Peter Sellars Quotes

Documents that were top secret and never meant to be seen are now set to music,

The only thing that I will do that will annoy some people is I am taking poetic license a little bit with time and space onstage,

And the other great thing that we`re allowed to do '” and you`re not '” is use metaphor.

Basically the first half-hour of the opera is an extended prologue, which is all material from the first two weeks of July 1945, ... Germany has just capitulated. Truman is meeting Stalin at Potsdam, which is where all this pressure comes from for the test to work. Oppenheimer has been in these meetings in Washington to select the target, and it`s full steam ahead to Japan.

How old were you that night?

These are not just made-up stories. These were real human beings with real choices ? and some folly, ... And this was the single biggest weapons project in the history of humanity.

(The chorus contains a statement of the principles behind the bomb, why it`s practical and what it can accomplish.) It doesn`t exactly say how to build a nuclear weapon, ... but it is a précis of the science involved.

I was 22 years old. But I`m still here. And one reason I`m still here is that I`ve got lots of ionizing radiation. That`s what`s good for you, for your immune system. There have been a lot of studies that show that a low level of it is good for you. The problem is they don`t know what the level should be.

Documents that were top secret and never meant to be seen are now set to music.

John sets it for Gerry (Gerald Finley, the baritone singing Oppenheimer) and full orchestra as a personal chaconne. Of course, you know that Robert Oppenheimer would be somebody who would have gone to an Alfred Deller concert or would have Alfred Deller records,