In the organizer's words:

MUSIC THEATER

Theater am Goetheplatz

Opera in two acts by John Adams
Text by Peter Sellars
In English with German surtitles
Musical direction: Stefan Klingele
Director: Frank Hilbrich

The musical kaleidoscope of an (im)moral experiment: Los Alamos was not a blessing for mankind. There, in the desert of the US state of New Mexico, the attempt to explode plutonium, i.e. nuclear fuel, on a large scale was successful on July 16, 1945. This trinity test of the Manhattan Project, in which the first atomic bomb in human history was detonated, was followed just three weeks later by the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For their opera, composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars drew on declassified US government documents and the correspondence of the scientists, government officials and military representatives involved in the project. Between scruples and self-importance, larmoyance and callousness, Adams poses with compositional force the questions of the responsibility of knowledge in the zeal for progress, when knowledge becomes the currency of power and the supposed selflessness in the service of humanity gets caught between the mills of (im)morality.