Henrietta Bredin talks to the baritone Gerald Finley about how he portrays ‘the destroyer of worlds’
At precisely 5.30 a.m. on Monday 16 July 1945 the world entered the nuclear age. The first atomic bomb exploded in a searing flash of light and a vast mushroom cloud unfurled in the skies above New Mexico. ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,’ thought Robert J. Oppenheimer, the physicist who had masterminded its development.
It was typical of the man and the deep contradictions within his nature that these lines from the Bhagavad Gita should have come to mind, and that he should have named the project the Trinity Test in response to poetry by John Donne. Sixty years later, composer John Adams and librettist/director Peter Sellars created an opera around this subject, Doctor Atomic. In the title role in San Francisco in 2005, and in every performance since, was baritone Gerald Finley.
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