The Death of Klinghoffer
The Death of Klinghoffer is an opera by the contemporary American composer John Adams to an English libretto by the poet Alice Goodman, based on a historical incident. First performance: Brussels, 1991.
The operas tells story of the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, and the resulting death of Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer. It was the center of a great controversy when it was performed in the United States in late 1991 and early 1992. A film version, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Adams, was directed by Penny Woolcock for the British television station Channel 4 in 2003.
The Music
The Death of Klinghoffer is written in the repetetive style of minimalist music made popular by composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Adams is inspired by the sacred oratorios of Johann Sebastian Bach, in which intervallic relationships such as affekt are used to evoke certain emotions. Other musical inspirations come from Arnold Schoenberg's Pierot Lunaire. Schoenberg's use of atonality and of sprechstimme is ridiculed when the same technique is used by the character of a flamboyant Austrian women.
The Klinghoffer Controversy
In a page-long article of the December 9, 2001, New York Times Arts and Leisure section, a noted musicologist, Richard Taruskin of The University of California denounced the opera and accused John Adams of "romanticizing terrorists." The opera tended to give many listeners the impression that the Palestinian terrorists were presented as men who were fighting for a noble cause. Many people held the belief that the opera was "anti-semitic," as it was picketed by members of the Jewish information league at its premiere in San Fransisco. After September 11, 2001, the work was also criticized as being "Anti-American," as Taruskin stated that "If terrorism is to be defeated, world public opinion has to be turned decisively against it... ...no longer romanticising terrorists as Robin Hoods and no longer idealising their deeds as rough poetic justice".