A musical education
Peter Sellars ’81 buzzed into a Harvard classroom. His hair standing famously at attention atop his head, the unconventional American theater director greeted students with bear hugs and engaged in a two-hour discussion on such topics as his take on critics, the historical and political themes in his work, and his creative process. “My work does not yield itself to offering its meaning in a 10-minute span. I am offering something way more complicated, and it takes a long time to digest,” said Sellars, who once staged Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” on a set resembling an apartment in New York City’s lavish Trump Tower. He told the students during the April 5 discussion that he also loves “the presence of documentary inside a fiction form,” and recalled using declassified government documents to write the libretto for the John Adams opera “Doctor Atomic,” about the creation of the nuclear bomb. “You want...