Long Wake
“The Death of Klinghoffer,” at the Met.
By Alex Ross
“The
Death of Klinghoffer,” John Adams’s perennially contentious opera about
terrorism at sea, received its first Metropolitan Opera performance on October
20th, twenty-three years after its world première. Beforehand, several hundred
people gathered opposite Lincoln Center Plaza to register their unhappiness with
the work, which dramatizes a ghastly act: the hijacking, by members of the
Palestine Liberation Front, in 1985, of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, and the
subsequent murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jewish
retiree.
At the rally,
people carried signs reading “The Met Opera Glorifies Terrorism,” “No Tenors
for Terror,” “Snuff Opera,” and “Gelb, Are You Taking Terror $$$?”—the last a
reference to Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met. A leaflet from the
Zionist Organization of America described the opera as “anti-Semitic,
pro-terrorist, anti-American, anti-British, anti-gay, & anti-western
world.” A hundred demonstrators sat, symbolically, in wheelchairs. An array of
local politicians, both Republican and Democratic, lined up to attack the
piece. Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, said that she was
“personally offended by the play.” David Paterson, the former governor of New
York, called the work “loathsome and despicable.” A New Jersey state senator
wondered whether Hamas had funded the Met production. Former Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani took a more conciliatory tone, conceding that Adams is “one of our
great American composers.” Giuliani was the only speaker who seemed to have
heard the music. Nonetheless, he concluded that the opera “supports terrorism.”
The most
aggressive rhetoric came from Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a money manager who has also
worked as a political operative. A few years ago, Wiesenfeld won notoriety for
seeking, unsuccessfully, to deny the playwright Tony Kushner an honorary
degree, on account of Kushner’s criticisms of Israel. Wiesenfeld led the
“Klinghoffer” rally, and he had much to say. “This is not art,” he thundered.
“This is crap. This is detritus. This is garbage.” He declared, as he did at an
anti-“Klinghoffer” event last month, that the set should be burned. He made a
cryptic joke to the effect that, if something were to happen to Gelb that
night, the board of the Met would be the first suspects. The rally went on in
that vein. As operagoers began making their way up the steps outside the Met,
the mood turned unpleasant. Shouts of “Shame on you!” greeted each new arrival.
Inside the
house, there were sporadic disruptions. When, midway through the first act, a
man began yelling, “The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgiven,” the
performance seemed on the verge of falling apart. But the Met was lucky to have
David Robertson, a fearless and impassioned conductor, in the pit; through
sheer will, he kept the music moving, and only a few more disturbances ensued.
In the end, the vituperation led to the opposite of the desired outcome:
listeners who had been berated on the plaza were more inclined to support the
work. When Adams walked onstage, during the curtain calls, he received a huge
ovation. I imagine that a similar roar would have greeted Gelb had he appeared.
The embattled general manager—who had earlier removed “Klinghoffer” from the
Met’s “Live in HD” and radio-broadcast schedules, in the vain hope of defusing
protests—held fast against the final onslaught. He is Jewish, and much of what
was said of him at the rally was, to borrow a word from Governor Paterson,
loathsome.
The
protest failed because it relied on falsehoods: the opera is not anti-Semitic,
nor does it glorify terrorism. Granted, Adams and his librettist, Alice
Goodman, do not advertise their intentions in neon. The story of the Achille
Lauro hijacking is told in oblique, circuitous monologues, delivered by a
variety of self-involved narrators, with interpolated choruses in rich, dense
poetic language. The terrorists are allowed ecstatic flights, private musings,
self-justifications. But none of this should surprise a public accustomed to
dark, ambiguous TV shows like “Homeland.” The most specious arguments against
“Klinghoffer” elide the terrorists’ bigotry with the attitudes of the creators.
By the same logic, one could call Steven Spielberg an anti-Semite because the
commandant in “Schindler’s List” compares Jewish women to a virus.
In the opera,
the opposed groups follow divergent trajectories. The terrorists tend to lapse
from poetry into brutality, whereas Leon Klinghoffer and his wife, Marilyn,
remain robustly earthbound, caught up in the pleasures and pains of daily life,
hopeful even as death hovers. Those trajectories are already implicit in the
paired opening numbers, the Chorus of Exiled Palestinians and the Chorus of
Exiled Jews. The former splinters into polyrhythmic violence, ending on the
words “break his teeth”; the latter keeps shifting from plaintive minor to
sumptuous major, ending on the words “stories of our love.” The scholar Robert
Fink, in a 2005 essay, convincingly argues that the opera “attempts to
counterpoise to terror’s deadly glamour the life-affirming virtues of the
ordinary, of the decent man, of small
things.” Moreover, subtle references to the Holocaust suggest that
a familiar horror is recurring. “At least we are not Jews,” an old Swiss woman
says. “I kept my distance,” an Austrian frigidly intones. The mellifluous,
ineffectual Captain indulges in fantasies of appeasement, conversing under the
stars with a silver-tongued terrorist named Mamoud.
Why, then,
has “Klinghoffer” caused such strife? One problem is a curious imbalance in the
structure. The Klinghoffers, the only individual Jewish characters, do not sing
until the second act, and until then the Palestinians hold the stage. Mamoud,
for example, discloses that his mother and brother were killed in Palestinian
refugee camps—a back story that might seem designed to justify the character’s
own violence. Only much later does Klinghoffer provide a counterpoint. With
blistering power, he sings, “You don’t give a shit, / Excuse me, about / Your
grandfather’s hut, / His sheep and his goat, / And the land he wore out. / You
don’t give a shit, / You just want to see / People die.” Another problem is the
thread of mild satire that runs through the portrayal of the Klinghoffers. The
original version of the work included an extended sendup of an American Jewish
home, a scene subsequently cut. Goodman’s interplay of irony and rumination, so
seductive in her first collaboration with Adams, “Nixon in China,” proved
riskier here. The opposition of the Klinghoffers’ daughters, Lisa and Ilsa,
should be noted, and the Met included a statement from them in the program.
Yet the opera
has a way of eluding its critics; somehow, it absorbs each new controversy that
threatens to engulf it. When, the other night, Marilyn Klinghoffer cried to the
Captain, “You embraced them!,” she sounded very much like the protesters
outside. Like it or not, “Klinghoffer” will be with us for a while, mirroring
our fears.
The
Met production, which had previously been seen at the English National Opera,
is by Tom Morris, who directed “War Horse” on Broadway. In place of the ritual
abstraction of Peter Sellars’s original staging, Morris opts for an enhanced
realism, using sets and projections to conjure the faded beauty of the cruise
ship. Photographs and captions give us background on the characters. The action
is frenetic at times, especially when dancers mime the inner life of the
teen-age militant Omar, but Morris knows when to clear away the clutter and
give us stark, elemental images: a Mediterranean sun blazing in the sky, an old
man in a wheelchair on deck, a young man inching forward with a gun. Most haunting
was the moment when the terrorists depart: they walk off the stage and trudge
up the aisle, exposed under a harsh spotlight, and stripped of whatever glamour
they had acquired in their minds.
The cast did
potent work under trying circumstances. (According to the Met, some of the
singers had received personal threats.) Paulo Szot fluently assumed the part of
the Captain, though he had a stiffer delivery than did James Maddalena, the
creator of the role. Aubrey Allicock, in a notable Met début, found eerie
beauty in Mamoud’s monologues. Alan Opie, despite his British diction, caught
the blunt nobility of Klinghoffer. The singer who most tore at the heart was
Michaela Martens, as Marilyn Klinghoffer. Her low voice gave foghorn strength
to the opera’s desolate last lines, after the widow has refused the Captain’s
empty condolences: “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.”
“Klinghoffer”
is as much an orchestral drama as a vocal one: the instruments are always
brooding behind the voices, fostering doubt. An effect of pinging electronic
timbres mixed with scrawny strings is especially prominent in the terrorists’
later arias, giving them a tacky sheen. Full, rich textures, such as Adams
readily supplies in his orchestral scores, come along rarely: there is the
sense of a progressive hollowing. At the very end, downward-slumping phrases in
the violas and cellos evoke shudders of grief. Robertson and the Met players,
having wrung a maximum of tension from the score, gave that final page a
Mahlerian pang—the last throb of a devoted heart. Then the opera simply stops.
The most troubling thing about “Klinghoffer” may be that it offers no
consolation, no way out. ♦
Alex Ross has
been contributing to The New Yorker
since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/long-wake
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