Malia Bendi-Merad, Raphaël Brémard, and Abdou Ouologuem in The Magic Flute.

When I was working recently on a profile of the baritone Sanford Sylvan for this newspaper, I watched a DVD recording of one of the performances that brought him widespread acclaim in the opera world. It was in one of the iconic productions of the 1980s: Peter Sellars’s version of Mozart’s Così fan tutte.

The production became famous as the “diner Così,” but in its original incarnation it was about as specific, as locavore, as opera can get. The first performances were in 1984 at the Castle Hill Festival in the coastal town of Ipswich, Mass. The diner set was not just any diner, but a roadside establishment that anyone in the audience would instantly recognize, the kind that dotted nearby Route 1A.

It is not surprising that this production was of an opera by Mozart, as were two of the others that brought Mr. Sellars recognition during the brilliant early period of his career: a Don Giovanni set in Spanish Harlem and Le Nozze di Figaro in the penthouse apartment at the Trump Tower. Of the major opera composers, only Wagner offers more natural room than Mozart for this kind of updating and conceptual transformation, but Mozart’s works have always been more immediately and widely appealing. Audiences love them, and they reward directors with their dramatic acuity and full, human characters.

They challenge directors, too. Mozart remains the wild card of the operatic canon, with a tone delicate and almost impossible to capture, veering from farce to tragedy in the course of a scene without ever seeming too much. Strauss self-consciously echoed his bittersweetness, but there is no other composer who created operas as exquisitely ambiguous as Mozart’s. The end of Così is like one of those choose-your-own-adventure novels; it’s unclear what has happened to the wreckage of the two young relationships at the center of the plot, and even who ends up marrying whom is up for grabs.

But Mozart’s operas have become so familiar that they are sometimes taken for granted. Many people still assume that they are Masterpiece Theater spectacles, inert and well behaved. At least that is the depressing conclusion to be drawn from the Così productions at two of the world’s most important opera houses, one at the Metropolitan Opera that was brought back last season and one at the Paris Opera, a revival that I saw last month. Well lit and without ideas, both are interested in the opera for its picturesque aspects rather than its psychological depth or aesthetic sophistication.

For those qualities we will have to wait until March, when the New York City Opera presents Christopher Alden’s production of Così. His Don Giovanni for City Opera in 2009 was committed to the full range of the work’s emotions, both its eeriness and its bitter comedy; in London this summer he directed a haunting version of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream that was even better. He is working at the top of his game.

In Barcelona in June I saw a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute by the legendary director Peter Brook, whose Tragedie de Carmen was a daring, influential adaptation of Bizet’s crowd-pleaser. (The much-traveled Flute production went from Spain to New York for a run at the Lincoln Center Festival.)

In a gesture simultaneously self-effacing and pretentious, Mr. Brook called his production A Magic Flute, apparently using the indefinite article to suggest that his version is but one of many possibilities. Whatever.

In Mozart’s other well-known operas—including Così, Figaro and Giovanni—the entire libretto is sung. The Magic Flute, on the other hand, is a Singspiel, a genre that combines spoken dialogue, special effects—magic and fantasy figured prominently—and self-enclosed musical numbers. It is closer to operetta or modern musical theater than to what we think of today as opera. The performances tend to be hectic, with room for improvisation and sharp veering from the script. It was vaudeville avant la lettre.

For A Magic Flute, Mr. Brook and his collaborators distilled the opera into a neat chamber ritual. Performed by a single, hardworking pianist, the new score flies from snippet to snippet of the original in a style that owes much to Liszt’s famous piano transcriptions but has none of their bombast; the effect is virtuosic and pleasing but also gauzy and vague, like Debussy on Xanax. The cast has been pared down to the essentials: the principals, plus two actors who serve as stagehands and sources of all-purpose mystical intervention. (In the performance I saw, both of these actors were black, and the uncomfortable, unfortunate evocation was of the stereotype of the “magical Negro,” using occult powers to facilitate the love plot of white protagonists.)

The set was simple, the stage bare except for a stylized forest of unembellished poles, which were picked up and used as makeshift props and indicators of scenes. The young cast was excellent, and new insights popped up throughout: the Queen of the Night, usually distant and imperious, with her dazzlingly high coloratura, was here just another girl, wounded and angry.

But the overall effect was wan. In the guise of a fresh rethinking, the production treated the work with numbing reverence. The whole thing had an elegance that was aggressive to the point of stultifying. The singing was lovely, the piano arrangement pretty and thoughtful. But there was no sign of life, let alone vaudeville. It was bloodless and boring.

It could not have been further from René Jacobs’s recent recording of the opera, the latest in his dazzling Mozart series on the Harmonia Mundi label. The recording careers breathlessly and exhilaratingly—O.K., sometimes exhaustingly—through the score. Mr. Jacobs’s interpretation can be bewildering until you get used to it. The singers and orchestra don’t always wait for each other; they’re constantly finishing each other’s sentences and moving on. There’s an antic quality, a sense that things might fly off the rails. It couldn’t be more different from what we think of today as an ideal performance.

The tempos speed up and slow down unpredictably. Instruments pop out of the orchestral textures that I’ve never heard there before; there are improvisatory passages that would have been natural when the work was first performed but are now strange and new. Listening to it, I got the uncanny sensation, as I have from all of Mr. Jacobs’s magnificent Mozarts, that I was there, in late-18th-century Vienna. This, it seems, is what it must have been like: all the energy and dazzle, the unpredictability and life, that those early audiences must have gotten from him.

Last week there was a very different form of that unpredictability and energy in a new production of Don Giovanni conducted and directed by Ivan Fischer and presented as part of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. At first it seemed like the show would feature still more of Peter Brook-style preciousness. On stage as the audience sat down were a few figures covered entirely in ashy, gray chalk, like George Segal sculptures. They were sitting in various positions, serious and still.

Yet unlike A Magic Flute, here the elegance had intellectual heft. Like Mr. Alden’s City Opera production of Don Giovanni, Mr. Fischer’s explored the work’s central thematic preoccupation: repetition, the inability to stop. In his program note he connected this explicitly to the problem of addiction, and the mood of the production was an addict’s, aching with isolation and long, lonely hours. The characters’ disguises, their difficulties identifying each other, were echoed in the anonymity and interchangeability of the gray figures, which—appearing both alive and dead, controlled and free—became the chorus and the extras. I was aware as never before of the pathetic inability of the characters to change their circumstances; Mozart and his great librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, created psyches that were the mirror of unchanging social facts, classes that refused to budge.

It was all done on two small platforms and an otherwise bare stage, a set even more spare than Mr. Alden’s had been. Both productions, two of the finest to come to New York in recent years, have raised the bar for the next major Mozart on the horizon: the Met’s new production of Don Giovanni, coming in October and directed by Michael Grandage, who won the Tony last year for Red.

On Thursday Mr. Fischer’s distinguished Budapest Festival Orchestra played with ferocious precision. The cast, particularly Laura Aikin as a desperate Donna Anna and Jose Fardilha as an alternately wry and overwhelmed Leporello, was excellent, with rich, full voices and generous, passionate acting. As in Mr. Jacobs’s The Magic Flute, there were fleeting sensations of utter authenticity. This, you could let yourself imagine, was what Mozart wanted us to see.

editorial@observer.com

Malia Bendi-Merad, Raphaël Brémard, and Abdou Ouologuem in The Magic Flute.

Nearly 27 years later, the answer is finally yes. On Feb. 2, Mr. Sellars' production of John Adams' Nixon in China opens at the Metropolitan Opera, marking belated Met debuts for one of the great contemporary works of music theater and one of the visionary opera directors of our time.

"It's emotional," Mr. Sellars said in an interview last week at the Met. "My grandmother had a subscription here, and I remember coming here with her. She's no longer alive, and I know this would just mean the world to her. It has a lot of emotion in that way."

Mr. Sellars is a small, slight, enthusiastic man with a famously gravity-defying shock of brown hair, lately thinning a little. He's from Pittsburgh and lives in L.A. now. There's something bicoastal about his combination of restless intellect and sunny calmness.

He favors vibrantly colored shirts, and his hand was twisted around one of the long beaded necklaces he always wears as he mouthed the words during a rehearsal of the first scene of Act II, when Janis Kelly's Pat Nixon takes a surreal tour of Chinese factories and schools. He shouted a profusion of thank-yous as he ran into the wings when the scene was over, and at one point cheerfully exclaimed, "Happiness is our fate!" with more than a hint of sarcasm but also, it seemed, more than a hint of earnestness.

This blend of satire and sincerity was central to Nixon's historical re-imagining, and to Mr. Sellars' production, which featured bold, flat, Soviet Realist-inspired sets by Adrianne Lobel that have been adapted for the Met.

Mr. Adams' opera premiered in Houston in 1987, when memories of its subject--Nixon's 1972 trip to China--were still fresh, and it widened the possibilities of the art form. It showed that contemporary opera could struggle with national history, with the intersection of the personal and the political, with humanizing hateful people through music, as vividly as did Verdi in Don Carlos and Mussorgsky in Boris Godunov. And it certainly hasn't lost its relevance.

"This history looms larger in our lives now than it did then," Mr. Sellars said. "Hu is here right now, and is gonna tell us what the American dollar is worth. Gone are the days when we go to China and tell them to shape up. It's like, excuse me, they're our banker! We need them more than they need us--well no, that's not fair, we really need each other, so completely. Our destinies are so intertwined, which is of course Act III of this opera."

Mr. Sellars' legend began even earlier than that 1984 production of Cosi. In the late '70s, he directed dozens of plays and operas as an undergraduate at Harvard. His dazzlingly creative work--a stark take on Gogol's The Inspector General, a version of Wagner's Ring performed with puppets, Antony and Cleopatra in a swimming pool--got the attention of critics and presenters, particularly after he won a MacArthur grant in 1983. He began his long association with Mr. Adams with Nixon, ventured into Handel and completed his cycle of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas.

In addition to the diner Cosi, Mr. Sellars set Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem and The Marriage of Figaro in the Trump Tower. It's easy now to look back on descriptions of those and other trademark productions and view them as dated. But they worked--and continue to work, as DVDs show--because they were focused not on superficial concepts but on making vividly real the composers' and librettists' interests in class, gender and politics.

"It's not about style," he said. "It's about content. Once you focus on content, then the stakes are real. What is the surface leading you to? That's when it gets really serious."

Audiences were split--fights kept the orchestra from starting the second act of the Figaro in Barcelona--and some critics, including Charles Michener writing in The Observer, have disliked some of Mr. Sellars' interpretations, like a 2006 New York production of Mozart's Zaide that focused on contemporary slavery. But the director's vision has always reminded us why these works matter, and have audiences leaving the theater talking not about the soprano's high notes but about the work's themes.

Though his work still has its detractors, Mr. Sellars is now an institution, just like Nixon--as tends to happen with once controversial artists and works. The Met, which passed on Mr. Sellars' production of Mr. Adams' Doctor Atomic a few years ago, is getting with Nixon as close to a sure thing as contemporary opera offers. And the company has itself changed: After edgy productions like Willy Decker's new Traviata, Mr. Sellars' Nixon can seem positively conservative.

"Regrettably there's nothing to boo here," Mr. Sellars said. "It doesn't have to argue or force its place. It feels like it totally belongs. Just as you used to go to the Met for Lisa della Casa's Countess and Cesare Siepi's Figaro because they were classic portrayals by people who'd been doing these roles all their lives, there's something thrilling about these years of Jimmy Maddalena"--who originated the role of Nixon and will play him at the Met--"and Janis Kelly on the stage together. We've all been through it a lot. It's great to arrive on the Met stage not as a new piece, but as a classic."

Mr. Sellars' recent style--seen, for example, in his almost semi-staged production of Mr. Adams' Flowering Tree-tends to be more pared-down than Nixon's pop stylizations, the Mozart cycle's modernizations or the massive abstraction of his Salzburg production of Messiaen's St. Francois d'Assise.

"When times are hard, you don't want something to feel decadent," he said. "You want it to feel correct to this moment. There are so many forces to dehumanize everything and to depersonalize everything, and I love saying, 'There's nothing onstage but people.' It's all you're looking at it, and that's why we're here."

This spare aesthetic--"less of the Nancy Reagan element," he said--is also in keeping with recent reductions in arts funding, particularly for the kind of newer, riskier work on which Mr. Sellars has lately focused. He said that in the past couple of months, emails have been streaming in announcing budget cuts of up to two-thirds on many of his upcoming European projects.

As for Nixon, anything that fills the massive Met proscenium could hardly be described as tiny. But Mr. Sellars insisted that his long-awaited debut is about as intimate as a production at the house could be--perfect in its timing and correct for its moment.

"It's a very low-budget grand opera," he said with a massive laugh. "And I couldn't be prouder."

editorial@observer.com

At Bard, the summer’s principal curio has been Schumann’s only completed opera, Genoveva, a work that’s had an occasional European revival but no lasting success since its less than triumphant premiere in 1850. For reasons that would require years of psychoanalysis to unravel, Schumann’s mercurial music, by turns magisterial and intimate, stirs me more than perhaps that of any other composer. I was deeply moved by Genoveva, as performed at Bard’s space-age, Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and I would jump at the chance to see it again.

Like Wagner, Schumann was a man with a mission, determined to put German Romantic opera on the noble footing occupied by the concert music of Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Unlike the more dramatically inclined Wagner, however, he viewed opera as a fusion of poetry and music. The plot of Genoveva details the horrific persecution of a stalwart wife wrongly accused of adultery with the conniving friend of her absent husband, who’s off fighting for the Christians in eighth-century Europe. But Schumann’s impassioned handling of it in compressed, swift-flowing scenes, set to tumultuous music that can turn on a dime from rhapsodic to eerie, elevates the piece way beyond pulp fiction.

John Daverio, in his definitive biography of the composer, Robert Schumann: Herald of “A New Poetic Age” (1997), calls Genoveva a “literary opera,” one that “begins as a Trauerspiel, a play of mourning, and ends as a hagiographic drama of redemption.” In this, the work calls to mind another composer’s singular operatic achievement—Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande, which is similarly gripping as a large-scale musical poem about cruelty redeemed.

Mr. Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra with knowing efficiency. Kasper Bech Holten, the artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera, devised a visually stunning production that matched the score for opulent austerity. In the title role, the alluring Swedish soprano Yiva Kihlberg led a strong international cast that included the Danish baritone Johannes Mannov as Siegfried, and the American mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens as the sorceress Margaretha. The affectingly light-voiced French tenor Philippe Castagner was scarily sympathetic in the opera’s most complex role—that of Golo, the treacherous best friend. Theirs was a Genoveva that should not be allowed to disappear.

MOSTLY MOZART'S MAJOR DISCOVERY has been the rare staging of an untitled operatic fragment known by the name of its heroine, Zaide. In 1779, Mozart was just 23 when he began an opera that he hoped would win him employment in Vienna. The plot he chose, a fashionable story of Oriental captivity, introduced a theme—the abuse of power—that he would later address with such astonishing complexity in his mature masterpieces The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute.

Scholars have speculated that Mozart left Zaide unfinished (it lacks an overture, a libretto and a finale) because it was, in essence, a self-portrait of the composer as a very young man. The hero is named Gomatz, a partial anagram of “Mozart”; the subject of enslavement hints at Mozart’s impatience to escape musical servitude in his hometown of Salzburg; and the absence of a third act revealing the fate of the captive lovers suggests that Mozart realized that his future as an opera composer was still up for grabs.

I can imagine a witty staging of Zaide that takes place inside the composer’s head and makes a virtue of the work’s patchy charms, leaving its occasionally breathtaking arias and ensembles to speak for themselves—and for the Mozart to come. But this show has been directed by Peter Sellars, an old hand at plucking daisies with a bulldozer.

During the 30 years since he put Handel’s Orlando in a trailer camp and Mozart’s Figaro in the Trump Tower, Mr. Sellars has gone from being an engaging imp to a moralizing scold. This most frail of Mozart’s vessels must now bear the weight not just of Turkish slavery during the Enlightenment, but of slavery in whatever form it exists in today’s world.

To this end, George Tsypin’s shallow, multi-tiered set, which filled the stage at the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Center, presented us with a punishing, neon-lit sweatshop in which a chorus of slaves slept under their sewing machines. Take that, globalization! Mr. Sellars used bombastic music from another early Mozart fragment, his theater music for Thamos, King of Egypt, to create an overture and connective tissue, during which the performers were asked to pantomime brutality, terror, lustfulness, pity and other manifestations of man’s inhumanity to man in poses that belonged on posters, not an opera stage. A dedicated group of non-white (read: politically cast) principals had clearly worked diligently (slavishly?) to master the semaphoric gestures of Mr. Sellars’ didactic naturalism.

For all that, I greatly enjoyed the verve with which Mostly Mozart’s music director, Louis Langrée, led the estimable period-instrument ensemble Concerto Köln through the young genius’ felicitous patchwork of music. And I admired the uniformly excellent singers, especially the true-voiced Zaide of the young Korean-American soprano Hyunah Yu and the rich bass-baritone of Alfred Walker as Allazim, a slave converted to Islam.

But Mr. Sellars no longer seems to know when to leave well enough alone. Whereas he once relied on the music and theatrical images to carry the evening, he now likes to pepper the proceedings with words—most of them his words—lest we miss the point. In a recent interview, he likened Mozart in his political prescience not only to such contemporaries as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin but also to Martin Luther King Jr. In a program note, he writes that with Zaide, Mozart “chose to challenge the world with blazing sincerity in music of deep political conviction.” Hmmm, so that’s why he didn’t finish it. In the lobby, I encountered a table of pamphlets, one of which bore the message “Slavery Still Exists: And It Could Be in Your Backyard.”

No doubt—and no doubt Mr. Sellars’ heart is heavy with the world’s evils. But so, unfortunately, is his hand.

At Bard, the summer’s principal curio has been Schumann’s only completed opera, Genoveva, a work that’s had an occasional European revival but no lasting success since its less than triumphant premiere in 1850. For reasons that would require years of psychoanalysis to unravel, Schumann’s mercurial music, by turns magisterial and intimate, stirs me more than perhaps that of any other composer. I was deeply moved by Genoveva, as performed at Bard’s space-age, Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and I would jump at the chance to see it again.

Like Wagner, Schumann was a man with a mission, determined to put German Romantic opera on the noble footing occupied by the concert music of Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Unlike the more dramatically inclined Wagner, however, he viewed opera as a fusion of poetry and music. The plot of Genoveva details the horrific persecution of a stalwart wife wrongly accused of adultery with the conniving friend of her absent husband, who’s off fighting for the Christians in eighth-century Europe. But Schumann’s impassioned handling of it in compressed, swift-flowing scenes, set to tumultuous music that can turn on a dime from rhapsodic to eerie, elevates the piece way beyond pulp fiction.

John Daverio, in his definitive biography of the composer, Robert Schumann: Herald of “A New Poetic Age” (1997), calls Genoveva a “literary opera,” one that “begins as a Trauerspiel, a play of mourning, and ends as a hagiographic drama of redemption.” In this, the work calls to mind another composer’s singular operatic achievement—Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande, which is similarly gripping as a large-scale musical poem about cruelty redeemed.

Mr. Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra with knowing efficiency. Kasper Bech Holten, the artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera, devised a visually stunning production that matched the score for opulent austerity. In the title role, the alluring Swedish soprano Yiva Kihlberg led a strong international cast that included the Danish baritone Johannes Mannov as Siegfried, and the American mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens as the sorceress Margaretha. The affectingly light-voiced French tenor Philippe Castagner was scarily sympathetic in the opera’s most complex role—that of Golo, the treacherous best friend. Theirs was a Genoveva that should not be allowed to disappear.

MOSTLY MOZART'S MAJOR DISCOVERY has been the rare staging of an untitled operatic fragment known by the name of its heroine, Zaide. In 1779, Mozart was just 23 when he began an opera that he hoped would win him employment in Vienna. The plot he chose, a fashionable story of Oriental captivity, introduced a theme—the abuse of power—that he would later address with such astonishing complexity in his mature masterpieces The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute.

Scholars have speculated that Mozart left Zaide unfinished (it lacks an overture, a libretto and a finale) because it was, in essence, a self-portrait of the composer as a very young man. The hero is named Gomatz, a partial anagram of “Mozart”; the subject of enslavement hints at Mozart’s impatience to escape musical servitude in his hometown of Salzburg; and the absence of a third act revealing the fate of the captive lovers suggests that Mozart realized that his future as an opera composer was still up for grabs.

I can imagine a witty staging of Zaide that takes place inside the composer’s head and makes a virtue of the work’s patchy charms, leaving its occasionally breathtaking arias and ensembles to speak for themselves—and for the Mozart to come. But this show has been directed by Peter Sellars, an old hand at plucking daisies with a bulldozer.

During the 30 years since he put Handel’s Orlando in a trailer camp and Mozart’s Figaro in the Trump Tower, Mr. Sellars has gone from being an engaging imp to a moralizing scold. This most frail of Mozart’s vessels must now bear the weight not just of Turkish slavery during the Enlightenment, but of slavery in whatever form it exists in today’s world.

To this end, George Tsypin’s shallow, multi-tiered set, which filled the stage at the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Center, presented us with a punishing, neon-lit sweatshop in which a chorus of slaves slept under their sewing machines. Take that, globalization! Mr. Sellars used bombastic music from another early Mozart fragment, his theater music for Thamos, King of Egypt, to create an overture and connective tissue, during which the performers were asked to pantomime brutality, terror, lustfulness, pity and other manifestations of man’s inhumanity to man in poses that belonged on posters, not an opera stage. A dedicated group of non-white (read: politically cast) principals had clearly worked diligently (slavishly?) to master the semaphoric gestures of Mr. Sellars’ didactic naturalism.

For all that, I greatly enjoyed the verve with which Mostly Mozart’s music director, Louis Langrée, led the estimable period-instrument ensemble Concerto Köln through the young genius’ felicitous patchwork of music. And I admired the uniformly excellent singers, especially the true-voiced Zaide of the young Korean-American soprano Hyunah Yu and the rich bass-baritone of Alfred Walker as Allazim, a slave converted to Islam.

But Mr. Sellars no longer seems to know when to leave well enough alone. Whereas he once relied on the music and theatrical images to carry the evening, he now likes to pepper the proceedings with words—most of them his words—lest we miss the point. In a recent interview, he likened Mozart in his political prescience not only to such contemporaries as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin but also to Martin Luther King Jr. In a program note, he writes that with Zaide, Mozart “chose to challenge the world with blazing sincerity in music of deep political conviction.” Hmmm, so that’s why he didn’t finish it. In the lobby, I encountered a table of pamphlets, one of which bore the message “Slavery Still Exists: And It Could Be in Your Backyard.”

No doubt—and no doubt Mr. Sellars’ heart is heavy with the world’s evils. But so, unfortunately, is his hand.

Everything this astonishing woman did was almost too much to bear. As with Maria Callas, whom she matched in eruptive intensity, Hunt Lieberson’s performances took you so deeply into what she was singing about that the experience verged on voyeurism. Although opera thrives on tragedy, operatic singers who possess a genuine tragic sensibility are rare. Hunt Lieberson was perhaps the most innately tragic singer since Callas. “I don’t know why,” she once told me, “but sorrow comes naturally to me.” Her voice—which carried an ineradicable melancholy that made her a peerless interpreter of Handel’s noble, abandoned heroines—glowed in the dark, the only light in the forest.

I first encountered her as Lorraine Hunt years before she added the surname of the gifted composer Peter Lieberson, whom she married in 1999. The occasion was a benefit for the New York Festival of Song at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment in the Dakota. I stood five feet from her as she sang a mesmerizing group of Spanish songs. Afterward, I went up to her and said, “You have one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard. Who are you?”

She said with the hint of a smile, “I’m a violist.”

It was true: Until recently, she’d supported herself as a freelance violist in Boston. Only after her viola was stolen from her loft had she taken up vocal studies (at the relatively late age of 26). She went on to incorporate that instrument’s dark, consoling nature into her art. I once asked Craig Smith, an early mentor and the music director of Emmanuel Church in Boston’s Back Bay, what made the sound of her voice so special. He said, “I think it’s her training as a violist. A viola is a middle voice—it has to be alert to everything around it.”

A kind of radiant alertness was the essence of her magnetism, as I was to observe on many occasions until her final New York appearance last November in Carnegie Hall, where she sang five love sonnets by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, set to music passionately tailored to her talents by her husband. Eschewing conventional career choices, she always confined her appearances to roles and settings in which she could be wholly herself—Baroque rarities by Rameau and Charpentier; radical stagings by Mr. Sellars of Handel and Mozart operas; world premieres of Mr. Lieberson’s Buddhist opera Ashoka’s Dream and John Adams’ oratorio El Niño; Mark Morris’ dance settings of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato; the secondary role of the seduced and betrayed Myrtle Wilson in John Harbison’s opera The Great Gatsby and her blazing Dido in Berlioz’s The Trojans—her only two operas at the Met.

She was equally particular about her small but uniformly splendid assortment of recordings. Listen to her singing of “Lord, to thee each night and day,” a magnificent prayer from the oratorio Theodora, included in a collection of Handel arias for the Avie label, and you’ll feel that mankind may be redeemable after all.

I got to know her offstage while profiling her for The New Yorker three years ago. Militantly private (she never had a press agent), she nonetheless allowed me to sit in on her intensive preparations for concert performances of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Haitink. To witness the painstaking process by which she became Mélisande was to be amazed by the sheer linguistic and vocal detail she absorbed so that this most elusive of operatic heroines would emerge as not just the usual lost waif, but as a real woman in palpable pain.

Peter Sellars described his first experience of hearing her sing as being “in the middle of this raging forest fire.” It was a fire she could control with consummate artistry but not put out. One night in Santa Fe, I went with her and her husband, Peter, to a local movie house to see Mystic River. Afterward, outside on the street, she decried what she felt were the “false notes” of Sean Penn’s “overwrought” performance. As her voice rose and Peter and I tried to calm her down with remarks like “It’s only a movie,” I realized that she was not just raging at what she perceived to be another performer’s wrong choices, but talking fiercely to herself about the danger of indulging in histrionics at the expense of truth.

It was a temptation she never fell into—in her art or in her life. Six years ago, she underwent a lumpectomy for breast cancer and was later advised to have chemotherapy. She rejected that option in favor of an alternative treatment in Europe. During the past year and a half, she suffered excruciating back pains that caused her to cancel most of her concert and opera engagements. Several months ago, she was faced with the cancer’s recurrence. After she died, one of her closest friends said to me, “There’s no point second-guessing what happened. She had to do it her way. She was Lorraine.”

John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, which had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Oct. 1, takes this axiom to an extreme. Set at the Manhattan Project center at Los Alamos, N.M., in June 1945, it focuses entirely on the final preparations for history’s most cataclysmic act of war: the dropping of nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II itself goes unmentioned. So do current events of the time, except for the brief news that Germany has surrendered; that U.S. B-29’s are mercilessly bombing Tokyo and other Japanese targets; and that “the President of the United States” is meeting with “Joe Stalin” at Potsdam.

Also unmentioned is any connection between America’s invention of nuclear terror and the nuclear dangers of today—though that subject comes inescapably to mind during the spooky silence that accompanies the opera’s final moment of detonation in the desert. More documentary than polemic, Doctor Atomic lets the consequence of that fateful act speak for itself. Like the day-to-day efforts of the thousands of scientists and their helpers who worked in that secret lab on a mesa, Doctor Atomic is ruthlessly claustrophobic in its countdown to the successful testing of the first plutonium bomb. It is also an unusually penetrating, if ultimately frustrating, work of musical theater—certainly the most powerful, specifically American opera about war ever written.

Unlike Mr. Adams’ previous operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, this one cannot be labeled a “CNN opera.” The how-to, almost childish feverishness that fueled the making of the bomb 60 years ago is an ideal vehicle for Mr. Adams’ effulgent late-late romanticism. Both literally and in spirit, he borrows from Wagner’s doomsday extravaganza Die Gotterdämmerung; Sibelius’ awesome symphonic vistas; the primal summonings of Orff’s Carmina Burana; and even—in a scratchy opening snippet—Jo Stafford’s rendition of “The Things We Did Last Summer,” which is one of the opera’s few lapses into facile irony. But Mr. Adams has always been the master of his inspirations, and in this, his richest, most inventive score to date, he keeps the ear and the nervous system—and, on several stirring occasions, the heart—hyper-engaged.

I was less enthralled by the cut-and-paste libretto of Mr. Adams’ longtime collaborator, Peter Sellars, who has also directed the piece. Working with the elegant, spare stage designs of Adrianne Lobel, the kaleidoscopic lighting of James F. Ingalls and the fluent, if occasionally stilted, choreography of Lucinda Childs, Mr. Sellars has captured the atmosphere of men and women regimented by military and scientific patriotism with the brisk, no-nonsense style of 1940’s newsreels and “war effort” documentaries.

Since the outcome is a foregone conclusion, dramatic conflict is confined to debate and minutiae: the edgy Edward Teller’s dislike of teamwork; a letter from another physicist, Leo Szilard, urging the scientists to take a moral stand against the bomb’s use; the plea of an idealistic young physicist, Robert Wilson, to give the Japanese the option of peaceful surrender; the exasperation of the project’s commander, Gen. Leslie Groves, over the increasingly foul weather; dire warnings from a medical officer about the deadly toxic properties of plutonium; and so on. An opening chorus gives a physics lesson in nuclear fission. In light of Mr. Sellars’ left-leaning politics, it’s no surprise that the only butt of humor in the opera is the general, who’s more concerned with the devastation wrought by brownies on his waistline than by the human effects of the bomb on Japanese targets. As I said, this is a quintessentially American opera.

Much of this information is conveyed through quotes from historic and scientific documents, which are presented like items on a checklist. The libretto breaks new ground for tongue twisters, requiring the singers to deliver words like “practicable” and “icosahedron” with lyric ease. That most of this registers with minimal irritation is testament both to Mr. Adams’ ability to set document-speak with heightened unremarkability and to Mr. Sellars’ meticulous attention to the performers’ vocal inflections and body language. As always in a Sellars production, speech and song are indivisible.

Doctor Atomic was initiated as part of a “Faust Project” by the San Francisco Opera’s outgoing general director, Pamela Rosenberg, and no more Faust-like figure can be imagined than its title character, chief scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. An intellectual devoted equally to the pursuit of scientific discovery and poetic truth, “Oppie” was both a team captain and an unabashed eccentric, a man whose triumph and subsequent downfall uncannily mirrored the ambiguities and trajectory of the bomb. In Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (2004), Jeremy Bernstein quotes the physicist I.I. Rabi about his close friend and colleague: “Once he gets into something he gets into it with both feet. He becomes a leader …. [Yet] he had this mystic streak that could sometimes be very foolish …. When he was riding high he could be very arrogant. When things went against him he could play the victim. He was a most remarkable fellow.”

Oppenheimer has all the makings of an unmurderous counterpart to Verdi’s Otello, but in Doctor Atomic, he’s little more than a wisp—an enigma of an enigma. Of the charismatic organizer, who was able to yoke the energies of the best and the brightest of his generation, we see nothing. There’s no trace of his spellbinding scientific brilliance and social charm (amply displayed in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s superb new biography, American Prometheus); no trace of the “overweening ambition” that General Groves spotted in his first meeting with the unlikely leftist he chose to lead the war’s most security-sensitive effort.

Mr. Sellars’ Oppenheimer is a shadowy guy in a porkpie hat on the sidelines, distancing himself from the blustery Groves and the prickly Teller with cryptic acerbities, blandly asserting his loyalty to the “upper crust” in Washington, and more often drifting into a private refuge of musings drawn from two of his two favorite poets, John Donne and Charles Baudelaire, or the Bhagavad Gita. This portrait of Oppenheimer, who was a lightning rod for more passion than perhaps any other American of the mid-20th century, is a fizzle.

Still, Mr. Adams has given him the opera’s most memorable music. In a love scene at the end of Act I with his wife Kitty (here depicted as a maternal Eternal Feminine figure quite at odds with the difficult and dislikeable woman she was for many of her husband’s friends), Oppenheimer extols (à la Baudelaire) the intoxicating allure of her hair in an aria of ravishing, exotic beauty. This is followed by the opera’s most stunning moment, a setting of Donne’s tortured, tough-minded love sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” (which inspired Oppenheimer to give the bomb test the name Trinity). In music that evokes the self-glorifying, self-flagellating soliloquies of Baroque cantatas, we finally sense the tragic dissonance in this “remarkable fellow.”

The opening-night performance was not all it could be. Richard Paul Fink as Teller, Thomas Glenn as Robert Wilson, Eric Owens as General Groves, and James Maddalena as the weatherman, Jack Hubbard, were strong and assured. Donald Runnicles conducted an energetic if sometimes texturally opaque reading of the daunting, hugely massed orchestral score. But balances between the lightly miked singers and the surging accompaniment were erratic, and the voices of Kristine Jepson as Kitty and Beth Clayton as Pasqualita, the Oppenheimers’ Indian servant, frequently got lost in the tumult.

As Oppenheimer, the striking Canadian baritone Gerald Finley sang impressively but acted rather one-dimensionally. He had the man’s nervous chain-smoking down pat, as well as his oblique stance and jerky gait, but his range of telling detail, both vocally and psychologically, was limited. Still, if his commanding Don Giovanni at the Met last season is any indication, he’s likely to grow in confidence and subtlety as the run (and future runs) of this arresting work continues. (The last San Francisco performance is Oct. 22.)

Despite my cavils, Doctor Atomic is without question the most interesting American opera in some time. To the degree that it succeeds, it does so because it matches the open-ended complexity of its subject with the open-ended complexity of opera. A few days after the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos was disbanded, Oppenheimer addressed the 500 or so people who remained at the site. About the debate over whether it had been right to make the bomb, he said, “Some people, I think, were motivated by curiosity and rightly so; and some by a sense of adventure, and rightly so. Others had more political arguments and said, ‘Well, we know that atomic weapons are in principle possible, and it is not right that the threat of that unrealized possibility should hang over the world. It is right that the world should know what can be done in their field and deal with it.’ And the people added to that that it was a time when all over the world men would be particularly ripe and open for dealing with this problem because of the immediacy of the evils of war, because of the universal cry from everyone that one could not go through this thing again, even a war without atomic bombs.”

The same problem is still with us today, and Doctor Atomic, with that honesty peculiar to opera, asks us to deal with it.

John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, which had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Oct. 1, takes this axiom to an extreme. Set at the Manhattan Project center at Los Alamos, N.M., in June 1945, it focuses entirely on the final preparations for history’s most cataclysmic act of war: the dropping of nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II itself goes unmentioned. So do current events of the time, except for the brief news that Germany has surrendered; that U.S. B-29’s are mercilessly bombing Tokyo and other Japanese targets; and that “the President of the United States” is meeting with “Joe Stalin” at Potsdam.

Also unmentioned is any connection between America’s invention of nuclear terror and the nuclear dangers of today—though that subject comes inescapably to mind during the spooky silence that accompanies the opera’s final moment of detonation in the desert. More documentary than polemic, Doctor Atomic lets the consequence of that fateful act speak for itself. Like the day-to-day efforts of the thousands of scientists and their helpers who worked in that secret lab on a mesa, Doctor Atomic is ruthlessly claustrophobic in its countdown to the successful testing of the first plutonium bomb. It is also an unusually penetrating, if ultimately frustrating, work of musical theater—certainly the most powerful, specifically American opera about war ever written.

Unlike Mr. Adams’ previous operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, this one cannot be labeled a “CNN opera.” The how-to, almost childish feverishness that fueled the making of the bomb 60 years ago is an ideal vehicle for Mr. Adams’ effulgent late-late romanticism. Both literally and in spirit, he borrows from Wagner’s doomsday extravaganza Die Gotterdämmerung; Sibelius’ awesome symphonic vistas; the primal summonings of Orff’s Carmina Burana; and even—in a scratchy opening snippet—Jo Stafford’s rendition of “The Things We Did Last Summer,” which is one of the opera’s few lapses into facile irony. But Mr. Adams has always been the master of his inspirations, and in this, his richest, most inventive score to date, he keeps the ear and the nervous system—and, on several stirring occasions, the heart—hyper-engaged.

I was less enthralled by the cut-and-paste libretto of Mr. Adams’ longtime collaborator, Peter Sellars, who has also directed the piece. Working with the elegant, spare stage designs of Adrianne Lobel, the kaleidoscopic lighting of James F. Ingalls and the fluent, if occasionally stilted, choreography of Lucinda Childs, Mr. Sellars has captured the atmosphere of men and women regimented by military and scientific patriotism with the brisk, no-nonsense style of 1940’s newsreels and “war effort” documentaries.

Since the outcome is a foregone conclusion, dramatic conflict is confined to debate and minutiae: the edgy Edward Teller’s dislike of teamwork; a letter from another physicist, Leo Szilard, urging the scientists to take a moral stand against the bomb’s use; the plea of an idealistic young physicist, Robert Wilson, to give the Japanese the option of peaceful surrender; the exasperation of the project’s commander, Gen. Leslie Groves, over the increasingly foul weather; dire warnings from a medical officer about the deadly toxic properties of plutonium; and so on. An opening chorus gives a physics lesson in nuclear fission. In light of Mr. Sellars’ left-leaning politics, it’s no surprise that the only butt of humor in the opera is the general, who’s more concerned with the devastation wrought by brownies on his waistline than by the human effects of the bomb on Japanese targets. As I said, this is a quintessentially American opera.

Much of this information is conveyed through quotes from historic and scientific documents, which are presented like items on a checklist. The libretto breaks new ground for tongue twisters, requiring the singers to deliver words like “practicable” and “icosahedron” with lyric ease. That most of this registers with minimal irritation is testament both to Mr. Adams’ ability to set document-speak with heightened unremarkability and to Mr. Sellars’ meticulous attention to the performers’ vocal inflections and body language. As always in a Sellars production, speech and song are indivisible.

Doctor Atomic was initiated as part of a “Faust Project” by the San Francisco Opera’s outgoing general director, Pamela Rosenberg, and no more Faust-like figure can be imagined than its title character, chief scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. An intellectual devoted equally to the pursuit of scientific discovery and poetic truth, “Oppie” was both a team captain and an unabashed eccentric, a man whose triumph and subsequent downfall uncannily mirrored the ambiguities and trajectory of the bomb. In Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (2004), Jeremy Bernstein quotes the physicist I.I. Rabi about his close friend and colleague: “Once he gets into something he gets into it with both feet. He becomes a leader …. [Yet] he had this mystic streak that could sometimes be very foolish …. When he was riding high he could be very arrogant. When things went against him he could play the victim. He was a most remarkable fellow.”

Oppenheimer has all the makings of an unmurderous counterpart to Verdi’s Otello, but in Doctor Atomic, he’s little more than a wisp—an enigma of an enigma. Of the charismatic organizer, who was able to yoke the energies of the best and the brightest of his generation, we see nothing. There’s no trace of his spellbinding scientific brilliance and social charm (amply displayed in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s superb new biography, American Prometheus); no trace of the “overweening ambition” that General Groves spotted in his first meeting with the unlikely leftist he chose to lead the war’s most security-sensitive effort.

Mr. Sellars’ Oppenheimer is a shadowy guy in a porkpie hat on the sidelines, distancing himself from the blustery Groves and the prickly Teller with cryptic acerbities, blandly asserting his loyalty to the “upper crust” in Washington, and more often drifting into a private refuge of musings drawn from two of his two favorite poets, John Donne and Charles Baudelaire, or the Bhagavad Gita. This portrait of Oppenheimer, who was a lightning rod for more passion than perhaps any other American of the mid-20th century, is a fizzle.

Still, Mr. Adams has given him the opera’s most memorable music. In a love scene at the end of Act I with his wife Kitty (here depicted as a maternal Eternal Feminine figure quite at odds with the difficult and dislikeable woman she was for many of her husband’s friends), Oppenheimer extols (à la Baudelaire) the intoxicating allure of her hair in an aria of ravishing, exotic beauty. This is followed by the opera’s most stunning moment, a setting of Donne’s tortured, tough-minded love sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” (which inspired Oppenheimer to give the bomb test the name Trinity). In music that evokes the self-glorifying, self-flagellating soliloquies of Baroque cantatas, we finally sense the tragic dissonance in this “remarkable fellow.”

The opening-night performance was not all it could be. Richard Paul Fink as Teller, Thomas Glenn as Robert Wilson, Eric Owens as General Groves, and James Maddalena as the weatherman, Jack Hubbard, were strong and assured. Donald Runnicles conducted an energetic if sometimes texturally opaque reading of the daunting, hugely massed orchestral score. But balances between the lightly miked singers and the surging accompaniment were erratic, and the voices of Kristine Jepson as Kitty and Beth Clayton as Pasqualita, the Oppenheimers’ Indian servant, frequently got lost in the tumult.

As Oppenheimer, the striking Canadian baritone Gerald Finley sang impressively but acted rather one-dimensionally. He had the man’s nervous chain-smoking down pat, as well as his oblique stance and jerky gait, but his range of telling detail, both vocally and psychologically, was limited. Still, if his commanding Don Giovanni at the Met last season is any indication, he’s likely to grow in confidence and subtlety as the run (and future runs) of this arresting work continues. (The last San Francisco performance is Oct. 22.)

Despite my cavils, Doctor Atomic is without question the most interesting American opera in some time. To the degree that it succeeds, it does so because it matches the open-ended complexity of its subject with the open-ended complexity of opera. A few days after the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos was disbanded, Oppenheimer addressed the 500 or so people who remained at the site. About the debate over whether it had been right to make the bomb, he said, “Some people, I think, were motivated by curiosity and rightly so; and some by a sense of adventure, and rightly so. Others had more political arguments and said, ‘Well, we know that atomic weapons are in principle possible, and it is not right that the threat of that unrealized possibility should hang over the world. It is right that the world should know what can be done in their field and deal with it.’ And the people added to that that it was a time when all over the world men would be particularly ripe and open for dealing with this problem because of the immediacy of the evils of war, because of the universal cry from everyone that one could not go through this thing again, even a war without atomic bombs.”

The same problem is still with us today, and Doctor Atomic, with that honesty peculiar to opera, asks us to deal with it.

The warm-up act was Bartók's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin , Op. 19, an expressionistic icon of the 1920's whose lurid colors and feverish energy make it the musical equivalent of one of the more alluringly noxious products in the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Mr. Salonen, who at 44 still looks scarcely out of knee pants, whipped the orchestra into high-decibel delirium, abandoning all pretense of podium politesse to ensure that every coruscating detail hit you smack between the eyes. At the end, the predominantly gray-haired listeners erupted into a stunned ovation, grinning and cheering as though they couldn't wait for "Purple Haze."

The star turn came after the intermission with Mr. Adams' Naïve and Sentimental Music , which was composed in 1998-99. This 45-minute extravaganza aspires to the sweep of a Bruckner symphony in the guise of an American diorama, conjuring up everything from a whistling cowboy to Hollywood schmaltz, mob anarchy, whack-down-the-forest empire-building, lackadaisical jazz and starry nights out on some lonesome prairie. Again, Mr. Salonen and the orchestra-whose marvelous recording of the work has recently been released by Nonesuch-kept it all together with crackling precision and relentless intensity. And again, the audience went giddily nuts. Behind me, a man murmured to his companion, "And they said the symphony concert was dead?"

Recently, there have been signs all over the place that the wall between classical and rock music is finally beginning to crumble. If much of this development is due to the rise of a better class of rockers who have warmed up to Olivier Messiaen, a lot of it is also owed to an eagerness by young classical musicians to get down and lighten up. Not surprisingly, the classical prime movers are two California maestros-Mr. Salonen in Los Angeles and his counterpart with the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas-and the Golden State's unofficial composer in residence, John Adams. Lincoln Center is currently celebrating the music of Mr. Adams in a festival that runs until May 17. And though Lincoln Center also houses the city's-and probably the country's-leading conservatory, the Adams Festival confirms what I have long thought to be true: The beacon for American classical music's way out of its isolation can be found not at the Juilliard School on Broadway and West 66th Street, but on the northern coast of California, at a hideaway called Brushy Ridge.

According to visitors' descriptions, Brushy Ridge-which is where Mr. Adams does much of his composing-stands as a metaphor for what he's up to. Its foundation is a rocky hillside, and its outlook includes redwood forests, spacious meadows and, somewhere in the near distance, the Pacific. "Eyes wide open" is a good way to describe the rooted, rambunctious music that this composer has been writing since he emerged in the mid-70's as part of the minimalist vanguard that was playing hooky from the school of atonality, which had alienated millions of music lovers after the Second World War. From the beginning, Mr. Adams-who moved to San Francisco in 1971, after a New England upbringing and a Harvard education-embraced the chug-a-chug pulsation, the glacial modulations and the high-testosterone energy that characterized his minimalist elders, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who had found inspiration in the hypnotic repetitions of Eastern music. Yet, as the titles of Mr. Adams' early major works- Shaker Loops , Phrygian Gates , Harmonium -suggest, he remained committed to writing music that exploited the formal richness of the Western classical tradition while honoring its ancient communal function. Over the years, Mr. Adams has composed an astonishing variety of works, including two operas, Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), whose bristling relevance to current events should make their immediate revival mandatory. ( Nixon was brilliantly revived in London by the English National Opera just a few years ago.)

Mr. Adams is now 55, and in the past several years, he has arrived at a place of greater ardor than ever in his desire to earn for his music a central place in American culture. Naïve and Sentimental Music takes its title from Schiller's famous distinction between poets for whom art is a natural form of expression and those for whom it's a self-conscious act. Despite the work's Whitmanesque range, it's all of a piece-a seamless blending of cool irony and ecstatic earnestness that takes the measure of America's desire for transcendence amid turbulence with more verve than anything I have heard since Copland's great ballet scores of the 1940's. Along with the incandescent Violin Concerto of 1993, it is, I believe, his masterpiece.

Mr. Adams' other large, ambitious work of recent years is El Niño , a two-hour oratorio that harks back to Handel's Messiah , but with a libretto that draws on the King James Bible, the Gnostic Gospels, Martin Luther, medieval mystery plays, and Latin American poetry in an incorrigibly contemporary way. Lincoln Center opened its festival with two sold-out performances at the B.A.M. Howard Gilman Opera House, a multimedia production involving Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the Los Angeles Master Chorus, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, three soloists, a trio of countertenors and a film-all put together by Mr. Adams' longtime collaborator, Peter Sellars. Having admired the Nonesuch recording of the original production, conducted by Kent Nagano, I went prepared to be stunned by the live performance.

Mr. Salonen, who conducted from the pit unseen, never seems to elicit anything but fully committed performances, and on this occasion I could only marvel at the luminous sincerity of Dawn Upshaw and Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson in their rhapsodic Marian anthems, the stentorian articulateness of Willard White's Almighty, and the otherworldly sweetness of the countertenors Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings and Steven Rickards. Thanks to Mr. Sellars, however, the finely detailed score was only intermittently absorbing. At his direction, the chorus-a superb vocal ensemble-moved about the stage in somnambulistic groupings of the Martha Graham Lite variety. And the film, which attempted to link the story of the Nativity to the arrival of a young Hispanic couple's first child (the birth was celebrated on the Santa Monica beach), proved a major distraction. It played continuously above the singers, adding a visual aid that was as banal as it was unnecessary. Mr. Sellars' quirky gilding of lilies has become increasingly facile of late, and the next time El Niño comes around, I hope he does his old friend Mr. Adams a favor by letting the work's considerable riches shine forth on their own.

The current revival of Baroque opera owes much to Peter Sellars, whose 1982 removal of Handel's Orlando to a trailer camp at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida established a geographically impish and musically impeccable model for making forgotten 18th-century works with musty, classical subjects palatable to modern tastes. The Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, where Mr. Kellogg is also the artistic director, has been another leader in the revival. The Glimmerglass approach combines shards of classical imagery with contemporary manners to create a hybrid place where Handel's musical genius can flourish alongside a tweaking of his plots. City Opera's Agrippina , which was first staged last summer at Glimmerglass, has good sexy fun with a lurid libretto while exalting all that is stirring in Handel's glorious music.

The driving force is the title character, wife of the Emperor Claudius, who will stop at nothing to see that her son Nero inherits his stepfather's throne. True to postmodern formula, the curtain opens on a beautifully lit John Conklin set: the fallen head of a Roman bigwig; towering, architectural fragments; a glowing red square borrowed from Josef Albers; and, on a Napoleonic bed, Agrippina reclining like Hedy Lamarr while her darling Nero, in a Tom Wolfe white suit, gazes at her incestuously. Gleeful when she believes (mistakenly) that her husband is dead, she counsels her son, "If you want to gain power, everything is permissible." The lady, it turns out, sleeps with a pistol; little Nero, after receiving his mother's advice, casually drops a cigarette and stubs it thoroughly into the stage.

In short order, we are introduced to the remaining, delightfully unsavory main players in this Dallas -on-the-Tiber. Claudius makes his entrance looking like a suburban car dealer at the Saturday-night dance, dressed in a white dinner jacket he can't wait to get out of. Ottone, his rescuer and rival, appears as a calf-eyed, ponytailed boy-next-door. And Poppea, the blond bombshell whom everyone pants for, turns up as the adorable town flirt in a succession of skin-baring outfits.

Under the wonderfully detailed direction of Lillian Groag, a veteran of many regional opera productions who is making her City Opera debut, the players each find a wealth of comic gold in the increasingly entangled race for political and sexual advantage. A moment of throbbing intensity provokes Poppea into a vigorous display of hair-brushing. As one ill-timed rendezvous follows another, a climax of sorts comes when Claudius loses control of his trousers and reveals that his Calvins are made of gold lamé. A sinister cadre of palace guards wearing gold masks and black Beefeater outfits proves adept at moving the architectural fragments into striking configurations of ghostly pomp-the best use of extras I've seen in quite awhile.

But the real grip of this Agrippina is musical. In the pit is Jane Glover, a canny Baroque specialist who at the opening performance propelled a small ensemble with so much feeling for the score's underlying buoyancy that many in the audience around me began tapping their feet. To call the onstage performers "singers" is to slight the uniform charm of their acting, but sing they did, with style and beauty. The Nero of Kimberly Barber, a young mezzo-soprano, was both repellently pliant and sympathetically plaintive. Gregory Reinhart, a bass of hall-filling power, gave Claudius a ferocious virility. The counter-tenor David Walker sang Ottone with a lyrical ardor that didn't quite conceal a nasty temper. Nancy Allen Lundy's Poppea had both visual and vocal allure. As Agrippina, Brenda Harris served notice that she has the potential to join the procession of great American lyric sopranos, from Eleanor Steber to Renée Fleming.

In the finale of Act II, after the knots of intrigue are untangled to provide the requisite lieto fine (happy ending), the supertitles spell out what really happened to the feverishly scheming characters, beginning with Agrippina's murder of her husband and ending with Nero's suicide. The gap between the historical and the operatic truth is the evening's crowning masterstroke, and it is delicious.

I grew up in an age when opera singers -apart from indulging in a few stock gestures and an occasional flashing of the eyes -pretty much relied on their vocal chords to create a sense of drama. One of the most glorious La Boh èmes in my memory featured Renata Tebaldi's Mimi and Franco Corelli's Rodolfo, who, during the Act I scene in which they're supposed to be looking for Mimi's key, kept their gazes fixed on their rival claques, which were seated on opposite sides of the Met. How different things are today. What distinguishes the current crop of top singers from their predecessors is a willingness to be pushed to the limit, not just vocally but athletically. In opera, it is the director, not the conductor, who increasingly calls the tune, and if he or she wants the diva to sing "Vissi d'Arte " standing on her head, the diva will stand on her head. Moreover, as the Susan Grahams, Bryn Terfels, Dawn Upshaws, Ren é Papes, Karita Mattilas, Cecilia Bartolis and Ren ée Flemings have encountered one another again and again in the international opera world, they seem to have developed the sort of summer-camp competitiveness that prodded Ms. Graham to sing a high A while assuming the position of someone awaiting the guillotine. Since many of the characters they play are still, emotionally at least, in the throes of adolescence, this can produce startling effects. Watching Mr. Terfel's rollicking thuggishness in last fall's Don Giovanni appealed dangerously to the playground bully in all of us.

It has been widely observed that, as we moved beyond the age of radio (with its reliance on sound alone as the magic element) and into the age of television (with its premium on retinal stimulation), we have entered an age in which audiences -particularly younger audiences -will pay attention only when their eyes are as engaged as their ears. This may account for a phenomenon I couldn't help noting during a recent spate of concerts and dance recitals: At the former, visually static events, the March-afflicted audiences coughed incessantly; at the latter, visually arresting events, they were as still as church mice.

So it's not surprising that concert presenters are increasingly borrowing from the strategies of opera, theater, the art world and even MTV to "reach out, " as they like to say, to "new audiences. " (When was the last time anyone called them "listeners "?) Hereabouts, the pioneering force in theatricalized concerts was Harvey Lichtenstein, the lately retired guru of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mindful of his success in expanding B.A.M.'s demographics to include both the culturally restless great unwashed and the members-in-good-standing of Manhattan's intelligentsia, Jane Moss, the head of programming for Lincoln Center's Great Performers series, has led the way in encouraging the higher echelon of classical artists to flex their non-vocal muscles on the recital stage. A few weeks ago, an apotheosis of sorts was reached by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's account of two of Bach's more poetically lurid solo cantatas, delivered not simply through her magnificent voice but through the boundary-challenged imagination of Peter Sellars.

To report that Ms. Hunt Lieberson -backed by a superbly sensitive Baroque ensemble, the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, conducted by Craig Smith -had no trouble ravishing the ear with what has become one of the noblest musical instruments in the world, will surprise nobody who has followed her luminous rise in Baroque and contemporary music. Like Falconetti in Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ms. Hunt Lieberson has the rare ability to convey not just an aesthetic but a moral radiance that seems to rise naturally out of her. I can think of no other artist today who so thoroughly inhabits a piece of music as she does, and with its rock-steady, sorrow-tinged depth of tone, her voice was the ideal vehicle for the self-scourging "Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut " ( "My heart is swimming in blood ") and the death-obsessed "Ich habe genug " ( "It is enough "). But apparently, just singing this magnificent stuff wasn't challenge enough, and so she and Mr. Sellars, longtime collaborators, decided to lend Bach a hand with body language and props that would give these pleas for spiritual release a little more, you know, punch. Thus the heart-in-blood imagery, so tellingly evoked in the music, was Sellars-enhanced by the spectacle of the singer endlessly entangling herself in a long pink scarf, like some mad Isadora Duncan with a boa fetish. And the longing for death was given Wit-like specificity by putting the singer into a flimsy hospital gown and woolly socks and having her writhe toward deliverance under a naked light bulb or lie on the stage singing to a snarl of I.V. tubes. That Ms. Hunt Lieberson managed to make all this seem a matter of genuine urgency was astonishing testament to her faith not only in Bach, but in Mr. Sellars. That the audience, during the two performances I attended at the John Jay College Theater, seemed to find it all either extraordinary in its novelty or extraordinary in its superfluity was not surprising. I came away decidedly of two minds -thrilled by the power of Ms. Hunt Lieberson and her eagerness to take risks, and reminded, once again, of how essentially dopey the Talented Mr. Sellars can be.

There could be no ambivalence, however, about another Great Performers recital a few afternoons later in Alice Tully Hall. This was given by the German baritone Thomas Quasthoff, who has been much in the media for having pursued an international career despite his having been stunted at birth by Thalidomide, but who has not been sufficiently recognized for possessing one of the most communicative musical personalities to emerge in many years. Sitting on a stool behind a music stand, unable to move about or use his hands to do more than turn pages, Mr. Quasthoff delivered the most riveting song recital I have heard in a long time in his accounts of Schubert's last songs, the Schwanengesang, and Brahms' Five Lieder and Four Serious Songs. Mr. Quasthoff is proof that the deepest art is born of necessity. I don't know how, out of that tiny body, he can produce what must be the widest range of vocal colors available to any singer today -from the obsidian hollowness of Schubert's "Die Stadt " to the impulsive buoyancy of "Die Taubenpost, " from the clarion yearning of "Stundchen " to the shattered whisper of "Der Doppelganger. " It would be wrong to suggest that Mr. Quasthoff is "reduced " only to his pliant bear hug of a voice, his handsome, unusually sympathetic face and his keen eyes, which like a great storyteller's so easily roam the faces of his audience. With only all of this, he creates a universe of feeling and perception unmediated by theatrics or athletics -anything extraneous to what he wants us to hear and feel. When he concluded the recital with an encore of "My Way, " he not only banished the ghost of Sinatra but caused me to think, "Ich habe genug "-this is enough.