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 The opera, seen by some as a humanist masterpiece and by
others as anti-Semitic, depicts the murder of Leon Klinghoffer,
a Jewish man on a cruise with his wife aboard the Achille Lauro.
After his death, the killers threw the body of the retired New
Yorker overboard along with his wheelchair.
In 1991, less than six years after the hijacking, the opera made
its premiere in Brussels, receiving mostly favorable reviews and
generating little controversy. But a few months later when the
opera moved to the borough of Brooklyn in New York City,
Klinghoffer's home town, it touched a raw nerve.
The production received much angrier notices, including a
statement of outrage from Klinghoffer's daughters, Lisa and Ilse,
who called it anti-Semitic and biased. Those labels have dogged
the opera ever since.
On Monday, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, is
expected to join hundreds of protesters and 100 symbolic
wheelchairs at a rally outside the opera's Met debut at Lincoln
Center in midtown Manhattan.
Last month, a crowd demonstrating against the opera jeered
operagoers in evening dress as they made their way into the
Met's season gala opening, and the opera company has scrapped
plans to broadcast "Klinghoffer" internationally.
"The problem is this is not gutter-level anti-Semitism," said
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a trustee of the City University of New York
who is helping organize the rally. The Met was "the very highest
level of American culture," he said.
"The history of the Weimar Republic shows us when this type of
racism and anti-Semitism reaches this level of the culture,
society is really troubled," he said, referring to Germany just
before the rise of Nazism in the 1930's.
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The opera's libretto by Alice Goodman and its score by Adams have
been closely scrutinized, and critics have come to divergent
opinions.
Some say Adams reserved some of the opera's most beautiful music for
Klinghoffer's killers to romanticize their violence, and that the
work's opening "Chorus of Exiled Palestinians" is one of several
attempts to rationalize their crimes.
Defenders of the opera, such as the musicologist Robert Fink, say it
shows the humble, loving Klinghoffers to be the moral compass of the
work, while the four Palestinians are portrayed as tawdry,
self-aggrandizing murderers.
Tom Morris is directing the Met's new production after a successful
premiere two years ago by London's English National Opera, which
drew a single protester carrying a placard.
Morris says the opera is a tragedy that shows the human cost of an
old conflict, and says those who complain that it humanizes
Klinghoffer's killers miss the point.
"The fact is, they were human," he said, "and if there is ever to be
any solution to this kind of conflict, it has to be based on the
premise that they are human, however hideous the crime they
committed."
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Frank McGurty and Eric
Walsh)
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