This afternoon, the final performance for this season of the opera The Death of Klinghoffer took place at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC. This performance was originally supposed to be HD-transmitted to movie theaters. However, back in June, under severe pressure and accusations, mainly from American Jewish organizations that lean heavily wing-nut, that the opera is anti-Semitic and 'glorifies terrorism', Metropolitan Opera general director Peter Gelb cancelled the HD-transmission. This, in turn, started a counter-protest with accusations of censorship against the anti-TDoK forces. I haven't traveled to NYC for this production, so I obviously can't comment on the performance itself. (If anyone here on DK has seen it, I would love for you to comment here.) But there is also the whole controversy surrounding the protests against the work, where I can comment, however superficially.
Even if you have not seen the opera (and even if you are an opera-phile, it's very unlikely that you have, since the work has been staged only on 4 occasions in the USA since its world premiere in 1991), if you were around in 1985, you'll remember the story of the elderly and wheelchair-bound Jewish-American Leon Klinghoffer, who was on a Mediterranean cruise with his wife Marilyn on board the 'Achille Lauro'. 4 Palestinean terrorists hijacked the ship, and murdered Leon Klinghoffer and threw his body overboard into the Mediterranean Sea. Needless to say (so I'll say it, of course), this was a revolting and unforgivably disgusting act. However, you could argue that the opera protesters with equal viciousness in their way, even though no one has died as a result of the opera. More below the flip.....
First, if you want to read reviews of the first night, I would advise that you click through to Anne Midgette's WaPO review, where AM has done yeoman's (yeowoman's?) work in compiling pretty much all the reviews in one place. Note that she has included not only newspaper reviews, but blog reviews as well. Beyond the reviews, there has been so much written about this controversy in newspapers and on-line newspapers, blogs, the whole bit, that I literally cannot over it all or link to it all. But if one starts from the Met's own site, this page, as wisely as possible under the circumstances, states:
"See it. Then decide."
However, the not-totally surprising irony of the situation is that not only had the overwhelming majority of the protesters never seen the opera (again, understandable, given the extreme paucity of productions in the US of the work), but they had not bothered to listen to the
Nonesuch commercial recording of the work, or watched
DVD of the Penny Woolcock TV movie adaptation of the opera. Nor did they bother generally even to read
the libretto by Alice Goodman, which the Met has linked to from
this page. It is true that the terrorist called "Rambo" in the opera (which gives you an idea of Goodman's culture-political inclinations) has crudely and viciously anti-Semitic lines, but of course he does, as that fits his character. Portraying such vicious bigotry on stage does not condone it.
One of the most revealingly idiotic protesters against the opera was Jeffrey Wisenfeld, whom the NYT once described as a "conservative Democrat", who said this, as captured in a video posted on this article (emphasis mine):
"You will be made to destroy that set before we're finished. We are going to be back here - everyone here and many, many more - every night of the Klinghoffer opera until the set is burned to the ground."
Oh my, my, my, or I could say
oy vey. Memo to Jeffrey Wisenfeld, you thuggish, bigoted, tactless, ignorant, moronic, bullying jerk. You are Jewish. Using the phrase "burned to the ground" is not a very smart choice of words to express your protest at this opera. Do you need explanation as to why?
It wouldn't surprise me if a group of protesters has shown up outside the opera house each night of the run of TDoK to protest. That is perfectly fine, of course. The irony is that, according to this article by Michael Cooper in the NYT, it hasn't worked, except maybe among people who wouldn't have gone to see the opera anyway:
"Since John Adams’s 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, opened last week at the Metropolitan Opera to street protests calling for it to be boycotted, it has sold more tickets than any other opera currently at the Met, company officials said.
But sales data so far suggests [sic] that the controversy and coverage generated by Klinghoffer may turn out to be neither box office poison nor box office gold: Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said he expects the opera ultimately to earn 70 to 75 percent of its potential ticket revenue, about average for recent seasons."
In general, as reported earlier in the past year and a half or so, Met Opera sales have been eroding, which seems symptomatic of the struggles that lots of arts organizations have been facing in a slow-drip manner for years (such as noted in recent SNLC's on the end of Washington University's Ovations! series after this season). The next passage in Cooper's article notes:
'Advance sales for Klinghoffer were weak, as some opponents of the opera - many of whom had not seen it - charged that it was anti-Semitic.....But sales picked up after the opera opened, and music critics weighed in on the piece offering an array of reactions. Critics from a wide range of publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, rebutted the charge of anti-Semitism in their reviews.
In fact, speaking of the
WSJ, no less than SCOTUS Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to see the Met Opera production, and as reported
here, commented:
'Justice Ginsburg, who is Jewish, said she sympathized with the daughters, but disagreed about its depiction of their parents.
The opera "is a most sympathetic portrayal of the Klinghoffers. Both of them come across as very strong, very brave characters….There was nothing anti-Semitic about the opera......
"The terrorists are not portrayed as people that you would like. Far from it. They are being portrayed as bullies and irrational. There is one very dramatic scene of a Palestinian mother raising this child, his toy is a gun from when he’s five years old, and she’s raising him so that he will one day do a very brave act that will result in his own death and then he will go to paradise. It was chilling."
FWIW, it should also be noted that Peter Gelb is Jewish-American, and David Robertson, the conductor for this production, is married to Orli Shaham, who is Jewish-American. So as a Gentile, Robertson would be expected to be quite sensitive to charges or overtones of anti-Semitism in the work, and could have said "no" to conducting the work if he felt that this was an issue. He evidently had no such concerns. (Also, Robertson has long conducted the music of John Adams, so it's not a surprise that he would have gotten the offer to conduct the work at the Met.)
Back in 2011, Opera Theatre of St. Louis staged the opera, in only its second US full scale production since the 1991 run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (which the Klinghoffer daughters had seen, and vehemently protested afterwards, in particular a scene that depicted fictional Jewish-American neighbors of the Klinghoffers, the Rumors, in an apparently unsympathetic manner (discussed in this academic article by Robert Fink, which you might have difficulty accessing). Here, though, OTSL did everything in advance to avoid potential tension, by holding community forum discussions on the opera and the I-P conflict, bringing in outside speakers for that, and in general, doing as much as they could, for the relatively limited audience that cares about opera, to educate people on the situation. The result: no disruptions or protests at any of the performances here. The Klinghoffer daughters did send a pro forma protest statement about the staging of the opera, which OTSL noted, but of course the production went ahead. By contrast, Gelb pretty much fumbled things promptly, as he did in the contentious labor negotiations. From across the pond, Tom Service in The Guardian had this commentary on Gelb's mishandling of the cancellation of the HD-cast.
It would thus be easy to give a caricatured picture of the anti-TDoK protesters that they don't have the stomach to handle an opera that dares to allow the Palestineans to express their grievances on a dramatic stage, and that John Adams and Alice Goodman have written an operatic masterpiece that all houses need to stage. It's not quite that way, because the opera is a flawed creation, for artistic reasons beyond political considerations. Much of the music seems to noodle along in the 'stereotypical' style of John Adams in his late 1980's phase of minimalism. Dramatically, as many have noted, it's much more of an oratorio than an opera as such, in that not a lot of "plot" happens, as the structure of the work is rather detached and abstract, avoiding the "Bermuda shorts" dramatic treatment (which, of course, Penny Woolcock's film uses, since that's a film and not a video of a stage performance). Regarding the libretto, Midgette critiques Goodman's work here thus:
'Even the strongest music cannot redeem a libretto as diffuse and verbose and full of blather as Goodman’s tedious Klinghoffer text. It drones on and on without actually being sure of what it wants to say, and obfuscating rather than clarifying its points in the name of “poetry” and “art,” neither of which it serves.
Goodman was already guilty of this in Nixon in China, but it’s more obvious in Klinghoffer, because the subject is more incendiary and the pacing much slower. You have plenty of time to notice, in other words, that the opera lacks a strong point of view. It throws out a lot of ideas and takes refuge behind the mantle of art to avoid actually thinking them through (the Palestinian scenes, in Tom Morris’s Met production, were a lot more pointed and incendiary than the Jewish ones)."
Yet even AM acknowledges, ultimately:
"Warts and all, Klinghoffer has survived for 23 years for a reason: it still represents a level of originality, certainly musically, that lifts it above much of the herd of carefully workshopped, safe contemporary American operas."
Alex Ross of
The New Yorker summed things up in
this Tweet:
"In the end, the protest failed completely. Marilyn Klinghoffer had the final word, and John Adams received a huge ovation."
Yet that's not completely true, because the protesters achieved cancellation of the HD-cast, of course. So in that sense, 'the terrorists won', via forced cultural censorship, and depriving audiences who could not get to the Met the chance to 'see' the production, if only at one remove, and judge for themselves. However, in one extremely meta sense, regarding the question of how much the HD-casts have drained live audiences at the Met, the protestors unintentionally highlighted that issue, because if you wanted to see the production and indeed judge for yourself, and you live in the NYC area, you couldn't go to the movie theater. You had to go to the Met itself, to experience it in person. Evidently, people did.
With that, you can:
(a) Talk about this work, or
(b) Observe the standard SNLC protocol.
Or both, although the 'both' characterization seems a bit weird to state in this particular instance.....