Opera
as Mediator: The Larger Impact of John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer
By Aaron Ball
The Achille Lauro in 1984 |
John Adams is among the most important opera composers working today. Born and raised
Composer John Adams |
The Death of Klinghoffer saw its United States premiere on 5 September 1991 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York and almost immediately generated a firestorm of controversy. Only weeks before the premiere, a three-day riot in the nearby Crown Heights district had resulted in the murder of a rabbinical student igniting tensions between African American and Jewish populations. On a national level, in January of that year, shortly after Israel was hit by Iraqi Scud missiles during the Gulf War, national sympathies for Israelis climbed to the highest in recorded history (Gallup). These political tensions both locally and nationally were fully represented by the audience at this premiere, an audience who, according to a national survey of opera audience demographics released for the year 1992 by the National Endowment for the Arts, consisted of predominately white, college educated, middle aged suburban residents twenty-five to forty-nine years of age, over 45-percent of whom had incomes of over $50,000 (American Participation in Opera); in other words, an affluent and influential audience well-read on issues of national and local interests. To add fuel to an already explosive atmosphere, the performance was attended anonymously by Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer, the daughters of Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer, who promptly denounced the opera as being anti-Semitic and sympathetic to Palestinian terrorists, and an opera that attempts to justify the murder of their father – a position they maintain to this day. In a recent public statement by Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer issued by the Anti-Defamation League upon the 2011 revival of the opera at St. Louis Opera Theatre (after an absence from the American stage of twenty years), the sisters write: “our personal grief and sensitivity to the controversy that has surrounded presentations of the opera since its premiere are not diminished by the passage of time. [. . .] The Death of Klinghoffer takes a heinous terrorist event and rationalizes, legitimizes, and explains it. There is no way that this terrorist murder can or should be presented in a balanced manner” (Statement by Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer). Audiences tended to agree. The political controversy lead to biased critical reviews and the opera quickly became too hot to handle, with the world-renowned Glyndebourne Festival in England and Los Angeles Opera each cancelling their planned productions of the work. Only the San Francisco Opera (one of the commissioners of the work) carried through with its plan to present the opera the following year in 1992. That production was met with protests staged by the Jewish Information League. Productions of the work have been condemned in Israel as being pro-Palestinian. Conversely, productions have been condemned elsewhere in the Middle East as being pro-Israeli. Poet, librettist, and priest Alice Goodman, when asked by The Telegraph last year about the reason for the controversy, replied simply that it was “because the bad people in [the opera] are not entirely bad and the good people are not entirely good” (Rahim).
Another subject of contention for the first audiences of Klinghoffer was the portrayal of one of the terrorists, Mamoud, who recounts to the Captain the horrors of having grown up immersed in violence and the way his childhood history has helped shape who he is today in the aria “Now it is night:” “I used to play with guns,” Mamoud sings, “my first toy was one like this:/ a real one./ I was five, and just able to drag it and crawl over to a wall,/ prop it, fire/ smell the hot metal and the exploded round.” He continues later: “It was not I driven away/ but my mother/ who could not remember what happened to her./ She only said there was a raid/ [. . . ] /She was killed with the old men and children in camps at Sabra and Chatila/ where Almighty God/ in His mercy showed my decapitated brother to me/ and in His mercy/ allowed me to close my brother’s eyes/ and wipe his face.” The Captain then delivers a line that seems to drive home one of the overriding messages of the opera when he sings “I think if you could talk like this/ sitting among your enemies/ peace would come.” To which Mamoud replies “The day that I and my enemy sit peacefully,/ each putting his case and working towards peace,/ that day our hope dies/ and I shall die too.” American audiences had already made up their minds by this point late in the second act that they were being persuaded to sympathize with terrorists.
Finally, in 2011, for the first time in nearly twenty years, The Death of Klinghoffer saw an American production at St. Louis Opera Theater directed by renowned opera director James Robinson. What happened as a result of that production was truly remarkable. A year before performances were scheduled to take place, Timothy O’Leary, general director of St. Louis Opera Theater, very much aware of the controversy of staging the work, began the process of involving local religious communities in the opera company’s educational discussions and programs revolving around Klinghoffer. Batya Abramson-Goldstein, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, in a Huffington Post article on the production, said that “O’Leary’s decision to involve the faith community in the educational discussions preceding Klinghoffer made ‘something that could have been a very divisive experience into something
Though the opera, with its balanced approach to its subject matter and musical structure, was not initially effective in generating balanced dialogue between people with diverse cultural and theological backgrounds when it premiered in 1991, there seems now to be a shift in how the work is being percieved as American culture begins to embrace diversity and tolerance with ever-increasing frequency. With a focus on developing and organizing community inter-faith involvement and education initiatives around future productions of Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer, the opera stands a very good chance of gaining widespread recognition as one of the great operatic masterpieces of the twentieth century, not just by way of its music, poetry, and theatrics, but also by sparking important and sensitive dialogue among opera audiences everywhere for many years to come.
Baritone Aaron Ball singing Mamoud’s aria “Those Birds Flying Above Us” from John Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer.
Townsend, Tim. “'The Death of Klinghoffer,' Controversial
Opera and Interfaith Concert Brings People Together In St. Louis.” STLTODAY.com. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 11 Sept. 2012. Web. 4
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Goodman, Alice. The Death of Klinghoffer. Second Edition, Jan. 2009. Composed by John Adams. Piano reduction by John McGinn. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2009. Print.
Beverly, David. “Klinghoffer and
the Art of Composing.” Earbox.com. John Adams., 25 Oct. 1995. Web. 4
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Rahim, Sameer. “The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams and
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