Mockingbird’s resident opera aficionado Ken Wilson offers forth a truly breathtaking moment of beauty:
John Donne’s plea in Holy Sonnet XIV that grace will break his captive will, set to necessarily inadequate but characteristically gorgeous music by John Adams and sung by bass-baritone Gerald Finley in the Adams opera Dr. Atomic (about Robert Oppenheimer and the setting off of the first atomic bomb):
Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Adams’ Nixon in China will be the next Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast, on Saturday, 2/12. His opera The Flowering Tree, at the Jazz at Lincoln Center facility in 2009, was so flat-out beautiful I have yet to recover.
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7 comments
Wenatchee the Hatchet says:
Feb 3, 2011
hmm, this setting is more fun than the Britten setting, the one other setting I've heard of this great Donne poem.
Now I'm thinking of "news … has a kind of mystery … ." I've always been more of a Steve Reich fan myself but Adams obviously has the upper hand in opera.
Wenatchee the Hatchet says:
Feb 3, 2011
complete tangent, it's a bummer that there is probably ZERO chance I'll get to catch a staging of Wozzeck here in Seattle. I'll have to settle for memories Bluebird's Castle.
Ken says:
Feb 3, 2011
Dummy here wrote "tenor" when Finley is obviously a bass-baritone.
Wenatchee, I love Reich as well, especially Tehillim and Music for 18 Musicians.
Findo says:
Feb 4, 2011
I saw this in London, also with the wonderful Gerry Finley (he's a baritone btw) – the whole opera itself is ok, but this aria is a real highlight, and arguably one of the first great operatic arias of the 21st century. I must learn it sometime!
Miriam says:
Feb 4, 2011
This is becoming my Adams week. Just had a long discussion about Nixon in China… love that, too.
Wenatch the Hatch- you just missed Wozzeck in Astoria, pretty good production, too: http://oregonmusicnews.com/blog/2010/06/27/astoria-music-festivals-wozzeck-makes-bold-statement/
Can't believe a big bold town like Seattle wouldn't have it on the horizon SOMEwhere!
Splinter Faction says:
Feb 8, 2011
Perhaps worth mentioning that that's the source of the title of Camille Paglia's brilliant book on poetry, Break, Blow, Burn.
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The Battered Heart of Sanctification: The Poetry of John Donne | Mockingbird says:
May 19, 2011
[…] us look at “Holy Sonnet No. 14” (which you may remember from here): Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; […]