It seems odd that Amsterdam would have hosted the finest performance about New Mexico history ever staged anywhere, but the Manhattan Project was also one of the most important events in world history. Video costs $5.00 to rent (sung in English).
Adams: Doctor Atomic on medici.tv.
The sequence from 2:06:20 to 2:13:47 is particularly good:
Oppie:
…and with the hideous old man
the whole of his demoniac retinue
has returned,
Memories, Regrets, Spasms, Fears,
Afflictions, Nightmares, Rages and Neuroses.
[Five year-old Peter Oppenheimer awakens.]
Kitty:
To keep the weakness secret.
To keep it secret
To deny it and break through.
In the dream of chieftains,
the corn distinct again in gold-white tuft-feathers.
The roads all paved, stony, savage;
the knocking in the chest resumed.
Your father has a passion for freedom
Rang and rang in the small boy’s head.
Pasqualita:
Then word came from a runner, a stranger:
“They are dancing to bring the dead back, in the
mountains.
”We danced at an autumn fire, we danced the old hate and
change,
the coming again of our leaders. But they did not come.
Wilson:
I just finished reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
and of course
to go to this mysterious mountain
on the top of which
there would be a secret laboratory
which we would go into,the doors would slam shut
and a few years later
we would come out bearing
an atomic bomb…
Oppie:
I assure you that now the seconds are strongly and solemnly
accentuated and each one, spouting out of the clock, says:
“I am Life, insupportable, implacable Life!”
Pasqualita:
The winter dawned, but the dead did not come back.
News came on the frost, “The dead are on the march!
”We danced in prison to a winter music,
many we loved began to dream of the dead.
They made no promises, we never dreamed a threat.
And the dreams spread.
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