American composer John Adams and poet Alice Goodman’s spellbinding and
powerful 1991 two-act opera The Death of
Klinghoffer presents a slightly fictionalized account of the 1985 hijacking
of the Italian luxury cruise liner Achille
Lauro off the coast of Egypt by Palestinian terrorists acting
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| The Achille Lauro in 1984 |
on orders
from the Palestinian Liberation Front. The opera dramatizes the taking of
hostages on the ship, the terrorists’ demands that the Israeli government
release five Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons, and recounts the execution
by the terrorists of one of the hostages, disabled American Jew Leon
Klinghoffer (on holiday with his wife Marilyn) whose body is subsequently
thrown overboard along with the wheelchair to which he is bound.
The opera also provides some historical
background for both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict through choruses
that dramatize events surrounding the 1948 Arab-Israeli War – specifically, the
exodus of around 700,000 Jews from Arab lands and the expulsion of around that
same number of Palestinian Arabs from their homes by Israeli military forces during
the Israeli occupation, which had the effect of taking control of land previously
sanctioned for Arabs by the United Nations, but afterwards claimed on behalf of
the then newly-declared State of Israel.
John Adams is among
the most important opera composers working today. Born and raised
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| Composer John Adams |
in New England, he began
composing at age ten, earned two degrees from Harvard, and currently lives in
the San Francisco Bay area (Earbox).
The
idea for
Klinghoffer was presented to
Adams by his longtime friend and collaborator Peter Sellers (also
Harvard-educated), a professor of World Art and Cultures at UCLA who teaches courses
on Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action.
Sellers had worked with Adams and poet (also
an Anglican priest) Alice Goodman on their previous opera,
Nixon in China, which Sellers directed. In 1987, the three set out to develop
an opera based on the then-recent events surrounding the Palestinian hijacking
of the
Achille Lauro and to use the
incident as an opportunity to explore the backgrounds of both sides of the
intensely complex political conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
According to Adams, in an interview on his
website, “we weren’t making an overly conscious attempt to be neutral,
but on the other hand, after reading about the background it was impossible not
to have strong feelings” (Beverly).
Adams goes on to explain the intense research involved in developing the
opera: a thorough examination of source material such as the Old Testament, histories
of the Middle East, the foundations of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration,
Theodore Herzel, Edward Said, and the Koran.
Adams states that “the entire opera is about symmetries and polarities”
(Earbox.).
By creating such a work – one
that lends symmetry to what
many Jews and Muslims have historically viewed as a
completely asymmetrical and one-sided debate – the opera has the power to level
the playing field between both sides of the conflict, paving the way to a
better understanding of the differences in the ideology and religion that tend
to divide nations and individuals, pushing them to the brink of war.
The opera has the power to serve as a
springboard for philosophical debate on the merits of tolerance and
understanding.
It has the power to bring
peace through the possible organizations of Jewish/Muslim interfaith groups and
groups dedicated to exploring cultural, artistic, and ideological differences
with the purpose of finding solutions for working peacefully with one another.
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).
The fact is that at the time Klinghoffer made its first
appearance, audiences were primed at
both the local and national levels to expect black and white thematic material regarding the subject matter. Any balance or symmetry (to use Adams’ own
word) within the fabric of the narrative (and the music, for that matter) was
perceived of as attracting sympathy for either side (and always the wrong
side depending upon which vantage point the audience happened to take).
The opera begins with two separate chorus
movements representing a prologue, the first of these being the “Chorus of
Exiled Palestinians;” the second being the “Chorus of Exiled Jews.”
The very first bars of music the
predominately pro-Israeli audience that evening of 5 September 1991 heard were
sung by a chorus representing exiled Palestinians singing “My father’s house
was razed/ in nineteen forty eight/ when the Israelis passed over our
street.”
Never mind that this choral
movement was followed by the Chorus of Exiled Jews who sang: “When I paid off
the taxi/ I had no money left/ and of course, no luggage./ My empty hands shall
signify this passion, which itself remembers.”
The damage had been done.
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.
Though the opera was not effective in achieving any sort
of balanced discussion of the
conflict in the Middle East in 1991, it looked
as though, ten years later, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center in New York, that this perspective of the work might change – if not for Klinghoffer, then at least for Adams.
The events of 911 motivated Adams to compose
the gut-wrenchingly moving work
On the
Transmigration of Souls in commemoration of these attacks.
The composition won him the Pulitzer Prize
for music in 2003.
Attempts were then
made to revive productions of
Klinghoffer
in light of Adams’ revived popularity; however, the events of 911 had unfortunately
aroused in its wake a rather sweeping anti-Muslim attitude that lead to even more
cancellations of the work and sparked a debate in the country’s leading papers,
The New York Times and
The Washington Post, among others, on
the nature of censorship in the arts in America.
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
very different’” (Townsend).
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
June 2013.
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
June 2013.
Rahim, Sameer. “The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams and
Alice Goodman.” The Telegraph. Telegraph
Media Group, Limited, 2 Mar. 2012.
Web. 4 June 2013.
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).
