Peter Sellars Quotes (14 Quotes)

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,

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.

You collect all this material and at a certain moment passages start speaking with other passages, ... A conversation that goes along with individual source material just takes off, and things start ricocheting and having surprising connections or counterbalances. You're always looking for yin and yang so the drama thrives on contrasts and contradictions.

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

Of course I will make it completely contemporary, as did Mozart. Even then, Europe was obsessed with the menace' of the Muslim world.

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.

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

He is particularly proud of the inclusion in this scene of a petition signed by 70 scientists asking Truman not to bomb Japan. Leslie Groves, the crusty general who oversaw the Manhattan Project, made sure that the document never reached Truman. What's beautiful, ... is to have documents that were quietly discarded in history now set for singers and orchestra for all the world to hear.

Obviously, he had this native intelligence, this sensitivity and this ability to move rapidly through a whole range of material, ... You could just feel him taking stuff in with that gadfly energy, that hummingbird energy, taking a little something from here, there and everywhere, taking a little something from everything.

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.

We are naturally disappointed and hope that the issue between the LME and the OFT can be resolved as speedily as possible.

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 prcis of the science involved.

It's an amazing, amazing work of art that extracts and exacts every drop of blood, ... It demands and pushes you past ... endurance, which is what art is supposed to do. This is just not another day at the mall. It's really asking the biggest questions and demanding very real answers.

In these times in America I am very moved and grateful that the Gish Prize has chosen to support diversity, controversy, complexity, and non-conformity. I am a collaborative artist, and I accept this recognition on behalf of the courageous artists who have opened and challenged new worlds and old, in a body of work that has created shared space on a divided planet.