![]() This was Native American land, and Sellars wanted to acknowledge that to the audience. There was no need for sets, when we were already in situ. Peter Sellars, the opera’s librettist and director of the San Francisco Opera premiere of the piece in 2005, has rethought “Doctor Atomic” for Santa Fe. ![]() Nothing stopped a performance of the most significant, I’d say the greatest, opera of our time. It was warm and pleasant as the audience quietly and solemnly took its seats while members of neighboring pueblos performed a sacred Corn Dance. Santa Fe’s opera-goers know to check their weather apps, and the odds favored a mild evening. This may be the nuclear age, but we still can’t fully predict storms in this part of the world. At 5:30 a.m., the plutonium bomb produced a blinding light minutes before dawn, making it the first double sunrise in history.Ī lot has changed in 73 years. Leslie Groves, the Army general in charge of the project, demanded that the military branch’s Caltech-trained top meteorologist forecast a favorable time for the detonation that day or he would hang. Truman instead wanted the Russians to quake at our capacity to be the first superpower. The war still raged in the Pacific, although there was no longer a clear need to overpower Japan with the most deadly force ever devised. Germany had recently surrendered to the Allies, and that day, President Truman was to meet with the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin in Potsdam, Germany. The test at the Trinity site had to go off as scheduled the early morning of July 16, 1945. You are, operatically and in actual fact, there. There, the bomb was developed in top secrecy during World War II in a rush to beat the Nazis to nuclear weaponry, and it’s where atomic weapons are still being produced. When the night is clear and the back of the stage is open to the enchanting desert, as it is in this production, you can see the distant twinkling lights of the Los Alamos laboratories. ![]() The outdoor opera house is only partly protected from the elements. Just such a violent desert thunderstorm came out of nowhere Thursday night during a Santa Fe Opera performance of John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic,” which dramatizes and provides uniquely essential insight into the most disquieting scientific event in history. Lightning, some scientists feared, might trigger a cosmic chain reaction igniting the Earth’s atmosphere. An unpredictable warm air mass capable of producing a violent thunderstorm could blow radiation fallout to nearby populations. The weather was nervous-making that summer evening 73 years ago when the first atomic bomb was tested at a remote desert site a little more than 200 miles south of here.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |