Earlier this week, hundreds of demonstrators took to the street in front of the Metropolitan Opera in New York to protest The Death of Klinghoffer by the composer John Adams. The opera is based on the real-life hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian commandos in the Mediterranean in 1985; the Klinghoffer of the title was Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jewish tourist murdered by the hijackers.
When The Death of Klinghoffer debuted in 1991, some critics claimed it was sympathetic to the murderers and their cause, anti-Semitic, and/or anti-Zionist. Those sentiments have only become more intense. The Metropolitan Opera’s first production of the opera, which opened on October 20, has outraged Jewish groups and prompted accusations of being 'soft on terror.' The Met’s program even printed a letter from Leon Klinghoffer’s daughters, who accuse the opera of romanticizing the terrorists.
New York Magazine critic Justin Davidson, who was at the opera’s premiere this week, calls the charge of anti-Semitism “a red herring,” but acknowledges that the opera has serious flaws. The entire first act is devoted to the hijackers, who sing movingly of their side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The opera’s opening line has a chorus of exiled Palestinians singing, “My father’s house was razed in 1948 when the Israelis passed over our street.” Davidson says, “It’s a hugely inflammatory line. It’s an incredibly complicated history — to toss that off, you’re really asking for trouble.” The characters Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer don’t appear until the second act.
When the Klinghoffers do take the spotlight, however, they provide the opera with its moral center. After Leon’s murder, the opera closes with a beautiful aria from the cancer-stricken Marilyn Klinghoffer. “They should have killed me,” she sings. “I wanted to die.” Davidson notes that Adams’ music provides “a very clear contrast between Klinghoffer’s sanity and humane quality and the terrorists’ hopped-up, murderous intensity.” But he concludes that Alice Goodman’s meandering, unfocused libretto is the “fundamental, unhealable problem of the opera.” (That Goodman, an American Jew, converted to Anglicanism during her work on the opera has raised suspicions for some about the work’s view of Jews.)
But even with Klinghoffer’s flaws, Davidson thinks the Metropolitan Opera is right to stage it. “At the core of the opera is a really strong score,” he says. “It has some incredible moments.” And he holds that the opera should be evaluated on its merits, not judged according to the politics of our time. “I can’t think of more than a handful of operas in the entire repertoire that are really perfect.”
Have you seen or heard the opera? Do you think the subject is too volatile a subject for art? Let us know in a comment below.