The New York critic Manuela Hoelterhoff, who saw the opera in Brussels, found that it "turns the sport-killing of a frail old Jew in a wheelchair into a cool meditation on meaning and myth, life and death". The operative word here is "cool". What Manuela deplored was the opera's emotional neutrality, allied to its eagerness to be politically, leftishly progressive. She declared the printed foreword by Peter Sellars to be "repulsively amoral and culturally pretentious".
Much turgid ink has flowed since those telling words. The world has moved on, and down. The Death of Klinghoffer cannot be seen today without reference to ascending levels of Middle East atrocity. Beside mass bombings and aid-worker beheadings, the shooting of a cruise hostage can seem, by comparison, almost chivalric.
Alice Goodman raises other qualms. In a recent interview with the Jewish Daily Forward, the vicar says she withdrew from a further Adams and Sellars opera, Doctor Atomic, because Adams and Sellars saw the story as a pact between a brilliant Jew and the science devil. "There's no way you can tell that story with [Robert] Oppenheimer as Faust and not have it be anti-Semitic," she said.
A whiff of bacon clings to The Death of Klinghoffer, even in the version toned down for the Met. I saw the work in a Channel 4 TV production and at English National Opera and I don't think it's an important or edifying opera; both Nixon and Doctor Atomic are superior works. I dislike Goodman's pulpit language and Adams's inability to write a duet. The greatest fault, however, is the title.
Klinghoffer's daughters have a case: the makers of this opera had no right to take the name of an innocent victim. Doing so showed lack of respect — worse, a lack of sympathy. But then people who go on cruises can't expect sympathy, can they? And makers of opera cannot be called to account.
Much turgid ink has flowed since those telling words. The world has moved on, and down. The Death of Klinghoffer cannot be seen today without reference to ascending levels of Middle East atrocity. Beside mass bombings and aid-worker beheadings, the shooting of a cruise hostage can seem, by comparison, almost chivalric.
Alice Goodman raises other qualms. In a recent interview with the Jewish Daily Forward, the vicar says she withdrew from a further Adams and Sellars opera, Doctor Atomic, because Adams and Sellars saw the story as a pact between a brilliant Jew and the science devil. "There's no way you can tell that story with [Robert] Oppenheimer as Faust and not have it be anti-Semitic," she said.
A whiff of bacon clings to The Death of Klinghoffer, even in the version toned down for the Met. I saw the work in a Channel 4 TV production and at English National Opera and I don't think it's an important or edifying opera; both Nixon and Doctor Atomic are superior works. I dislike Goodman's pulpit language and Adams's inability to write a duet. The greatest fault, however, is the title.
Klinghoffer's daughters have a case: the makers of this opera had no right to take the name of an innocent victim. Doing so showed lack of respect — worse, a lack of sympathy. But then people who go on cruises can't expect sympathy, can they? And makers of opera cannot be called to account.
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