An exciting night at the opera: ‘Klinghoffer’ opening dominated by protest and heavy police presence

What an exciting night at the opera.  As I rode in the cab to Lincoln Center, the driver said there was quite a big protest in front of the opera house.  He interrogated me on what I was going to see.  Scared that he might be Israeli, I looked him straight in the eye and calmly gave him a synopsis of the opera.  Thankfully, he was Turkish!  He said not to worry, but don’t go to close to the protesters.

It was pretty wild, approaching the opera house.  Lincoln Center was surrounded by police officers and police vehicles.  I had to pass through a narrow break in the police line.  There were protesters all around, holding signs and haranguing people as they went towards the opera house.  One lady protester was in a mechanical wheelchair.  Luckily, I was able to enter, and meet my companion, Scott Roth.  There were policemen stationed throughout the inside of the opera house.  They probed through my purse with their wooden stick.

“The Death of Klinghoffer” is a contemporary opera, based on the 1985 murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a real person. This Jewish-American individual was aboard a cruise ship when it was hijacked by Palestinians.  At one point during the hijacking, he was shot and killed, and his body thrown into the ocean.  The music for the opera was written by John Adams; the libretto, written by Alice Goodman.

According to The New York Times, some Jewish groups have criticized the work.  I don’t fully understand why.  Quite a few of the audience members were wearing yarmulkes.

The music was beautiful and hypnotic at times.  I thought the Alice Goodman libretto was great, and very intellectual.  Each of the characters was compelling.  I kept thinking, “who am I, in this story?”  For example, there is a lady passenger who hides in her cabin during the entire hijacking.  It’s terribly sad because she was supposed to be on vacation.  She has a bit of chocolate and fruit in a fruit basket, and she has to move about silently in her room, barefoot, so that the hijackers don’t know she is there.  Her aria was very compelling, very soulful.

At one point, someone in the audience yelled out, again and again, “The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgiven!!”  Other audience members shushed him.  He must have been led away by police officers, because, pretty quickly, the shouting stopped.

My friend Scott thought the protesters were old and aggressive.  When we stood on the balcony during intermission, we could see that it was a large protest, of at least a couple hundred people.  They were protesting what happened to Mr. Klinghoffer.

Tickets are still available for “The Death of Klinghoffer.” The opera will also be presented October 24 and 29, and November 1, 5, 8, 11 and 15.   It is possible to buy tickets online at metopera.org or call the box office: (212) 362-6000.

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Thanks for the report. I have seen the opera on DVD, and was impressed by it. I am disappointed I will not hear a radio broadcast of this performance on Live at the Met.

Is Philip Munger involved in this production ?

Philip Munger says:
June 18, 2014 at 1:45 pm
just,
I have tried to follow the performance history of Death of Klinghoffer since its premiere in 1991. At the time, I was seriously considering writing an opera about Edward Teller’s role in Project Chariot, a late 1950s plan to use four hydrogen bombs to create a new harbor in northwestern Alaska. I wanted to model it somewhat after John Adams’s first opera, Nixon in China, so was interested in how Adams’s voice was developing in his second opera.
All through its history, some individuals and Zionist organizations, and members of the Klinghoffer family have objected to one aspect of the opera or another. The first objection to which Adams responded was his depiction of some of the Klinghoffer’s friends, and his creation of fictional characters to portray them. They were perceived to be caricatures of some sort of Jewish stereotype. Adams deleted the scene. At least two scholarly papers have been written about how this deletion marred the opera’s form and balance.
The most authoritative person to claim the opera is anti-Semitic and romanticizes terrorism is the curmudgeonly Richard Taruskin, now a professor of musicology at Cal Berkeley.

As recently as last winter, the LA Opera pulled out of a co-production of the opera, leaving Long Beach Opera to produce it alone, which was a heavy financial burden for the company.

The most often-performed extract from the opera is a set of choruses, depicting displaced Jews and displaced Palestinians, in turns. They are choral masterpieces. Before September 11th, 2001, the Boston Symphony and chorus has programmed the work to be performed that fall. They cancelled after numerous complaints that the choruses “romanticize terrorists.”
The composer’s responses to criticisms and cancellations over the work’s 23-year history are studies in restraint. The opera is more like an oratorio or passion than what we generally consider to be an opera. More opera-like than most of those by fellow minimalist Philip Glass, Adams really does succeed in having a neutral point of view. Apparently that isn’t enough for some who are upset whenever Palestinians are treated even-handedly in comparison to Israelis or to Jews.

On the other hand, my cantata, The Skies Are Weeping, which you refer to above, does not take a neutral point of view. When some local Zionist friends suggested I change it to give it a neutral point of view, I replied that to do so would not honor Rachel Corrie’s memory. My work, like Adams’s, has been criticized for “romanticizing terrorism,” by which the complainants are referring to Rachel Corrie. I find that characterization of her to be deeply offensive.
I was looking forward to seeing this opera in the HD format. Adams’s Dr. Atomic was presented that way by the Met two seasons ago, in a vibrant production. This sucks.

I have a dim memory that when the opera first came out, some people criticized it for trashing Palestinians — tarring them with the brush of terrorism.

Be that as it may, clearly, today, a lot of the same people who help keep USA’s politics on I/P in place also feel that any depiction of I/P (even an opera) must be slanted their way, must be their propaganda rather than whatever (other propaganda, or other balance) the composer wanted.

Can we wonder at the horrible coverage of I/P in NYT, NPR, WNYC?

I guess if we don’t want works of art to romanticize terrorism, we won’t be seeing Exodus anytime soon.

Meanwhile – ‘Israeli soldiers blindfold and detain 11 year old disabled child’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkIPsGnMqQw#t=17