For a little while, it seemed as though the controversy over John Adams’s 1991 opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer”—a dramatization of the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, during which members of the Palestine Liberation Front murdered the Jewish-American businessman Leon Klinghoffer—was beginning to fade. When the opera was first seen in New York, at BAM, in 1991, it sparked outrage in onlookers who felt that it unduly favored the Palestinian point of view, not least because the score begins with a lamenting chorus of Palestinian exiles (“Israel laid all to waste”). Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer, Leon’s daughters, issued a statement saying that the work “appears to us to be anti-Semitic.” A second “Klinghoffer” controversy erupted in 2001, when, in the wake of September 11th, the Boston Symphony decided to forego playing excerpts of the opera. But, in recent years, stagings both in America and abroad have passed without much comment. In 2009, the Juilliard Opera mounted an effective concert performance, and earlier this year the Long Beach Opera offered a production that had earlier appeared at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, one in which the work takes on a cool, timeless sheen.
Last week, though, the brouhaha resumed. The Metropolitan Opera is scheduled to present “Klinghoffer” this fall, and the Anti-Defamation League, citing the concerns of the Klinghoffer daughters, has been pressuring the company to change its mind. A flurry of right-wing editorials suggested, in the words of a New York Post headline, that the work “romanticizes one NYer’s murder.” None other than Michele Bachmann, speaking before the Faith and Freedom Coalition, denounced the Met for showing sympathy toward terrorists. Amid the furor, the Met settled on a compromise: it would go ahead with the production but cancel the transmission planned for its Live in HD series, which goes out to movie theatres around the world. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, declared that while he did not believe the opera to be anti-Semitic, he had become persuaded that it “would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.”
It was, as a Times Op-Ed said, a “lamentable” decision, and also a ludicrous one. Tom Service, in the Guardian, attacked the logic behind it: “If you think the piece is not anti-Semitic … then you cannot also hold the position that the opera would exacerbate ‘rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.’ ” To be sure, a non-anti-Semitic work can be used toward anti-Semitic ends, but there is little evidence that this mournful, meditative score has fed the passions of bigots, European or otherwise. Alice Goodman, who wrote the libretto both for “Klinghoffer” and for Adams’s first opera, “Nixon in China,” told the Guardian: “The whole idea of pogroms emerging from the simulcast of a modern opera is more than faintly absurd.” It is true that the terrorist characters spout hateful slogans—“America is one big Jew,” one says—but a dramatist cannot address hatred without giving hatred a voice onstage. And the terrorists’ words are counterbalanced by the utterances of the victims. In response to the Met cancellation, Adams said, “My opera accords great dignity to the memory of Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer, and it roundly condemns his brutal murder.” Notably, Marilyn has the last word:
Anyone who thinks that “Klinghoffer” romanticizes murder probably has not sat through it to the end. Indeed, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, admits that he has yet to see the opera.
This is not to say that “Klinghoffer” is an innocent victim of arbitrary attacks. It ventures onto extraordinarily difficult terrain, playing with stereotypes on both sides of the conflict, and no one should be surprised that it remains contentious. It has inspired a meaty debate in critical and scholarly circles, with the musicologist Richard Taruskin leading the prosecution and his colleague Robert Fink mounting a defense. Taruskin, in a 2001 article, charged that, in its original version, the opera catered to “anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-bourgeois” prejudices—a sitcom-like scene involving a chattering Jewish-American family was later dropped—and that those prejudices remained visible even in the revised version. Fink, in 2005, responded that, in the end, the work celebrates precisely those middle-class values that Taruskin believes it rejects: the “life-affirming virtues of the ordinary, of the decent man, of small things.” That two intelligent commentators should reach such radically disparate conclusions points to an abiding problem at the heart of “Klinghoffer”: its pensive, ambivalent attitude toward present-day issues about which a great many people feel no ambivalence whatsoever.
There will be occasion to reflect more deeply on “Klinghoffer” next fall—if, in fact, the Met staging goes ahead. What concerns me now is the sense that the grand old house is on an erratic course, and that the latest “Klinghoffer” flare-up is the result not merely of an intractable ideological dispute but also of irresolute management. Having decided to stage the opera some years back, Gelb should have been better prepared for the inevitable explosion. His statement will likely satisfy no one: if, as he argues, the opera is prone to fanning anti-Semitism, critics will surely respond that it should not be performed at all. The episode is yet another example of maladroit public relations from a manager who, when hired, was supposed to have shown nimbleness in such matters. One recalls a 2012 incident in which Gelb attempted to squelch criticism of the Met in the pages of Opera News, a Metropolitan Opera Guild publication, and also the epic fiasco of Robert Lepage’s “Ring” production, which cost the company an amount of money that reporters have yet to pin down precisely.
Especially disheartening is the fatalistic tone that Gelb has struck in discussing the Met’s biggest crisis, “Klinghoffer” notwithstanding: the ongoing negotiations with the sixteen unions that represent the Met’s great beehive of performers and workers. Gelb has said that expenses have become ruinous and that employees must accept cuts. The unions have responded by blaming Gelb for rising expenses and diminishing receipts. The underlying financial situation is difficult for an outsider to assess, and Gelb may have valid points to make. But he loses credibility when he blames wider cultural trends for the Met’s particular problems: “There aren’t enough new audience members replacing the older ones who are dying off. It’s no secret that the frequency of operagoing in the U.S. is decreasing.” Such actuarial language is unworthy of the leader of one of the world’s largest arts institutions. Incidentally, Gelb has revealed that seventy-five per cent of the Live in HD audience is sixty-five or older. “Those are people who are so old that they can’t go the Met, to the theatre, anymore,” he has said. This, apparently, is the same audience that would have become bloodthirsty after a viewing of “The Death of Klinghoffer.”
The Met does have a problem with declining attendance, but the downward trend has happened a little too quickly to be explained by large-scale demographic shifts. A report prepared by the Met’s orchestral players and Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians has a telling graph, tracing attendance at performances of Wagner’s “Ring” from the 2008-2009 season—when the old Otto Schenk production was seen for the last time—to 2012-2013, when the Lepage staging had its first revival. Attendance declined from 97.43 per cent of capacity to 75.06 per cent. Did a quarter of the audience die off in four years? Or have people simply peeled away after a string of bad shows?
The Met cannot shake the sense of being adrift. The image that Gelb is trying to project—stylish, theatrically savvy, up-to-date without being avant-garde—has proved insubstantial. The unions are hinting at the need for a change of leadership, although such a move seems unlikely, given that the Met board awarded Gelb a new ten-year contract in 2012. In that year, he earned a generous salary of $1.8 million. When that figure, which includes benefits, surfaced last week, Tino Gagliardi, speaking for the A.F.M., told the Times, “Local 802 doesn’t take any issue with the general manager of the Met earning a competitive salary. Our position is that the person needs to be effective in that position.” This is a fair point, and the “Klinghoffer” imbroglio underscores it.
Photograph by Dylan Martinez/Reuters/Corbis.
