‘Klinghoffer,’ the
Opera: Biased and Banal
Warren Boroson
An opera about
the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians might have been absolutely
splendid. But one deep-seated defect of composer John Adams’s “The Death of
Klinghoffer” is that he, along with librettist
Alice Goodman, is biased against Israel. Another defect: They are intellectual
lightweights.
The opera has
gotten loads of free publicity lately, thanks to the Metropolitan Opera’s
decision not to broadcast the opera around the world come October but just on
stage in New York City. A number of leaders of Jewish organizations — including
Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League — had complained about the opera
to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, pointing out that it might inflame anti-Israel
sentiments abroad and lead to anti-Jewish incidents.
You don’t have
to have seen the opera, which is based on real events, to recognize that it
contains anti-Semitic elements. (I saw the filmed version, made in 2003,
conducted by Adams himself, with a screenplay by Penny Woodruff, who also
directed. The film seems to be more pro-Palestinian than the opera itself.)
The terrorist
called Rambo, one of four who hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985,
sings to Leon Klinghoffer, a Jew: “You are always complaining of your suffering
but wherever poor people are gathered they can find Jews getting fat. America
is one big Jew.”
Another terrorist,
Molqi, sings: “We are soldiers fighting a war. We are not criminals and not
vandals. We are men of ideals.” This is the hijacker who actually shot and
killed Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old disabled, defenseless Jew confined to a
wheelchair. (In real life, one of these “men of ideals” asked an elderly
Austrian couple if they were Jewish. When the man said yes, the gunman knocked
him to the ground and hit him in the
head repeatedly with his gun butt.)
The film begins with
black-and-white photography — not
historical footage — of Jewish settlers chasing Palestinian men, women, and children
out of their homes. (One of the children, we learn, is the mother of a
hijacker.) Later one sees Jews moving into the houses.
The film proceeds to
show much of the action abroad the ship through the eyes of the hijackers,
sometimes sympathetically. Even the most vicious hijacker, Rambo, who torments
Klinghoffer by shoving around his wheelchair, is shown in a flashback grieving
over a relative killed by the Israelis. Another gunman, Mamoud, sings about how
pleasant it was to view the dawn through the window of his house. One keeps the
hostages supplied with cigarettes. One weeps at the death of Klinghoffer;
another throws up. The poor terrorists!
From many of the
newspaper accounts, you might think that “Death of Klinghoffer” is a musical
masterpiece. But a number of leading critics, who had seen earlier performances
of the opera, had reservations.
Tim Page at
Newsday called the opera “pompous, turgid, derivative, and hopelessly
confused.” A Pultizer Prize-winning music critic, Page also objected to the
libretto’s portraying the terrorists as “real men … as opposed to the opera’s
nattering, ineffectual Jewish characters.” In the original version, a Jewish
family from New Jersey, the Rumors, bicker over finances and bathroom matters. That
family was later removed from the opera. That was apparently too much even for Adams
and Goodman.
I myself found
the music unmelodious and unmemorable.
Yes, “Death of
Klinghoffer” is obviously biased. The composer and librettist admit that they
had agreed to try to be neutral — pro and con Israelis, pro and con the
Palestinians. Hence, the title: not “murder,” just “death.” The late Samuel
Lipman, a renowned music critic, wrote in Commentary: “[T]he
pretense of not taking sides, of ‘even-handedness,’ is just that — a pretense.
For in treating the murder of Klinghoffer as a ‘death,’ and in viewing the
incident through the lens of moral equivalence, the opera for all practical
purposes endorses the claims of the Palestinian assassins.”
In agreeing to
be neutral, the two tipped their hands. Americans in general are not neutral. Recent
polls have found that 59 percent of Americans side with Israel, 13 percent with
the Palestinians.
The main message
of the opera — murky though it is — seems to be that, because some Palestinians
fled their homes and some were forced out of them during the war of 1948, today’s
Palestinians are justified in whatever they do to any Jews, including murdering
a disabled, elderly Jewish American civilian. It is the same demented thinking
that blames all Jews — everywhere, for all time — because a small group of Jews,
2,000 years ago, supposedly helped crucify Jesus. In short, this modern opera
engages in crude, time-dishonored anti-Semitic
thinking.
In case any
opera-goers fail to follow the argument, the filmed opera has the same actor,
playing an Israeli Holocaust survivor who
forces Palestinians out of their homes, wind up, years later, as a passenger
abroad the Achille Lauro. To make it obvious, he has the same pattern of scars
on his back.
The Jews aboard
the cruise ship are mocked. Whereas Burt Lancaster and Eva Marie Saint as the
Klinghoffers, in an earlier film, talk
about their love for each other, Mrs. Klinghoffer in the Adams/Goodman opera
chatters about illnesses.
The terrorists
are not just romanticized, as musicologist Richard Taruskin has complained, but
given the best music in the not-very-musically-interesting opera.
Asked about this
in an interview, Goodman lost her temper. Should the terrorists have been given
“ugly” music to sing? Well, how about appropriate
music? There’s fine music for villains. Verdi wrote arias for Iago, Gounod
wrote arias for Satan.
In fact, Goodman
reported that Adams (and producer Peter Sellars, who had come up with the idea
for the opera) wanted the terrorists in “Death of Klinghoffer” to be even more
praiseworthy.
She demurred. “They’re not Smurfs!” she told them. (Smurfs
are harmless, humorous cartoon characters.)
Goodman grew up
in Minnesota, the daughter of religious Jews. She converted to Christianity
after becoming sympathetic to the Palestinians. “Even
when I was a child, I didn't totally buy … the State of Israel being the
recompense for the murder of European Jewry….” She is now a rector in the
Anglican Church, living in England. She prepared herself to write “Death of
Klinghoffer,” she has said, by reading the Koran.
Whether someone who has renounced a religion is a good candidate
to write an opera dealing with adherents of that religion may be questionable.
In any case, critics have blamed Goodman for the platitudinous longueurs of “Death of Klinghoffer,” like the ending, which
goes on and on, and the pretentious, junky language (something has “grown
exponentially”; someone is a “rara avis”). She herself blamed the hostility
toward the opera for not writing any more libretti.
Adams loathed
two TV films already made about the hijacking, films sympathetic toward the hostages
and hostile toward the terrorists. (Besides the Lancaster-Eva Marie Saint film,
there was a Karl Malden-Lee Grant film.)
Adams and Goodman
had also worked together on an earlier opera, “Nixon in China.” That also had
its detractors. The New York Times chief music critic at the time, Donal
Henahan, called the work “fluff,” and “worth a few giggles but hardly a strong
candidate for the standard repertory.” James
Wierzbicki of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called the opera “more interesting
than good ... a novelty, not much more." TV critic Marvin Kitman, wrote: “There
are only three things wrong with ‘Nixon
in China’: One, the libretto; two, the music; three, the direction.
Outside of that, it's perfect.”
It is perhaps
telling that Samuel Lipman wrote in Commentary, “Sadly, the most
intriguing aspect of the production was also the most offensive: the
presentation of Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, as a lumpish,
often clearly menacing and altogether sinister figure, mostly silent but always
evil in aspect. Indeed, … Kissinger bears an uncomfortable resemblance to what
might have appeared in an illustrated anti-Semitic tract of the 1930′s.”
Adams
himself has said that his views on Israel and the Palestinians were strongly
influenced by Edward Said, the late Columbia University professor. Said claimed
to be Palestinian, but it turned out
that he had grown up as part of a wealthy family in Cairo. He was fiercely
anti-Israel, and wanted Israel to no longer function as a Jewish state — though
he conceded that Jews deserve a nation of their own.
Edward
Alexander, a retired English professor at the University of Seattle, has called
Said the “professor of terror,” and referred to “his thinly-veiled anti-Semitism and blatant
anti-Americanism.” Said’s reputation suffered when he was spotted, while in
Lebanon, throwing rocks across the border at Israeli soldiers.
Has “Death of
Klinghoffer” actually been “censored,” as some commentators have claimed?
Because it will now be shown in fewer places? “Censored” doesn’t seem to be the
right word. No doubt certain works of art can produce tragic consequences.
There are “copycat suicides,” sometimes called the Werther Effect after
Goethe’s novel about a young man whose suicide was emulated by other young men
at the time. (Norway may be the only country that now forbids the publication
of news about suicides, though many media are careful when they transmit such
stories.)
Another example:
The film “Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 silent movie directed by D.W. Griffith, celebrated
the monstrous Ku Klux Klan while portraying newly freed blacks (played by white
actors in blackface) after the Civil War as unintelligent and as rapists. When
it opened, riots broke out in Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities, with
whites attacking blacks. Chicago, Denver, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh refused to
let the film open. In Indiana, a white man, after viewing the film, murdered a
black teenager.
Beyond the possible
dire consequences of showcasing deeply controversial art, like depictions of
Muhammed, there’s the question of offensiveness. Did the Met want to offend the
Klinghoffer family? And offend Jews in general?
The Met had
ample precedent for what it did. Glyndebourne and the Los Angeles Opera declined
to present “Death of Klinghoffer,” and the Boston Symphony decided not to go
ahead and offer excerpts.
Other works of
art have been bottled up. A 1958 film version of “Porgy and Bess,” with Dorothy
Dandridge and Sidney Poitier, was withdrawn by the estate of the Gershwin
family apparently because African-Americans took offense at its depiction of black
violence and drug-taking. Walt Disney’s “Song of the South” has been withdrawn
because of its condescending attitude toward black people. And when is the last
time you had an opportunity to see “Birth of a Nation,” considered one of the
greatest of American films despite its crude racism?
True, certain
classic works of art are anti-Semitic, yet are performed today quietly and without
controversy. A few Wagner operas, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s
“Merchant of Venice.”
But I think it’s
safe to predict that “Death of Klinghoffer” will not become a classic, a permanent
fixture in the operatic repertory.
Commentary’s Lerman has written: “As ‘Klinghoffer’ makes clear, [Adams] has a very
limited number of musical tools…. The verdict, then, on Adams’s music, in ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ no
less than in the earlier ‘Nixon
in China,’ is that it is at best utilitarian, a means of occupying the
aural space….”
Peter Davis of New York
Magazine wrote in June 2003, “Leaving politics aside … what strikes me as most
offensive about the work is its sheer ineptitude…. Goodman’s libretto is worse
than naïve –- it fails on just about every level…. All [Adams]… has managed to
produce is a hopelessly meandering, tensionless score that sounds like the most
vapid New Age pap.”
In short, Alice
Goodman is no Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss’ gifted librettist. And
John Adams is no Richard Wagner — at least as far as writing music is
concerned.
