The Death of Klinghoffer

The most controversial opera of modern times -- The Death of Klinghoffer -- opens tonight at New York's Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Square.

The work has been performed many times, but the Met's staging is seen by people who deplore it as giving Klinghoffer the opera world's equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.  The objections are that the piece is anti-Semitic and that it promotes sympathy for terrorists.

The opera's story, probably fresher in people's minds when it debuted in 1991, is based on the 1985 hijacking of a Mediterranean cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists who shot Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish man in a wheelchair, and dumped his body into the sea.

The opera opens with a prologue of two choruses.  First comes the "Chorus of Exiled Palestinians" who are run out of their homes in 1948 after the establishment of Israel. Then comes the "Chorus of Exiled Jews" who leave Europe after the Holocaust to settle in the new Israeli state.

There is beautiful music in this opera, including the Hagar Chorus, directed below by the opera's composer, John Adams.



Hagar, you will recall from the Bible, was the servant of Abraham's wife, Sarah.  Hagar bore Abraham's son Ishmael, whose descendants became the peoples of the Middle East.  Abraham and Sarah's son, Isaac, was the father of the Jewish tribes.

In effect, the opera asserts the inextricable linkage of Palestinians and Jews.  It depicts Palestinian terrorists as human beings with their own story and frustrations and motivations.

After 9/11, this is a hard sell for Americans.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and several politicians of both parties plan to lead a protest today.  The current mayor, Bill De Blasio, has decried European anti-Semitism but defended the opera.  "The American way is to respect freedom of speech," he said.  "Simple as that."

A First Amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams, penned a newspaper opinion piece arguing that the opera certainly deserved protection as free speech.  But, he asked, would the Met mount an opera justifying the frustrations and hatred of the killers of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr., or of the 9/11 airplane bombers?

"One can argue passionately about the Middle East, Israel or Palestinians," he wrote, "but nothing makes the Klinghoffer murder morally tolerable."

The Met responded to critics by canceling a planned telecast of the opera and also its radio broadcast.  The opera's playbill will include a statement from Klinghoffer's children, who denounced the opera after watching its first performance in 1991.

John Adams in turn denounced the Met.  "The cancellation of the international telecast is a deeply regrettable issue and goes far beyond the issues of 'artistic freedom,' and ends in promoting the same kind of intolerance that the opera's detractors claim to be preventing," it said.

In fact, a part of the opera depicting an American Jewish family, friends of the Klinghoffers, was seen as offensive caricature and removed from the piece long ago.

Below are the two prologue choruses from a 2003 movie of the opera by a British filmmaker.  The music and the libretto are not the issue, but the images accompanying the music strike me as heavy-handed.  The film was well-received around the world, but not so much in the United States, where it was not widely shown.





The film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that "the combination of artistic sophistication and moral obtuseness that has characterized The Death of Klinghoffer is ratcheted up to new levels in this repulsive film version."

A critic from the site Film Threat called the movie "an unashamedly pro-Palestinian and virulently anti-Israel (and, unspoken but clearly implied anti-American) creation."

Other songs and choruses from Klinghoffer also can be found on YouTube.  I do like the choruses.