SEPTEMBER 7, 1991 ON “DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER” BY EDWARD ROTHSTEIN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
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When Defamatory Politics Masquerade as Art
The Death of Klinghoffer, an opera that aims to create sympathy for the terrorist hijackers of the Achille Lauro, returns to the New York Metropolitan Opera tonight. Edward Rothstein, reviewing the piece when it first opened in 1991, had some nice words for the conductor and the singers. But he also found the music “either atmospheric or emotionally elementary” and the message, delivered through a contrastingly “empathetic evocation of the [Palestinian] intifada” and mockery of the terrorists’ Jewish victims, politically rigged and morally repugnant. In Rothstein’s summary:
The work itself turned out to be more about its intended reception than about its subject, more a matter of pitch than substance. Without historical insight, without profound revelation of character, without the advertised symmetry [between Jews and Palestinians], without even a coherent libretto and convincing score, The Death of Klinghoffer becomes simply another monument to an avant-garde that is repeating old political and aesthetic gestures while acting as if it is daringly breaking new ground.
September 7, 1991
Review/Opera; Seeking Symmetry Between Palestinians and Jews
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
All through Thursday night’s New York premiere of the much-awaited “Death of Klinghoffer,” one knew exactly what the creators wanted a listener to think:
Setting the story of the 1985 Palestinian hijacking of a luxury cruise ship and the killing of a wheelchair-bound American Jew not on an ocean liner but in an Erector Set of scaffolding and ramps would treat yesterday’s newspaper reports as mythic, ritualistic repetitions of timeless struggles.
Telling the story in highly stylized language (by Alice Goodman) and music (by John Adams), using formalized gestures developed by Peter Sellars, having Mark Morris choreograph his dancers with hyperbolic poses and frenetic movements would raise audiences’ reactions above knee-jerk notions.
Using choruses that seemed to stand outside the plot and having the same singers play multiple roles of terrorists and Jews would undo all preconceptions of identity. The Palestinians and the Jews would be shown as symmetrical victims of each other’s hatreds. Like the principals’ previous opera, “Nixon in China,” the work would be beyond politics. “On the ‘politically correct’ scale, we don’t even register,” boasted its director, Mr. Sellars, last spring when the work was unveiled in Belgium.
That, at any rate, was what the work wanted us to feel and think; it was also the kind of reaction its premiere sometimes inspired.
But in actuality the performance, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (four more performances are scheduled, starting tonight), was something else entirely.
Though expertly conducted by Kent Nagano and well sung by the cast (particularly James Maddalena and Sanford Sylvan), Mr. Adams’s music has a seriously limited range. He creates languid but ominous murmurings of ostinato figures, frenetic pulsings of rising pitches that indicate approaching climaxes, and poplike riffs used for mockery and irony. That is about it; the music is either atmospheric or emotionally elementary, while the text is set in so unmusical a fashion that the surtitles are required to decipher it.
But the music is just a sign of deeper problems. Consider just the prologue. It begins with the cast arrayed on stage in contemporary street clothes (worn by every character throughout the work). The women sing a “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians”: “My father’s house was razed/In 1948,” reads Alice Goodman’s libretto, “When the Israelis passed/Over our street.”
The accompanying orchestra pulses delicately, the vocal lines elegiac, ornamented at times in nearly Arabic fashion. The men then join in a description of the resulting destruction in a crescendo until by the end of the chorus the singers are spitting out their words fortissimo, the orchestra churning as singers threaten that stones will now break the Israelis’ teeth.
This empathetic evocation of the intifada suddenly comes to an end as a family gathers on a couch and chair on a raised platform in midstage. They are the Rumor family, Jewish friends of the Klinghoffers. Mr. Rumor sits crankily with a television remote control in hand, squabbling with his missus over the tourist items she picks up every time they travel. She berates him for spending so much time on the toilet overseas, and also manages to suggest to her son that he check out Myrt Epstein’s daughters. The music burbles along like a theme song from a 1950’s television show, raising its voice along with the family’s. In the midst of this bourgeois fricasee, Mrs. Rumor spots an item in the newspaper about Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and is outraged.
Then begins, as if on cue, the languorous chant of the “Chorus of Exiled Jews,” a set piece that is a sort of tourist’s recollection of devotional sentiment about the Promised Land, mentioning sights like military barracks, the Western Wall, movie houses picketed by Hasidim, the Dome of the Rock, and a goat in an orchard. The words have no historical weight, though the Daughter of Zion poetically (and tendentiously) informs her tourist visitors: “I am an old woman. I thought you were dead.”
The work continues to give seemingly historical resonance to Palestinian wounds. There is even an extended narrative dance of Hagar and her son exiled by Abraham, wandering in the desert and giving birth, in the biblical account, to the Arab people. The plot doesn’t gentrify the terrorists’ acts, but their victims continue to be little more than variations of the offensive Rumors: narrow in their focus and vision, singing primarily about their physical condition, revealing the simple-minded historical blindness that the avant-garde has long attributed to the bourgeoisie. Even Marilyn Klinghoffer’s final aria is just a display of purely individual pain that leaves one cold. Who could tell from this work just what the Jewish side really is — a sort of touristy attachment to an ancient land?
All this would not matter if the opera did not go out of its way to lay claim to historical insight and sensitivity. It might even have worked without such wisdom. But “The Death of Klinghoffer” is constructed not out of traditional narrative but out of poetic monologues, meditations and musings, creating an extraordinary challenge for the text in evoking character and ideas.
The libretto, though, is not up to the challenge. Even when the protagonists’ faces are projected on a giant television screen, they remain distant figures, remote from either sympathy or horror. The text seems almost casually random in its use of imagery and portentous statement. Ideas are undeveloped, cryptic passages are chanted, mixed metaphors created, references left unclear. When this miscellany is combined with Mr. Adams’s film-scorish impressionism, the result is a monochromatic stage show that relies on the audience to bring along the appropriate sentiments.
“Klinghoffer,” with all these failings, is the product of expert international packaging. Its $1 million cost is being shared by the international opera houses at which the work is being presented. The reasons are clear: it seemed to promise a revivification of contemporary opera, sensitive treatment of controversial subjects, new audiences for an increasingly dour international cultural scene. And despite the lukewarm reaction the work seemed to receive on Thursday night, the companies may yet see a return on their investment.
But the work itself turned out to be more about its intended reception than about its subject, more a matter of pitch than substance. Without historical insight, without profound revelation of character, without the advertised symmetry, without even a coherent libretto and convincing score, “The Death of Klinghoffer” becomes simply another monument to an avant-garde that is repeating old political and esthetic gestures while acting as if it is daringly breaking new ground. THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER
Opera in two acts by John Adams, libretto by Alice Goodman; director, Peter Sellars; musical director, Kent Nagano; choreography, Mark Morris; set design, George Tsypin; costumes, Dunya Ramicova; lighting, James F. Ingalls; sound, Jonathan Deans; projection, John Boesche. With the Mark Morris Dance Group, the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Concert Chorale of New York. Presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Alma Rumor and Omar . . . Stephanie Friedman
Jonathan Rumor . . . Thomas Young Harry Rumor and Leon Klinghoffer . . . Sanford Sylvan Captain . . . James Maddalena Swiss Grandmother, Austrian Woman and British Dancing Girl . . . Janice Felty First Officer and Rambo . . . Thomas Hammons Molqi . . . Thomas Young Mamoud . . . Eugene Perry Marilyn Klinghoffer . . . Sheila Nadler Dancers Alyce Bochette, Joe Bowie, Ruth Davidson, Tina Fehlandt, Dan Joyce, Olivia Maridjan-Koop, Clarice Marshall, Rachel Murray, Mark Nimkoff, Kraig Patterson, June Omura, Mireille Radwan-Dana, Guillermo Resto, Keith Sabado, William Wagner, Jean-Guillaume Weis and Megan Williams
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