Seen and Heard International
Opera Review
ADAMS The Death of Klinghoffer
Howard Reddy, Elif Ezgi Kutlu, Charles Unice, Frédéric
Antoun, James J. Kee, Hanan Tarabay, Alexander Tall, Lishir Inbar,
Brenden Patrick Gunnell, Elizabeth De Shong; The Philadelphia Singers;
Curtis Symphony Orchestra; Curtis Opera Theatre concert production,
conducted by David Hayes, directed by Susan Fenichell; Perelman
Theater at the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, 18 February 2005 (BJ)
The title did not seem to me promising: the “death,”
not the “murder,” of Klinghoffer, which makes the
terrorist hijacking of an Italian cruise ship off the coast of
Egypt in 1985, leading to the killing of a wheelchair-bound Jewish
passenger, sound like merely an event that happened, rather than
a criminal act that was committed. Doubts about the moral stance
of John Adams’s opera have surrounded it, at least in the
United States, from the start. Director Susan Fenichell’s
program note mentioned the protests that greeted its first American
productions in Brooklyn and San Francisco in 1991 and 1992. The
opposition, she recounts, “centered on the opinion that,
by its very even-handedness, the opera justified the terrorists’
actions and, therefore, implicitly both the terrorization of the
Achille Lauro passengers and crew and the killing of
Leon Klinghoffer.” As a result, though the work has had
a number of productions lately in a number of European cities,
and has been recorded both on CD and, two years ago, on DVD, it
had until this month been performed only once in the US (in 2001,
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music again) since those initial 1991
productions.
I have not previously encountered Klinghoffer, so last
Friday’s one-off concert production by the Curtis Opera
Theatre offered my first opportunity to come to terms with the
piece, and also to form my opinion on the morality/amorality/immorality
question. The performance itself seemed exemplary. David Hayes,
the music director of the Philadelphia Singers, conducted with
a sure and sensitive hand, his chorus covered itself with glory,
the students who make up the Curtis Symphony Orchestra played
with their customary precocious authority, and there were no weak
links in the line-up of ten soloists. There was no ambitious staging,
just a touch of stage movement – the orchestra was in the
pit – and some simple but effective lighting devised by
Troy Martin-O’Shea, but this was as much as was need to
get the opera’s message across.
So far as that message is concerned, as it happened, I nearly
deprived myself of the chance to receive it clearly. I found the
long first act so tedious that I had to conquer a strong inclination
to go home at intermission. For one thing, there was no characterization
in the true operatic sense. All the characters sang music devoid
of personal differentiation – melodic lines that could equally
well have been sung by any one of them. The choral writing was
powerful and atmospheric. But even here Adams’s sense of
timing seemed to have deserted him, so that in the opening chorus,
for instance, which laments the Palestinians’ eviction from
their homes, a long gap was left at one point between two lines
that belonged together, and a third line of quite different import
then followed much too quickly. Add to this my inability actually
to distinguish more than a few words of the text without looking
at the supertitles, because both choral and solo voices were to
a large degree covered by the relatively heavily scored orchestral
part (itself lacing in variety), and you will understand my impulse
to cut my loss of time and leave.
Well, I am heartily glad I didn’t. The second act is so
far superior to the first that it could almost have been written
by a different composer, or at least perhaps by the same composer
at a different stage in his career. Now at last we were offered
music that responded pointedly to the various characters’
situations, and a general pacing that shifted to excellent dramatic
effect from phase to phase of the story. And the way in which
this was accomplished has, as it happens, everything to do with
informing my opinion about the work’s problematic “even-handedness.”
For it was only when Leon Klinghoffer, from his wheelchair, began
in the impressive person of baritone Alexander Tall to berate
the hijackers that I felt I was listening for the first time in
the evening to a real, individual human being. Here at last was
a man, and a Mensch. His contempt for what he saw as the hypocrisy
of the terrorists in citing the loss of what they saw as their
unjust eviction from supposedly ancestral lands stood out in stark
contrast with what we were hearing from the hijackers themselves.
From this moment everything came into moral focus for me. I do
not pretend to know what John Adams’s intention was in regard
to even-handedness, or sympathy, or blame. But a sentence like
(I quote from memory) “The day my enemy and I sit down peacefully
together, and discuss things, and work toward peace, on that day
our hope will die, and I shall die” seems to me the kind
of pronouncement that, in any sensibly ordered society, would
be clearly seen as evil, or indeed as pure insanity. Today, thanks
to the offenses that Political Correctness has committed against
common sense, we are required to “get into the minds”
of the perpetrators of such vileness, and even to set it on a
level of moral equality with the views of those who hate nobody,
and seek only fairness, and believe in the efficacy of rational
discourse.
So, no, I do not think that The Death of Klinghoffer
is a work of exculpation. Yes, it shows us why, justifiably or
not, terrorists feel the way they do, presenting the positions
of both sides with a degree of dispassion that leaves judgment
to the listener. But to any listener not hopelessly enslaved to
parti pris only one judgment – though in all conscience
a complex one – is surely possible.
Postscript: Since I wanted to respond to the work itself without
being swayed by even the composer’s own account of his purpose,
I have deliberately finished writing the above review before reading
John Adams’s statements about The Death of Klinghoffer
in an interview with Elena Park published at Andante.com in 2001.
Some of his comments are particularly relevant to the point I
have been trying to make.
“Terrorism,” he said, “is just the ignition
point in the opera. The deeper, more complex themes are what resonate
in the mind as one leaves the theater. Americans are in danger
of becoming so hardened and desensitized by years of consuming
the television news and the daily papers that they can’t
imagine a representation of a story like the Klinghoffer event
being anything other than a cliché melodrama with ‘evil’
terrorists and ‘innocent’ victims. Terrorism is evil
and everyone who experiences it suffers immeasurably. But there
are reasons why a terrorist behaves the way he or she does, and
we would be foolish and self-deluding not to question why. . .
The Death of Klinghoffer treats the murder of Leon Klinghoffer
as the tragic event it was. In that sense I saw him very much
as a sacrificial victim and his murder was not all that different
from the crucifixion that is at the heart of the Bach Passions.
Both Jesus and Leon Klinghoffer were killed because they represented
something that was suspect and hated. But the opera doesn’t
simply stop here; it also gives voice to the other side. We look
into the minds and souls of the Palestinians and see what might
have driven them to produce a generation of young men easily willing
to give up their lives to make their grievances known.”
It seems, then, that Adams’s position, albeit different
in emphasis, is not far removed from what his opera made me feel.
Though I think the first half of the work could have been more
effectively written, I am grateful for having had the experience
of The Death of Klinghoffer, and grateful also to the
Curtis Opera Theatre for its superb presentation.
Bernard Jacobson
