US Edition 
The Death of Klinghoffer, ENO, Seven magazine review
John Adams's political opera has waited 20 years for its London premiere – would that it had been longer, says John Allison
Two decades after its premiere in Brussels, John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer has finally reached the London operatic stage. The obstacles to its progress –which has been much less spectacular than the same composer’s Nixon in China – have generally been judged to be political, and the work is nearly always tagged as “controversial”: a perverse kind of PR to make it sound more interesting and significant than it actually is.
Based on the events of October 1985 when PLO terrorists commandeered the Achille Lauro cruise liner off the Egyptian coast, shooting the disabled American tourist Leon Klinghoffer and throwing him and his wheelchair overboard, this is hardly the anti-Semitic piece that it has been branded.
The murderers may utter the sort of anti-Jewish sentiments that go with the territory of being Palestinian terrorists, but Klinghoffer is portrayed as a good man, and the manner in which the chorus of exiled Palestinians changes into exiled Jews only underlines the studious even-handedness of it all.
Yet in a work that allegedly purports to reflect on the Israeli-Palestinian question, such a cold-blooded murder ought not to leave much room for moral debate. This is perhaps the wrong subject for the opera that Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman wanted to write – and the result is not just morally, but also artistically, feeble.
Adams, of course, is regarded as one of the great white hopes of contemporary music – a signal of desperation in the musical world. His score is unmemorable (not least the much-vaunted Aria of the Falling Body), a mixture of fizzing jingles and endless meandering parlando. Not even the excellent English National Opera orchestra and chorus, under the sympathetic baton of Baldur Brönnimann, can disguise that.
And if there is little music, there is even less drama. Goodman’s static libretto is elliptical, pretentious and banal, allowing no character development. Seemingly a self-help exercise devised by the Jewish-American poet turned Church of England rector, it is appropriately enough a curate’s egg.
ENO’s staging is excellent. Alan Opie’s dignified Klinghoffer leads a cast in which Christopher Magiera (Captain), Richard Burkhard (Mamoud), Michaela Martens (Marilyn Klinghoffer) and Clare Presland (Palestinian Woman) also stand out. In a co-production due to go to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Tom Morris (War Horse) and his team fill the stage with atmospheric video projections, making Judean hillsides dissolve into concrete walls and threatening seas.
Captions helpfully elucidate what this opera, a cheap-shot work in every sense, fails to explain.
To March 10; www.eno.org
This review also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with The Sunday Telegraph.
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