Music of the spheres, science and the imagination, consciousness and dematerialization. Kopernikus: A Ritual Opera of Death premiered in 1980, the work of the late Canadian composer Claude Vivier, who also wrote the libretto. A young woman named Agni is the opera’s magnetic center, drawing into her dreamworld such characters as Lewis Carroll, Merlin, the Queen of the Night, Mozart himself, Tristan and Isolde, and, of course, the mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. This is a Peter Sellars production, and Sellars, as you know, is master of his own magnetic fields. —L.J.