Anti-Semitism? The makers of the opera say such lines express the reality of Arab Jew-hatred and reflect badly on the terrorists. The librettist, Alice Goodman, born American Jewish, is now an Anglican vicar, an innocuous vocation.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a lobby group, advised the Met's manager Peter Gelb that restaging the opera in 2014 would fuel global tides of anti-Semitism. Gelb, declaring pride in his Jewishness (while consuming a New York Times bacon lunch), agreed to cancel cinema screenings of the opera, accepting in effect that its content was inflammatory but confining its influence to the few thousand civilised Manhattanites who could afford tickets to the Met. His compromise, a political fudge, left no one satisfied.
The opera went ahead in the teeth (or dentures) of an ineffectual demonstration, undermining the ADL's assertion that it might incite something stronger. Not, in fact, since Auber's La Muette de Portici fomented Belgian revolution in 1830 and Verdi's Nabucco defined Italian nationalism in 1842 has an opera provoked political violence. Opera is not that kind of art. If its impact was exhortative, our ancestors would have rushed out and raped their sisters after seeing Wagner's Ring.
What, then, is the purpose of opera in 2014? To make us think, to make us feel (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps the saddest aspect of the Met hoo-hah was its want of new thinking or true feeling. The fault lay in the work and its history.
The Death of Klinghoffer belongs to a different time. Its team — Goodman, Adams and the hyperactive director, Peter Sellars — came together in 1985 for Nixon in China, an opera that broke both the American taboo of respect for the office of President and the modern convention that opera must be "difficult". Adams's post-minimalist score was easy on the ear, while Goodman's text added credible humanity to aloof characters.
Premiered in Houston in 1987, Nixon in China reached the Edinburgh Festival the following year and, after TV and other productions, is regarded as a minor revival miracle for an embattled art form.
Praised for inventing a sub-genre of news opera, Sellars plucked The Death of Klinghoffer from a headline. Its inception was unhappy. The team claimed they had consulted the victim's family. Leon Klinghoffer's two daughters, in a note in the 2014 Met program, said they first saw the text at a Brooklyn production, months after its Brussels world premiere. "We were devastated by what we saw: the exploitation of the murder of our father as a vehicle for political commentary," they wrote.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a lobby group, advised the Met's manager Peter Gelb that restaging the opera in 2014 would fuel global tides of anti-Semitism. Gelb, declaring pride in his Jewishness (while consuming a New York Times bacon lunch), agreed to cancel cinema screenings of the opera, accepting in effect that its content was inflammatory but confining its influence to the few thousand civilised Manhattanites who could afford tickets to the Met. His compromise, a political fudge, left no one satisfied.
The opera went ahead in the teeth (or dentures) of an ineffectual demonstration, undermining the ADL's assertion that it might incite something stronger. Not, in fact, since Auber's La Muette de Portici fomented Belgian revolution in 1830 and Verdi's Nabucco defined Italian nationalism in 1842 has an opera provoked political violence. Opera is not that kind of art. If its impact was exhortative, our ancestors would have rushed out and raped their sisters after seeing Wagner's Ring.
What, then, is the purpose of opera in 2014? To make us think, to make us feel (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps the saddest aspect of the Met hoo-hah was its want of new thinking or true feeling. The fault lay in the work and its history.
The Death of Klinghoffer belongs to a different time. Its team — Goodman, Adams and the hyperactive director, Peter Sellars — came together in 1985 for Nixon in China, an opera that broke both the American taboo of respect for the office of President and the modern convention that opera must be "difficult". Adams's post-minimalist score was easy on the ear, while Goodman's text added credible humanity to aloof characters.
Premiered in Houston in 1987, Nixon in China reached the Edinburgh Festival the following year and, after TV and other productions, is regarded as a minor revival miracle for an embattled art form.
Praised for inventing a sub-genre of news opera, Sellars plucked The Death of Klinghoffer from a headline. Its inception was unhappy. The team claimed they had consulted the victim's family. Leon Klinghoffer's two daughters, in a note in the 2014 Met program, said they first saw the text at a Brooklyn production, months after its Brussels world premiere. "We were devastated by what we saw: the exploitation of the murder of our father as a vehicle for political commentary," they wrote.
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