes so embarrassing that at this loss I felt only a little more emotion than if, during a walk, I had lost my visiting card." Sellars gave Finley an indication of what this allusion might mean: "It's like, 'Oh, really, Edward, you're worried about losing your soul? Well, I lost my bus ticket yesterday. I was upset. That transfer is an extra quarter!' The most soulful character in the history of science is acting like a soul is a trivial thing. Get a little pyrotechnic with it. With your butterfly mind, just feel that you can literally go rings around him."

Finley ran through the Baudelaire lines in a lighter, airier tone. The words "visiting card" fluttered in the air, and the singer accentuated them by wiggling his fingers.

"Great great great great great great great great great great great cool cool cool cool," Sellars said, in about the time that most people would say, "Great, cool."

Later in the scene, Robert Wilson registers his objections to using the bomb in combat. The part is played by Tom Randle, who is the sort of singer that Sellars loves-alert to psychological detail, physically agile, extremely well prepared. (He often mouthed the words to other singers' parts.) Sellars urged him to invest his words with humanitarian passion and patriotic fervor. "What I always hate are right-wingers who say that progressives can't be patriotic," he said. Wilson's argument, in brief, is that the Japanese should be given more time to surrender, and if the bomb is to be used it should be dropped on an uninhabited area, as a demonstration.

Again, Oppenheimer engages in a masterly manipulation. Sellars said to his lead singer, "When Wilson starts speaking, would you start very slowly coming the entire distance-smoking, listening-and then say something that is going to be very unpopular with all these young people: 'What do we know about Japanese psychology? How can we scientists judge the way to end the war?' Be prickly. You 're saying, Look, you've come this far in the countdown. Five minutes before, two billion dollars later, twenty thousand people working for two and a half years, and now you say, 'Uh, O.K., go home, thanks'? Physics in the last twenty years has become the most powerful thing in the world, the single greatest power in the history of the human race. As a scientist, you want to know if it works."

Randle nodded. "There's something sympathetic about this," he said, on behalf of his character. "I understand that, his curiosity."

Finley sang the words with his usual nobility. Sellars instructed, "Gerry, come straight down, like a piranha. You have to be the bad guy, and what that means for you to have to be the bad guy is what I want to feel. You're somebody who's into the nuances of Baudelaire and you're talking about 'Japanese psychology'? It's offensive, what you're saying. You're saying this just to provoke them." Sellars also said, "As you know, Oppenheimer is being grilled around the clock by these government security people about every damn thing about your past. They've missed Klaus Fuchs, who is actually reporting on the bomb to Stalin, and meanwhile you're being harassed on a weekly basis about "-Sellars snarled-"minuscule shit. These people will not rest until you are dead."

Sellars wrote his undergraduate thesis on Vsevolod Meyerhold and his avant-garde theatre of abstraction and defamiliarization. At the same time, Sellars studied Konstantin Stanislavsky's art of psychological naturalism. You could say that his lifelong project has been to try to reconcile the two giants of early-twentieth-century Russian theatre. He devises challenging, disorienting frames for drama, and then fills those frames with lavish knowledge of the characters' inner lives. If he sometimes seeks the unattainable-at one point, he asked one of the singers to "get Martin Luther King's entire 'I have a dream' speech in that melisma"-he never fails to provide the wealth of context and backstory that actors crave. Above all, he won't hang cards around characters' necks saying "good" or "evil"; that is why some people rejected "Klinghoffer," and why others may reject "Doctor Atomic." In the end, the main objection that can be levelled against some of Sellars's work is not that it presents a limited point of view but, rather, that it presents too many points of view. His productions, Andrew Porter wrote in The New Yorker two decades ago, are "meant for nimble minds."

The following day, Sellars rehearsed this same Act I scene on the main stage of the house. He was in his element, hollering instructions and channelling history as the dancers swirled around him, supernumeraries carried boxes of explosives, the women of the chorus sang an ode to the plutonium core, and the male principals ran through their chamber play of protest and intellectual seduction. The composer was there, too, though you had to go to the back of the hall to find him.

Adams began "Doctor Atomic" in November, 2003, and finished it on May 24th of this year. He worked at a steady pace, hitting relatively few major obstacles as he went along. He composed directly onto thirty-six-staff orchestral music paper, without making an initial piano sketch. It's a bit like painting directly onto canvas without first pencilling in a drawing underneath. Although Adams solved some musical problems on the computer, using various forms of compositional software, he wrote out the score the old-fashioned way, by hand. The manuscript is a mammoth thing, taking up five hundred and forty-eight pages. It sits now in his studio in Berkeley, divided into manila envelopes.

For Adams, the tensest day of the process was the first orchestral rehearsal. It took place in a long, low-ceilinged hall on the grounds of the Presidio; Adams noted the appropriateness of first hearing the orchestral music of "Doctor Atomic" on a decommissioned military base. The composer walked in, saw an array of twenty gongs, and said, "My God, what have I done?" He greeted various players, some of whom he had known since the seventies, when he was a hippie-ish instructor at the San Francisco Conservatory. He went over to a table at the front of the orchestra and sat down next to Sellars, who was studying the music.

Donald Runnicles, who will conduct the premiere, walked in with the two big volumes of the score under his arm. He is an amiable, shaggy-haired, unprepossessing maestro, a native of Scotland, who has been living in California long enough that his burr has softened. He has been the chief conductor of the San Francisco Opera since 1992. This week he was preparing not only "Doctor Atomic" but also "L'Italiana in Algeri," which would play at the opera's opening-night gala. When I talked with him at his favorite pub, a place called Liverpool Lil's, he joked about the absurdity of going back and forth between Rossini's frothy comedy and Adams's dire nuclear drama. He then drew a fascinating comparison between Oppenheimer and the figure of Captain Vere, in "Billy Budd." Vere's decision to send Billy to his death, he said, was not unlike Oppenheimer's decision to support the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima: each man wills himself to uphold the official line, at enormous inner cost. "He conforms to the pressure of the state," Runnicles said. "But he's forever haunted by his decision."

Several times during the first rehearsals, Runnicles invited Adams and Sellars to talk to the musicians. This was an unusual move. Orchestral players like to concentrate on the technical nuts and bolts-Should it be soft or loud? When does the crescendo start?-and they tend to snicker at airy generalities about what the music means. So it was a bit brave of Sellars to stand up and chant Baudelaire. He then unleashed one of his verbal reveries, giving the players the same sort of Stanislavskian motivation that he had offered to the singers.

"In Act I, you're basically providing a lot of bad weather," Sellars said, standing on the tips of his toes so he could see the brass players and the percussionists in the back. "But when you make this thunder and do these sudden explosions it's not purely descriptive. You are indicating moral heights and depth of knowing. Those strange wind solos, for example-the oboe solos that play when they are talking about radiation poisoning-they show how cancer works in the body, how radiation functions. Or these weird, dark wind chords: the physicists are saying one thing, but you in the orchestra are telling us there's a whole lot more. The Stravinsky emergency music keeps hammering, because people did not always have the luxury of making decisions in a calm, quiet place." He added, "It's a real honor to do this piece at this time in the history of our country. The arts are not just entertainment, sideshow, and distraction."

Whether these instructions made any difference was not immediately apparent, but, during the break, several players came up to Sellars to thank him. Then it was back to business as usual: adjusting balances, establishing crisp entrances, making sure that a fast figure was relayed cleanly from one section to another. The orchestra was mastering Adams's tricky textures, but, as the afternoon went on, their energy waned. By the time they arrived at the climax of Act I, Oppenheimer's recitation of "Batter my heart," they were tired out. Adams, who, a little earlier, had been rocking delightedly in his seat, was now bent over his score with a tight expression, scribbling notes on a yellow pad. He decided, at one point, that it was too much to ask the double basses to play some high, spidery figures in unison, so he gave the passage to a single bass player.

"Donald should just send them home," he muttered. "They're beat."

Sellars, though, was transported by the sound. "John Adams," he said, "you have written an un-fucking-believable opera."

"Doctor Atomic" begins not with music but with noise: a two-minute electronic collage of industrial groans and screeches, into which is mixed the roar of airplanes, military voices, and a snippet of Jo Stafford singing "The Things We Did Last Summer." It suggests the buzzing of the innards of the bomb as it bleeds through radio static. All this will rain down on the audience from speakers that the sound designer, Mark Grey, has installed all over the San Francisco Opera House.

Jo Stafford's voice breaks up, cuts off, and gives way to a brutally dissonant passage for full orchestra, which feels like a detonation in progress. Adams had in mind not so much the explosion itself as the mental conflict of the Los Alamos physicists, who were mortally afraid of what would happen if their bomb did not work and no less afraid of what might happen if it did. Adams says that he was inspired in part by Edgard Varese, who composed some of the most earsplitting music of the early modernist period. A recording of Varese's work "Ionisation" apparently entertained some physicists in the Manhattan Project. But the real model is one of Adams's classic early works, his hyper-Romantic symphonic poem "Harmonielehre." The trombone and tuba have an identical floor-rattling figure (a rising minor ninth) in both works. What had been darkly exuberant is now exuberantly dark.

The chorus barges in with its report on the progress of atomic research. The manic, scurrying pattern underneath-the Stravinsky emergency music-indeed takes off from Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, which was itself inspired by the images and sounds of the Second World War: newsreels of goose-stepping German soldiers, of "scorched earth" tactics in China, of Allied forces on the march. The great Russian exile began writing it in the spring of 1942, around the time Oppenheimer was organizing a team of Berkeley physicists to work on the bomb, and finished it on August 7, 1945. Listening to Adams's music, I pictured Stravinsky in a hut at Los Alamos, working away on an intricate problem of seemingly tangential yet ultimately crucial significance.

A little later, a kind of explosive fusion occurs: the two main elements of the opening section, the dissonant chords and the driving lines, are rammed together. Throughout the scene, there are premonitions of the detonation to come. The word "Hiroshima" is uttered, with its accompanying low-brass moan. When Oppenheimer rhapsodically describes the "brilliant luminescence" of the explosion, the winds swirl like particles in rapid motion and the strings play shivery tremolo chords. Many of these sounds are familiar from the forbidding archives of modern music past, not to mention a hundred sci-fi movies. There's a sense in "Doctor Atomic" that Adams is mobilizing the entire ghoulish army of twentieth-century styles.

In the second scene comes another shock, this one of beauty. We are in the Oppenheimers' bedroom, in the middle of the night. The physicist is sitting up in bed. Kitty wakes up and sings a setting of Rukeyser's "Three Sides of a Coin ": "Am I in your light? No, go on reading." The poem is used to conjure up Kitty 's sardonic, plaintive, and finally angry attempts to command the attention of a husband whose mind is buried in the mysteries of the atom. Oppenheimer, after putting aside his work, answers her with the Baudelaire prose poem that begins "Long let me inhale, deeply, the odor of your hair"-the "opium bath," as Adams calls it. They can relate to each other only in these precious terms. Kitty acknowledges as much when she moves on to another Rukeyser poem, beginning "The motive of it all was loneliness": it suggests that the Oppenheimers are together less out of love than out of fear. The interaction is edgy and charged, but Adams allows his music to become ravishingly sensuous. On close inspection, those blaring dissonances turn out to be simple chords nested together. They detach, breathe, sing out. The Baudelaire suggested to Adams a very French sound-surging, shimmering textures out of Debussy. It's a drugged, drunken beauty, not quite real.

In the final scene of Act I, the action moves to Trinity, on the eve of the test. A violent storm breaks over the desert. General Groves, who is played by Eric Owens, bellows, in a Lear-like tantrum, "What the hell is wrong with the weather?" Later on, after much sound and fury surrounding the arrival, raising, and arming of the bomb, Groves drops his bluster and begins to talk about his various attempts to lose weight. The oddly haunting tone of this "diet aria" illustrates what I think of as the Gadget Effect: even the most mundane chatter takes on spooky significance in light of the bomb.

The crux of the opera arrives: Oppenheimer, alone at the bottom of the tower, sings "Batter my heart, three person'd God." The most telling lines may be the last: "for I / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me." The aria is in the key of D minor, in the manner of a Renaissance lament, with a hint of synagogue chant; Oppenheimer sings a grand, doleful, nobly stammering melody, while the orchestra mimics the sound of viols and lutes.

"That music just sort of fluttered down and landed on my desk one day," Adams told me. "Part of me said, 'No, you can't do that,' and the other half said, 'That's it, go ahead and do it.' Afterward, I realized the reason it was right. Naming the site after a John Donne sonnet was itself an archaic gesture. Oppenheimer was always referring back to ancient things, summing up his state through very dignified forms."

Act II is one long hallucination. The low brass lean for long stretches on black Wagnerian chords; the strings emit clattering noises and sirenlike glissando tones. The electronic component intrudes more insistently, until it produces an almost continuous rumble. It's as if we were hearing the hum of power lines in the desert, the glistening of the grid. Weird shapes emerge from the sonic gloom-sci-fi creatures, perhaps, including an irradiated version of the dragon of "The Ring." Pulses compete against each other; clocks tick away, but not in unison. They seem to speed up even as the countdown slows in real time. The chorus stops singing and begins muttering, or, at one point, shouting. It also erupts into a monumental, timpani-driven setting of verses from the Bhagavad Gita, a hymn of praise to Vishnu: "At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous, / Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies, / Terrible with fangs, O mighty master, / All the words are fear-struck, even just as I am." Robert Wilson reflects that Los Alamos reminds him of Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain."

The private world of the opera-the world of poetry and prayer-seeps into the "official" world of lingo and debate. The action cuts between Trinity, where Oppenheimer and the rest take bets on the kiloton yield, and Los Alamos, where Kitty is staying up all night with her maid, Pasqualita. The Rukeyser poems and Pasqualita's Tewa song become a constant, nagging presence amid the solemn jibber-jabber of the countdown. Sellars wanted to break up this mostly male melodrama by having women infiltrate the scene. Adams, for his part, keeps interrupting the general death march in the orchestra with passages of aching simplicity. You would never expect to find so much delicate writing for harp and celesta, or so many plaintive solos for horn and muted trumpet, in a work on this subject. So why do you remain tense as you listen? Because the other shoe must drop.

It is left to Kitty Oppenheimer, that volatile, alcoholic, widely disliked woman, to announce what Sellars sees as the moral of the opera. Act II opens with a setting of Rukeyser's poem "Easter Eve 1945," which tries to find rays of light in the blackness of war:

Whatever world I know shines ritual death, wide under this moon they stand gathering fire, fighting with flame, stand fighting in their graves. All shining with life as the leaf, as the wing shines, the stone deep in the mountain, the drop in the green wave. Lit by their energies, secretly, all things shine. Nothing can black that glow of life.

Some of Rukeyser's work is dense to the point of impenetrability, and some of it is tendentious, as Communist-inflected literature of the nineteen-thirties and forties often could be. Much of it, however, is breathtaking, and "Easter Eve 1945" is a masterpiece. It takes on an added power in the context of "Doctor Atomic": those images of luminous death play almost like a prophetic vision, as if Kitty, lost in her cups, were seeing the blinding flash to come.

The role of Kitty was to have been sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. When that matchless artist withdrew for medical reasons, early in the summer, Kristine Jepson, an Iowa-born mezzo-soprano of rising reputation, gamely stepped in. Jepson is about as far from Kitty in temperament as can be imagined-ebullient, easygoing, self-effacing. But she soon found the sympathetic side of her character, who is, on the one hand, a neurotic, drunken mess and, on the other, the chief truthteller and moral compass of the opera.

"She speaks only in poetry a hundred per cent of the time," Jepson told me, a few hours before her first rehearsal in costume. "She's having a vision of the mountains being on fire, she feels that she's hearing the cries of the children. All of those-if you want to call them-hallucinations are very real to her." And the bomb turns her hallucinations into reality.

Early in the morning on July 16, 1945, Mrs. H. E. Wieselman was driving over the border from Arizona to New Mexico when a huge light filled her field of vision. That day, she told the El Paso Herald-Post, "It was just like the sun had come up and suddenly gone down again." Dorothy McKibbin was watching from a hilltop near Albuquerque, and described the experience in terms that resonate with the imagery of Rukeyser's "Easter Eve 1945": "The leaves of the green native trees were kind of shining with the gold. It was different. Everything was different. The world was changed."

How to depict the detonation puzzled Adams from the start. He talked about the problem one day as we drove across the San Francisco Bay Bridge, on the way to a rehearsal. He knew better than to put a mushroom cloud onstage. "I can't compete with George Lucas," he told me. What he decided to do, in the end, was to visualize the explosion from afar-from the perspective not of the scientists in their bunkers but of the women back at Los Alamos. He sent a query to Richard Rhodes, asking whether the blast would have perceptible from two hundred miles away. Rhodes told him that "people would have noticed a dawn coming from the entirely wrong direction." So Adams wrote a slow crescendo for trilling strings, to which is added a flash of winds and brass-a chord that dazzles and fades, like a false dawn.

If "Doctor Atomic" is considered the saga of Robert Oppenheimer-and it is more than that-then the hero's final line is important. It is "Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart." The music seems like a reprise of "Batter my heart," but it falters after two bars. Oppenheimer begins the opera by saying, "The soul is a thing so impalpable," and returns many times to the soul, the spirit, and the heart. We are confronted, at last, with the question of Oppenheimer's soul. Pamela Rosenberg had asked Adams to write an American Faust, and his title had a Faustian ring, but the composer came to fear the implications of that association. Any sort of demonic narrative would severly oversimplify the situation of Oppenheimer and his staff, who conceived the bomb, after all, in the belief that Hitler was preparing to drop a bomb on them. (Hitler, it turned out, was perplexed by the idea of atomic bombs; he didn't like the idea that they might kill everyone on the planet.)

Once Adams was done, though, he admitted that the Faust metaphor still interested him, as long as it was not taken too literally. It helps to expose the blinkered mentality of the scientists, and particularly of Oppenheimer, who assumed that science had every right to discover whatever lay within its grasp, and that it was someone else's job to figure out the moral consequences. Oppenheimer once had this to say: "It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success." As he read the literature, Adams seesawed between an intense admiration for Oppenheimer and an equally intense dislike of him. The physicist had a violent streak, and it is unsettling to read of his more bloodthirsty initiatives-for example, his notion, floated briefly during the war, that Germans could be killed en masse by radiation poisoning. Such a program would be worth pursuing, Oppenheimer said, if it could yield the death of five hundred thousand or more people.

Oppenheimer liked to float above the rest of humanity, not just intellectually but geographically. If you go to see the places where he lived, you notice that he made a habit of perching like an eagle on the rim of the world. When he lived in Berkeley, he took a house high in the hills; it had the address No. 1, Eagle Hill. In New Mexico, he had a cabin on Grass Mountain, a surreally lush meadow at nearly ten thousand feet. He was instrumental in placing the Manhattan Project atop the Los Alamos mesa. In his youth, he said that his two great loves were physics and New Mexico, and that he wished he could unite them. And he did, but only at the price of ruining, for his own purposes, the landscapes that he loved. It's said that he felt the mushroom cloud hanging over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where his cabin was. One tremendous passage in Adams's opera is an interlude called "Rain Over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains": it is nothing more than a tremulous chain of chords, one blurring into the next. I think of it as a radioactive cloud bearing down on Oppenheimer's aerie.

A few months before his death, as cancer was spreading from his throat through his body, Oppenheimer went to hear the world premiere of Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles. The same work was played at his memorial service, in February, 1967. It is no accident that the "chords of death" that end Stravinsky 's valedictory composition-a tolling of spectral bells-are echoed in the chords that end "Doctor Atomic." There are nineteen of them, and the high gongs create strange resonances in the upper frequencies. Previously, during the countdown, time slowed to a surreal crawl, but now it seems to be racing forward, to the moment of Oppenheimer's death. It is also moving to a nearer destination, to the Ground Zero of August 6, 1945. How Adams succeeds in transmuting Trinity into Hiroshima is not something that should be revealed in advance, for it is the most dramatic turn of the entire opera, albeit one that takes place at low volume. It has happened, and it is about to happen again.

One day in early September, Sellars worked on the final scene of the opera with most of the principals, including Beth Clayton, who sings Pasqualita, and James Maddalena, who is Hubbard, the weatherman. The scene begins with Oppenheimer once more savoring lines of Baudelaire: "To what benevolent demon do I owe the joy of being thus surrounded with mystery, with silence, with peace and with perfumes?"

Sellars went through the poem with Finley word by word, working out gestures and facial expressions. The singer got to the line "That supreme life which I now know and which I am tasting minute by minute." Sellars, uncharacteristically, made no comment. Finley asked, "Do you want anything special on 'tasting'?" Sellars responded, "Oh, God, yes." The passage ends, "Time has disappeared; it is Eternity that reigns now!" Oppenheimer, at this late stage, seems far gone, lost in the desert of his mind.

Maddalena stood all the way upstage. He is a longtime Sellars collaborator, and has given many piercing performances in the title role of "Nixon in China." In that opera, he played the troubled soul; here he plays an ordinary man who tries to keep his bearings. Sellars asked Maddalena to deliver his final weather report in a state of wonder, as if he were describing not the sky above but a paradise beyond it. As Sellars recited and meandered about, Maddalena walked right behind him, matching his gestures like a shadow. To Beth Clayton, Sellars gave the task of purifying and blessing the terrain; by the end, Pasqualita becomes a dream figure, perhaps a representative of the ancient Tewa people who once occupied the Los Alamos mesa.

Sellars's vision for the very end was not yet complete. He talked of having all the performers lie face down, arms behind their heads, as waves of light poured across the stage.

At one point, Sellars stopped to describe for Clayton the scene at Trinity today, even though he had never been there. "There is incredible regeneration in this world," he said. "The good thing is that this bomb is going to go off and fifty years from this night there will be wildflowers growing among the trinitite at this test site. All our private storms, which seem like the end of the world, blow over, and there is a new day. That's the deepest thing in life. The person who seems most hopeless turns out to be the very person who is the hope. There is some part of life that will never be extinguished and will always stay evergreen. I feel that some weird, strange hope exists in the created universe."

LOAD-DATE: October 5, 2005