For a little while, it seemed as though the controversy over John Adams’s 1991 opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer”—a dramatization of the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, during which members of the Palestine Liberation Front murdered the Jewish-American businessman Leon Klinghoffer—was beginning to fade. When the opera was first seen in New York, at BAM, in 1991, it sparked outrage in onlookers who felt that it unduly favored the Palestinian point of view, not least because the score begins with a lamenting chorus of Palestinian exiles (“Israel laid all to waste”). Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer, Leon’s daughters, issued a statement saying that the work “appears to us to be anti-Semitic.” A second “Klinghoffer” controversy erupted in 2001, when, in the wake of September 11th, the Boston Symphony decided to forego playing excerpts of the opera. But, in recent years, stagings both in America and abroad have passed without much comment. In 2009, the Juilliard Opera mounted an effective concert performance, and earlier this year the Long Beach Opera offered a production that had earlier appeared at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, one in which the work takes on a cool, timeless sheen.
Last week, though, the brouhaha resumed. The Metropolitan Opera is scheduled to present “Klinghoffer” this fall, and the Anti-Defamation League, citing the concerns of the Klinghoffer daughters, has been pressuring the company to change its mind. A flurry of right-wing editorials suggested, in the words of a New York Post headline, that the work “romanticizes one NYer’s murder.” None other than Michele Bachmann, speaking before the Faith and Freedom Coalition, denounced the Met for showing sympathy toward terrorists. Amid the furor, the Met settled on a compromise: it would go ahead with the production but cancel the transmission planned for its Live in HD series, which goes out to movie theatres around the world. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, declared that while he did not believe the opera to be anti-Semitic, he had become persuaded that it “would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.”
It was, as a Times Op-Ed said, a “lamentable” decision, and also a ludicrous one. Tom Service, in the Guardian, attacked the logic behind it: “If you think the piece is not anti-Semitic … then you cannot also hold the position that the opera would exacerbate ‘rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.’” To be sure, a non-anti-Semitic work can be used toward anti-Semitic ends, but there is little evidence that this mournful, meditative score has fed the passions of bigots, European or otherwise. Alice Goodman, who wrote the libretto both for “Klinghoffer” and for Adams’s first opera, “Nixon in China,” told the Guardian: “The whole idea of pogroms emerging from the simulcast of a modern opera is more than faintly absurd.” It is true that the terrorist characters spout hateful slogans—“America is one big Jew,” one says—but a dramatist cannot address hatred without giving hatred a voice onstage. And the terrorists’ words are counterbalanced by the utterances of the victims. In response to the Met cancellation, Adams said, “My opera accords great dignity to the memory of Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer, and it roundly condemns his brutal murder.” Notably, Marilyn has the last word:
If a hundred people were murdered
and their blood
flowed in the wake
Of this ship like
Oil, only then
would the world intervene.
They should have killed me.
I wanted to die.
Anyone who thinks that “Klinghoffer” romanticizes murder probably has not sat through it to the end. Indeed, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, admits that he has yet to see the opera.
This is not to say that “Klinghoffer” is an innocent victim of arbitrary attacks. It ventures onto extraordinarily difficult terrain, playing with stereotypes on both sides of the conflict, and no one should be surprised that it remains contentious. It has inspired a meaty debate in critical and scholarly circles, with the musicologist Richard Taruskin leading the prosecution and his colleague Robert Fink mounting a defense. Taruskin, in a 2001 article, charged that, in its original version, the opera catered to “anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-bourgeois” prejudices—a sitcom-like scene involving a chattering Jewish-American family was later dropped—and that those prejudices remained visible even in the revised version. Fink, in 2005, responded that, in the end, the work celebrates precisely those middle-class values that Taruskin believes it rejects: the “life-affirming virtues of the ordinary, of the decent man, of small things.” That two intelligent commentators should reach such radically disparate conclusions points to an abiding problem at the heart of “Klinghoffer”: its pensive, ambivalent attitude toward present-day issues about which a great many people feel no ambivalence whatsoever.
There will be occasion to reflect more deeply on “Klinghoffer” next fall—if, in fact, the Met staging goes ahead. What concerns me now is the sense that the grand old house is on an erratic course, and that the latest “Klinghoffer” flare-up is the result not merely of an intractable ideological dispute but also of irresolute management. Having decided to stage the opera some years back, Gelb should have been better prepared for the inevitable explosion. His statement will likely satisfy no one: if, as he argues, the opera is prone to fanning anti-Semitism, critics will surely respond that it should not be performed at all. The episode is yet another example of maladroit public relations from a manager who, when hired, was supposed to have shown nimbleness in such matters. One recalls a 2012 incident in which Gelb attempted to squelch criticism of the Met in the pages of Opera News, a Metropolitan Opera Guild publication, and also the epic fiasco of Robert Lepage’s “Ring” production, which cost the company an amount of money that reporters have yet to pin down precisely.
