In an Alex Ross piece I was reading the other night, he mentions an architectural guide during a tour in Germany complaining that a new building in the Potsdamer Platz had too many right angles and thus revived an authoritarian aesthetic. This was a new perspective through which to view my earlier comments on the modern architecture in Strasbourg. Has European architecture been put through the same Adorno-esque neo-classical rejection that German music has? Are purposely esoteric atonal musical events and the ECHR drawn from the same well?

Later I was listening to John Adam's Nixon in China. The hyper-classical pronunciation managed turned a chorus of cheers into a running call for chairs. Cheers/Chairs. Adams and frequent collaborator Peter Sellars have a new piece, Doctor Atomic, which premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 and is part of the Lyric Opera of Chicago's season this winter. I hope to see it in January when I'm back there. Concerning the test of the first atomic bomb, it paints Robet Oppenheimer as a modern day Faust, the question of his soul hanging in the balance against the bomb. Though while Fuast in the end loses his immortal soul, Oppenheimer's journey is to the discovery he has one - so the librettist decides. The construction of the libretto is also pretty fascinating. Every line comes from transcripts of the sceientists, declassified documents, related poetry (Oppenheimer had a book of Baudelaire in his pocket at the first test and supposedly reacted to the detonation by quoting from Donne; his wife is given voice through the words of her contemporary, poet Muriel Rukeyser), and other contemporary writings on the Manhattan project.