by Rabbi Arnold Saltzman
The Metropolitan Opera has announced that in the coming season it will have a new production, The Death of Klinghoffer, by American opera composer, John Adams, who is an important and established composer with libretto by Alice Goodman. In addition to the production, the Met had scheduled for the opera to be simulcast around the world.
Almost unworthy of noticing, this has caused an uproar of protests and defenses, by those who feel the work may be anti-Semitic and may stir up anti-Semitism, as opposed to those who defend the work saying this is an artistic and thoughtful rendering of the subject in a balanced manner.
What exactly is balanced about it? Why it gives voice to the Palestinian terrorists who hijacked a ship, the Achille Lauro, seized the passengers, shot Leon Klinghoffer in the head while he was wheelchair bound and then threw him overboard. This is a subject for an opera?
Whatever Happened to Figaro? Tosca has murder in it, yet it seems justified and Shakespearean. Verdi’s Don Carlo has the Auto-da-fe, the burning at the stake of Jews before the Spanish King and Queen, yet it is not meant to be balanced, rather it demonstrates the horror leaving it to us to condemn those responsible for perpetrating those horrors of history.
The librettist and composer, without the permission of the family, have taken a personal and tragic event and used the actual name of the victim and drama to stir up what? Understanding?
The purpose is to have sympathy for those who did this under the command of the PLO which now runs the West Bank now known as the Palestinian Authority. Nothing less.
This is art at its worst, even though Peter Gelb, the General Manager of the Met, described it as a ‘masterpiece.’ It well may be a musical masterpiece and it may well deserve a hearing which as of today it will receive probably to thunderous applause by opera buffs and aficionados who will cause ‘sold out’ performances. Clearly this is generating the kind of publicity only the ‘Rite of Spring’ by Stravinsky could have generated.
A photo in the news this past week showed the great African American singer Eric Owens (London Production) playing the role of the hijacker, standing with an automatic weapon, towering over an old Leon Klinghoffer in a wheelchair. The subtext of this photo in my mind is: “We are going to throw you, old handicapped Jewish man, into the sea and sing about it with a smile! Why? Because you are a stereotyped Jew, weak, feeble, and unable to do anything about it. Our historic dream Jewish man!” The photo says it all.
Yet, is that the image of Israel? Weak, feeble? Or is the Israel we know one which has fended off attacks over and over, and which unites Jews as a people and unites Israelis as a nation – for example recently as three teenagers were kidnapped. There is no weakness in the response, just determination, courage and strength. In addition, Israel has respect and love for someone in a wheelchair!
Leon Klinghoffer is one man, while the families of the 9/11 victims are not looking for a balanced explanation. In an age of terrorism, it should not be explained – it should be snuffed out, fought, and understood for what it is – another form of what we saw 70 years ago.
Years ago, in the 1990s I was on the Board of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick Museum, and a member of the music committee. A well known music group in Washington was invited, hired, to present an evening of Renaissance Music which included a ‘Renaissance Masterpiece’ of music. The words involved the story of a Blood Libel, the anti-Semitic lie, about a Jew who took a little Christian boy and killed the child to collect his blood for use in the baking of Matzah. This is the Big Lie known as the Blood Libel.
I brought the matter to the committee’s attention, and the producer of the program said well this is a masterpiece – we should hear it. I countered that if we did not have to pay for it, and it was done outside the concert and as a discussion of anti-Jewish themes then it might make some sense. However, the other committee members hearing the text and story were quick to say they wanted no part of it. It had no place in a Jewish Museum supported by people who wished to promote the arts and understanding. The concert was canceled.
The NY Times came out in support of the opera, and criticized the cancellation of the broadcast. They rightly said that if its OK to produce why not broadcast it? Yet they missed the point made by Abraham Foxman which is that there is a rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe and many places around the world. Would such a work fan the flames of hatred? I say that it would, and as a result of the Met fiasco there will be productions for years to come. I think Peter Gelb should go, along with the opera. The damage inflicted to the Met will not be undone and could easily weaken a major arts institution.
Who will sponsor this? Who will ignore the boycotts or picket line that will surely happen for each performance in a city with the largest Jewish population in the world?
Anthony Tommasini writes in support of the opera, yet chooses this lyric excerpt:
“The ensemble voices the roiling grievances and hatreds of the Palestinians. Yet the bitter words are set at first with haunting lyricism. Phrases spin off in elegiac melismas. The orchestra is on a low simmer, nervous and stealthy, until the final moments, when the Palestinians vent their anger in threatening, piercing music, singing:
Let the supplanter look
Upon his work. Our faith
Will take the stones he broke
And break his teeth.”
“This episode segues into the Chorus of Exiled Jews. Again, the inspired music is powerfully ambiguous: thick-textured and harmonically luminous, yet agitated and eerie.
Since the 1991 premiere of “Klinghoffer,” these paired choruses have been seized upon by the opera’s detractors as evidence that its creators are suggesting the moral equivalence of these Jews and Palestinians. I can understand this reaction, but do not share it.”
I cannot share his enthusiasm. The world does not even deny its anti-Jewish rants, and especially in the world of music, there is an open hatred which friends returning from Vienna say they find shocking.
In writing symphonies and opera on themes related to the Jewish experience, I have always sought to counter this type musical argument. For an evenings entertainment its problematic, and I predict that it will damage the Met in NYC, one of America’s greatest artistic institutions. As a child I was member of the Metropolitan Opera Company Children’s Chorus, and I have special feeling for those memories and years when during the day I went to Yeshiva Rambam and in the evening I sang at the opera: Carmen, Wozzeck, Tosca, La Gioconda, Boris Gudenov, Turandot, Macbeth, and Cavalleria Rusticana.
I wonder if there is a young Yeshiva student in the chorus who will be singing the words quoted and thinking as I do – have we learned nothing from the past, from the Holocaust, from the great composers who look for a better more harmonious world?
I will bet that if the Met asks John Adams to remove the offensive words he will cry ‘murder!’ Artists have the right to do whatever they want? What do you think?
It might give new meaning to the title or even make a new work: The Death of the Opera – Klinghoffer.