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Tabloid Opera
| Article
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20154 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
1,035 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence O'Toole
Lawrence O'Toole writes for Entertainment Weekly and other
national publications. |
The Death of Klinghoffer is a triumph of publicity. Few, if any, modern operas have entered into the world of the arts with as much fanfare as this one, from its premiere in February 1990 in Brussels to its latest venue, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The triumvirate of composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, and bad-boy director Peter Sellars is, in the parlance of the modern marketplace, the hottest around.
In 1987 their Nixon In China, which also played at BAM, became a cause celebre wherein politics and human drama meshed unusually and effectively with what has long been regarded as the highest of the arts, opera. The subject matter of The Death of Klinghoffer is a hotbed of political conflict: the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean and the killing of hostages, including a wheelchair-bound American Jew named Leon Klinghoffer. And so the very idea of Klinghoffer became an event long before its execution.
The resulting opera is a memorable work. Although the daughters of Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer have denounced the work, even calling it anti-Semitic, The Death of Klinghoffer is a powerful piece of music-drama and a moving, human story in which both sides--Palestinians and Jews--of what is apparently the world's most unsolvable political problem are given equal and eloquent voice.
It is so eloquent primarily because of John Adams' glorious score, into which an enormous amount of heartfelt thought--passion--has gone. Klinghoffer is a much warmer work that Nixon. Two of the most powerful sequences in the opera are devoted to choruses of exiled Palestinians and exiled Jews, each with its clear and rightful case for redress. Set as it is on a ship afloat in an isolated sea, Klinghoffer is, in a way, about homelessness on a global level.
The rise and fall of the sea of music in these two choral sections pulls one in like an undertow. Adams conveys the mystery and eerie calm of the ocean in these two choruses and in a Captain's monologue with a shimmering swell of notes and subtly changing rhythms. These sections, and two anguished arias of pain from Marilyn Klinghoffer, represent an enormous stride in Adams' maturity as a musician.
But at times the music's wit--musical quotations as diverse as TV-theme music and Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries--while momentarily diverting, points to a flaw in Adams' work at this stage of its development. Such wit seems motivated more by what modern
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