Met Opera's GM, Peter Gelb, Responds to Controversial THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER

By: Oct. 22, 2014
Enter Your Email to Unlock This Article

Plus, get the best of BroadwayWorld delivered to your inbox, and unlimited access to our editorial content across the globe.




Existing user? Just click login.

Metropolitan Opera's General Manager, Peter Gelb, wrote in the NY Post: "Monday night's premiere of "The Death of Klinghoffer" was not one of the easiest nights in the history of The Metropolitan Opera, but it was one of the most important."

He goes on to say: "Adams chose to explore a disturbing subject, and succeeded in challenging us to think about difficult events and issues in ways that, although unsettling, can also be illuminating. That's what art is supposed to do... While protesters demonstrated outside and a few voices inside attempted to disrupt the performance by shouting over the music (before being escorted out), conductor David Robertson coolly led the orchestra, chorus, dancers and singers through the two-act opera. For those who came to listen and watch, it was a deeply moving experience that left no doubt which side the opera was on: the side of humanity."

Read the entire article here.

In the World of opera, it's common for a new work to take some time to establish its place in the repertoire. Just think of Così fan tutte, written in 1790 but largely ignored until the mid-20th century, or Les Troyens, which didn't reach the United States until more than a century after its composition. A generation has passed since the 1991 premiere of John Adams's second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, but for the most part the work is still known solely by its controversial reputation. Apart from that original production, only two other full stagings have been seen in the U.S., and both of these took place within the past three years (at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2011 and Long Beach Opera in spring 2014).

But Met audiences will at last have a chance to experience firsthand one of the most talked-about contemporary operas when Klinghoffer has its company premiere in Tom Morris's moving production (initially staged in 2012 at English National Opera). With David Robertson conducting and Paulo Szot, Alan Opie, and Michaela Martens in the principal roles,Klinghoffer will be the third John Adams opera to make its way to the Met following the company's widely lauded productions of Doctor Atomic in 2008 and Nixon in China in 2010. All three operas were originally created in collaboration with the director Peter Sellars, Adams's longtime artistic partner. To write the libretto for The Death of Klinghoffer, the pair turned once again to the poet Alice Goodman, librettist for their inaugural opera, Nixon in China.

Although never planned as such, together these three works might be seen to form an ambitious trilogy-a trilogy that addresses some of the major events responsible for shaping the contemporary American psyche. Adams points to the archetypal underpinning shared by all three. The reason behind?his focus on these topics-the dawn of the atomic age, political personality cults and the Cold War confrontation between East and West, and the very present reality of terrorism-lies in "their ability to summon up in a few choice symbols the collective psyche of our time." And in terms of its musical and emotional intensity, The Death of Klinghoffer arguably represents Adams's highest artistic achievement in writing for the stage.

The opera's plot is based on an event from history even closer to the time of its writing thanNixon had been: the terrorist hijacking of the Italian luxury cruise liner Achille Lauro, which took place in October 1985. Four Palestinians had boarded with false identities; when they were accidentally discovered with their weapons while still at sea, they impulsively decided to hijack the vessel.

The standoff lasted for three days, and before the passengers (many of?whom were Americans) were rescued, the hijackers committed a despicable murder: they shot an elderly, wheelchair-bound Jewish New Yorker, Leon Klinghoffer, tossing his body into the sea. Leon and his wife, Marilyn, had booked the cruise to celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary; Marilyn must have known it would be their last together, since she was suffering from terminal cancer.

Controversy has swirled around The Death of Klinghoffer since it premiered just days after the end of the First Gulf War. From the start, the opera's creative team was accused at best of naive "political correctness" and specious moral equivalence for dramatizing the perspective of the Palestinians and presenting "singing terrorists"; at worst, the opera has been condemned as "anti-Semitic." Still other critics have denounced Klinghoffer for representing Palestinians as inhuman.

Much of the outcry has been over whether this material is appropriate for the opera house. Ironically, one of the earliest criticisms lobbed at Klinghoffer suggested that its subject had been superficially plucked from the headlines to exploit a "trending" topic. In fact, beforeKlinghoffer reached the stage there had been two docudramas for television based on theAchille Lauro hijacking. Yet the real challenge the opera poses is to explore precisely what ismissing in our era of instantly accessible information and attention-grabbing headlines.Klinghoffer is concerned with what is behind the news- not in confirming what we already know.

"I didn't do it to be controversial or to be provocative," says Adams. He chose?to writeKlinghoffer precisely because he believes the material calls out for the?kind of illumination that is possible through opera. "Because opera is the most emotionally charged of all art forms, it is, more than fiction or film, the most appropriate expressive vehicle to address terrorism. Terrorism itself is a symbolic act. If you think of the attack on the World Trade Center or a suicide bomber in Iraq or Afghanistan, those terrorist acts are more than anything else symbolic acts. What we try to do in this opera is to penetrate that symbolism and to examine the narratives that led up to that."

Despite being called foolhardy by?some for taking on such a divisive subject, Adams says he was impelled "to find out what prompts these individuals to do what they do. What in their background, what in the mythology that they grew up with, forced them or dared them to take this action, this terrible, brutal decision to kill this man?"

"It's not an easy work, but I think it is?a profound work, which dares to examine some aspects of one of the most problematic conflicts of our age," says Tom Morris, the artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic. Morris is especially known for his production of War Horse, which won him a Tony Award for Best Director. For Klinghoffer, Morris asserts, Adams "commands a score of real emotional scale and absolutely wonderful precision."

The emotional complexity of the material prompted Adams to develop a correspondingly richer, psychologically resonant musical language. This takes?the form of a darker harmonic palette, more nuanced orchestration, remark-?ably extended lyrical passages, and a?new flowering of one of the composer's strong suits: his writing for chorus. While some elements are reminiscent of the driving energy of Nixon in China, overall Klinghoffer creates a sound world vastly different from Nixon's bright outbursts?of Pop Art-tinged "primary colors." The "Minimalism" tag to which Adams is often subjected represents a misguided way to think about his musical approach here. That style's churning pulses and recurring patterns merely appear as one part of a far more extensive vocabulary.

The Passions of Bach provided an important structural model, with their alternation of powerful choruses and intimate, soul-searching arias-an effective tool for underlining the shift in focus between individual and collective memory. In place of an overture, for example, the opera begins with a pair of monumental choruses: "The Chorus of Exiled Palestinians" and "The Chorus of Exiled Jews." Not even Verdi's Nabucco relies so strongly on the chorus to establish what Adams terms the opera's "oracular tone."

Yet Adams feels that Klinghoffer is "emphatically an opera," and indeed it is far from an oratorio, since Adams uses the reflections from the chorus to contrast with the realism of the story. The latter?he details as "the brutal, hard facts of the hijacking, with the death of Klinghoffer, and the interactions of the various people on the ship." The choruses might also?be said to perform a function we tend?to think is restricted to arias or smaller ensemble numbers.

"What makes the opera unique," says Morris, "is you have the combination?of these huge emotional pieces of music with very poetic text touching on the mythologies of the Palestinian people and the Jewish-Israeli people, mixed with an incredibly dramatic, vivid, human story that is articulated in the scenes."

Morris has high praise for the opera's fusion of music with the sonorous and poetic libretto but points out that this marriage also adds to the challenges of any attempt to bring Klinghoffer to the stage. Together, words and music establish a layer of present-tense action that plays out against a more reflective layer of memory. The entire opera is in fact framed retrospectively (as in Britten's Billy Budd), with the captain recalling what happened during the hijacking. An even deeper layer of ancient memory is voiced by a series of prominent choruses strategically positioned over the opera's span.

As a result, the real-world violence?in Klinghoffer takes place alongside a metaphorical, more abstract level of reflection. Morris points out that his staging, together with the set design by Tom Pye and video projections by Finn Ross, aims to convey this dualism of realism and metaphor. Laura Hopkins's costumes, for example, are realistic, but there is no literal boat on stage. "It's as if we're in some kind of mythological space," Morris says, "and the story is being projected onto that ... as if the vivid details of?the hijacking are being remembered by people for whom they are both crystal clear and present within a wider conflict."

The final act in particular includes some of the most deeply stirring music of all of Adams's work, including the "Aria of the Falling Body" for the murdered Klinghoffer and two arias for his wife, before and after she learns of his fate. Adams explains that the effect of Marilyn
Klinghoffer's first aria, which is about "the sadness of being old and the vulnerability of one's aging body," is to show that the opera "isn't just about this terrifying political event. It's also about people in love at the end of their lives, suffering, and finding joy in the support of each other."

Without question, The Death of Klinghoffer takes its audience to a?deeply uncomfortable place. "The most important thing about this opera is it doesn't assume that it has any answers to anything that it's addressing," Morris says. Klinghoffer "isn't over at the end. It's really about what people think about when they go home."

Should opera even be tackling such subjects? "In a world where we seem unable to understand the conflicts which continue to manifest themselves, once in?a while we should listen to the ways in which artists respond to them, because we might understand something new." -Thomas May

This article was first published online and in the Met's Season Book and Playbill in September 2014.



Videos