Category: John Adams

  • Blackface/Yellowface

    We’ve talked a little about the longstanding practice in opera of white singers “blacking up” to play characters of color. This practice has only begun to be thought of as controversial in our own century. For now, the least offensive choices for opera producers are to 1) cast singers whose race/ethnicity matches the race/ethnicity of…

  • Do the Words Matter?

    Baritone Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer, onstage with “The Gadget” in John Adams’s Doctor Atomic. In a previous blog post, I discussed Oppenheimer’s Act I aria in John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic. The entirety of the aria’s text is John Donne’s Holy Sonnet no. 14, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” As you know, an opera aria is…

  • Batter My Heart

    (J. Robert Oppenheimer) How does contemporary art music respond to the moral problems of the age? John Adams wrote the opera Doctor Atomic, about the Manhattan Project — the top-secret World War II initiative to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis could — in 2005. The libretto is by Peter Sellars, whom you will remember…