Michael Tanner

Waiting for the end

Doctor Atomic<br /> English National Opera Der fliegende Holländer<br /> Royal Opera House

issue 07 March 2009

Doctor Atomic
English National Opera

Der fliegende Holländer
Royal Opera House

John Adams’s latest opera Doctor Atomic, in a production shared with the New York Met, had its UK première at the English National Opera, and was greeted with the kind of cheers that you don’t often encounter in opera houses. It bored me in a way so special that I feel the need, sometime soon, to do a typology of operatic boredoms: there is the tedium of endless undistinguished recitative, the da capo of an aria which gave very mild pleasure the first time round, the unreal clemency of wronged monarchs worked out in a series of decreasingly dramatic situations, and then the flatulence of late-Romantic conflations of love and death and anything else pretty terminal, with in between the infuriating cheerfulness of cabalettas expressing unrequited passion in many an undeservedly resurrected bel canto piece.

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