LA Times, November 20, 2001

'Klinghoffer': Too Hot to Handle?

Opera: Boston Symphony Orchestra opted not to perform excerpts of John Adams' project based on a 1985 terrorist attack, but he isn't going quietly.

By MARK SWED, TIMES MUSIC CRITIC

Next week at Symphony Hall in Boston, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will perform a program that begins with Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 1, instead of John Adams' "Klinghoffer" Choruses. Therein lies a controversy.

Last month, the Boston orchestra managers e-mailed the composer that, for all their admiration of his music, they felt it would not be sensitive to the mood of the times to program the choruses, which are excerpts from the 1991 opera "The Death of Klinghoffer." They suggested substituting another major Adams work for chorus and orchestra, "Harmonium," with texts by Emily Dickinson. Adams did not agree to the change and asked that his music not be performed.

In various press reports on the East Coast, Adams has been characterized as very angry over this fracas, although he has said little about the situation publicly. Agreeing to comment to The Times on Sunday, Adams, in town to conduct the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra last weekend, suggested that disappointment came closer to describing the way he felt. "The cancellation of a performance was certainly something I could live with," he said, nursing bronchitis at the home of a local patron. He had not objected, for instance, when his popular fanfare "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" was removed for obvious reasons from a symphony program in London a week after the death of Princess Diana. But he felt differently about the "Klinghoffer" choruses being performed nearly three months after the Sept. 11 tragedy.

"I was concerned about what the reasons given for the cancellation had to say about classical music," he explained. "I do think that symphonies and opera companies are very skittish in this country, and I'm sorry that they are, because it confirms the distressing image of symphony-goers as fragile and easily frightened. That's really a shame, because I want to think of symphonic concerts as every bit as challenging as going to MOCA or to see 'Angels in America.'

"The reason that I asked them not to do 'Harmonium' was that I felt that 'Klinghoffer' is a serious and humane work, and it's also a work about which many people have made prejudicial judgments without even hearing it. I felt that if I said, 'OK, "Klinghoffer" is too hot to handle, do "Harmonium,"' that in a sense I would be agreeing with the judgment about 'Klinghoffer."'

The seven choruses from "Klinghoffer," Adams' opera about the Palestinian hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, provide broad philosophical comment on the situation in the Middle East. They concentrate on the landscape, looking at it as mysterious and powerfully religious. Although the first chorus is in the voice of Palestinians and ends with an expression of violence--"Our faith/Will take the stones he broke/And break his teeth"--that violence is but a minute in more than 40 in which the Israeli point of view is also expressed. The overall tone is reflective, difficult poetry of symbols and allegory.

Still that minute of violent music has been cited as causing the Tanglewood Festival Chorus anguish. A member lost her husband on one of the hijacked airplanes Sept. 11, and the chorus was said to feel uneasy performing the "Chorus of Exiled Palestinians." Robert Spano, guest conductor of the Boston Symphony program and an Adams champion, agreed that these might just be too tender times for such music.

Adams, who had not been told about the chorus members' situation until recently, said he certainly sympathized with their trauma, and he realizes that Spano and the Boston Symphony management "obviously suffered over their decision before they made it and clearly they have suffered after they made it." But still he feels that it was the wrong decision. "In the end, I think [it] was based largely on an assumption of a very timid and easily offended audience."

In daily life, Adams notes that "Americans now are eating dinner while they're watching bombs being dropped on Afghanistan, watching dead bodies being pulled from the rubble, watching those horrific images for the 100th time. Every American has done it. Why, then, is hearing the 'Chorus of Exiled Palestinians' in Symphony Hall too much to bear?"

Meanwhile the Boston Symphony will attempt to skirt controversy with Copland's symphony from 1924, a piece with its own kind of early Modernist violence. One contemporary review likened its "squalling" scherzo to the screaming of "a bewildered banshee which by some twist of locale has found itself at the Wailing Wall."

Still, there is nothing like the "Klinghoffer" controversy to awaken interest. Adams says that after the cancellation, one major American opera company, which he can't name, has expressed interest in producing the opera. A previously scheduled concert performance went forward in Amsterdam last month; another is scheduled for January in London, where a television film of the opera is also in production. Several European companies, he says, are also looking into productions.

All of this makes Adams wonder whether the Boston situation might simply be a tempest in a teapot. "I do really feel that if they had just gone ahead and performed the 'Klinghoffer' Choruses, there might have been a few upset people, but I think there would not have been much controversy. In fact, I'm almost certain that would have been the case."

 

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LA Times, Sunday, October 7, 2001

Seeking Answers in an Opera

Once too controversial for U.S. companies, "The Death of Klinghoffer" is now a work of the deepest relevance thanks to its exploration of terrorism from all viewpoints.

By MARK SWED

"The Death of Klinghoffer" requires that we identify with emotions driving actions we despise. MARTY SOHL

Serious times call for serious art, and classical music has responded. Beauty is balm, and the fervent beauty of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, for instance, has served us well in concert after concert as a national song of lamentation.

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms nurse nervous uncertainty. Their wonderfully rational music, whether it seeks to represent spiritual grandeur or simple elegance, offers us respite from the anxiety of a chaotic world.

But however valuable the soothing of wounded psyches may be, art can accomplish more. OnSept. 12, preferring answers and understanding to comfort, I put on the CD of "The Death of Klinghoffer," John Adams' opera about terrorists and their victims. Its characters are based on the Palestinians who hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 and on the crew and passengers they held hostage.

Opera is often called the most irrational art form. It places us directly inside its characters' minds and hearts through compelling music, often causing us to enjoy the company of characters we might normally dislike. Adams' opera requires that we think the unthinkable.

As a profoundly disturbing meditation on the tragic death of an innocent man, "Klinghoffer" hardly supports or apologizes for terrorism. But it does require, in the way that only opera can, that we identify with the emotions that drive actions we despise. And by presenting the terrorist act from all points of view, it becomes not just a study in suffering, a painting in the simple strokes of the banality of evil, but a wrenching panoramic expression of the complex interaction of motives and actions, all against a background of the biblical imperatives that both enliven the Middle East and tear it apart.

Although paid little attention in the past few years, "Klinghoffer" can tell us a lot about why the world is the way it is today, and our neglect of it, it is now clear, has been to our detriment.

The Achille Lauro hijacking riveted the world. The terrorists shot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old American Jew who used a wheelchair, and then they announced that they had thrown his body overboard.

When Adams began his opera, the image of Klinghoffer falling from the ship in his wheelchair was still fresh, and the times were charged. In the notes accompanying the Nonesuch recording, Michael Steinberg writes that Adams began it in 1989 while "the United States was lavishly supporting Saddam Hussein" and "completed it on 12 February 1991 while we were dropping 'smart bombs' down Baghdad ventilator shafts."

The premiere was held under tight security in Brussels one week after the end of the Gulf War. Controversy was inevitable, and the critical response included accusations of namby-pamby evenhandedness, of craven opportunism and of exploiting personal tragedy.

At one extreme, the opera was called a Zionist plot; at the other, Adams, director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman were denounced for being unashamedly pro-Palestinian. Goodman received death threats. The U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music later in 1991 was picketed by Jewish protesters. "Give me a break!" a woman sitting next to me at BAM loudly exclaimed in response to nearly every Palestinian remark onstage.

There were certainly those who recognized in the opera a rare insight into the most troubling and destructive political and cultural division of our age. But it was an opera ahead of its time, and it wasn't long before timid companies dropped "The Death of Klinghoffer" like a hot potato. San Francisco Opera mounted the Sellars production in 1992, but Los Angeles Opera and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, both part of the consortium of "Klinghoffer" commissioners, never did.

In a curious twist of fate, a renewed surge of interest in the opera has already begun in Europe. In February, the Finnish National Opera mounted a production by the British TV director Tony Palmer. Concert performances were scheduled in Amsterdam later this month and in London next January. Meanwhile, an avant-garde British stage and film director, Penny Woolcock, decided to make a film of the opera for British TV. On Sept. 11, as the airliners were flying into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Adams was in London rehearsing the singers in "Klinghoffer" for a soundtrack recording for that film. Neither he nor any of the other artists wanted to comment.

In the wake of Sept. 11, "Klinghoffer" shocks with inescapable, prescient power, even in an almost silly aria, a bit of mild comic relief sung by a passenger, a character called British Dancing Girl. She is accompanied by a snappy Minimalist version of '60s bubble-gum rock as she distinguishes between two of the terrorists: the dreamy, poetic Omar, who "kept us in ciggies the whole time" and the brutal Rambo, who slaps the hostages around. Actually, she observes, men like that aren't capable of much:

You watch out for the type
Who looks as if he wouldn't fight
If he were paid.

Because the music is cute, the observation doesn't immediately sink in. Now, look again at the seemingly soft, shy face of Osama bin Laden in the photographs.

"Klinghoffer," I was also reminded by a fresh listening, is one of the most beautiful operas written in my lifetime. But the beauty - in the music, the words, the memories, the images - doesn't always illuminate what we want it to.

The opera opens with a chorus of exiled Palestinians who sing:

My father's house was razed
In nineteen forty eight
When the Israelis passed
Over our street.

That house was a place of sacred hospitality, idyllic, and the music draws you in through simple sketchy melody that becomes ever more enticingly elaborate, like an Arabic chant. The images are sensual: On a hot day, coolness rises like a wave from a pure well, and one practically tastes it in the refreshing pulsing of the orchestra. But as the pulse increases, the feeling of rapt nostalgia mutates into rage, an electrifying, exhilarating climax with a shocking sentiment:

Let the supplanter look
Upon his work. Our faith
Will take the stones he broke
And break his teeth.

That sucker punch is thrown repeatedly in "Klinghoffer." Late at night on the ship, a terrorist, Mamoud, tunes into Arab radio stations and hears songs of his youth. Sad laments of parted lovers magically travel over the water, his own operatic singing matching the eloquence of melismatic Arab music. But again, almost imperceptibly, his nostalgia turns to memories of childhood, exploding metal, closing the eyes on the head of a decapitated brother.

Once we begin to share the characters' dreams, to feel their motivations, we become aware of the startling power of opera. No one protested two melodramatic television movies about the Achille Lauro hijacking, one starring Karl Malden, another with Burt Lancaster. The terrorists were comic-book villains. Tension was undercut by commercial breaks. But in "The Death of Klinghoffer," Mamoud is flesh and blood, one of those characters into whose dreams we are drawn without choice. And so the woman next to me at BAM offered her "give me a break" refrain as if it were a mantra to ward off evil.

Still, the opera does not side with the terrorists. Nor is it ultimately evenhanded, not after we've endured Klinghoffer's death and witnessed the unassuagable rage of his widow, Marilyn.

The death itself is one of the most moving in the history of an art form that would be nothing without dying. After Klinghoffer's body is thrown off the ship, his soul sings a very slow, time-stop aria as it falls through the water in a timeless journey to another world. The fall, staged by Sellars (whose idea the opera was) with choreographer Mark Morris, is a dance between Klinghoffer and his body: a dancer slowly drags the singer across stage on a flowing white shroud.

The opera ends with the ship captain offering his condolences to Marilyn Klinghoffer. He is a weak, vacillating character, and she won't have it. She sees through him, just as her husband had eloquently debunked the terrorists' claims of righteousness in an earlier aria. She is not eloquent. She is beyond words, beyond any affirmation of life, left with pure, raw emotion. Her last words are "I wanted to die."

And yet one does not leave the opera house devastated.

It is the audience's difficult role to sort through the contradictions and conflicts "Klinghoffer" raises, but Adams and Goodman offer help by turning to the model of Bach's passions, those penetrating tellings of the death of the Christ, from several points of view.

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