on John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer
Nov. 6th, 2014 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI saw John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer last night. I am of the opinion now that it is mildly anti-Semitic, more strongly anti-Palestinian, and also that it is dramatically, morally, and artistically bad. I could also throw in ageist, ableist, and sexist, but this is the Met we're talking about, and I'm unsure how much of that is the fault of the staging. Probably a fair share.
It opens with a pair of choruses, from the Chorus of Exiled Palestinians and the Chorus of Exiled Israelis. I'd heard a lot about these choruses in the run up, accusations from Zionist organizations that these choruses lied about the origin story of the current Israel-Palestine conflict. I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far, but not because I think these choruses aren't misleading. What nobody had told me was that these are UNISON CHORUSES.- 30-60 singers communicating the same idea at once, as if speaking for all Palestinians or all Israelis. Imagine! Telling a century of bloody history in two voices, as if those experiences spoke for nations. It's grotesque. It's laughable. [It's also the opposite of the reason Adams's Nixon in China works so well. Nixon in China begins and ends with a cacophony of voices.] So while the opening choruses left me cold and a little angry, I thought perhaps that might be the end of it. We'd zoom in on the human drama, we'd leave these caricatures of Israeli and Palestinian life behind, and we'd sing a song of despairing, heartbroken hope.
NOPE.
I mean, before I go into that, let me say that of these two caricatures, the Palestinian was far less sympathetic and more offensive. Its arc was basicallY: We used to have beautiful, primitive and exotic Arab homes (eek, the Orientalism), but the Israelis destroyed them in 1948, so we want to kill all of them. The Israeli arc was: We left Europe with nothing, we came to Israel out of desperation, we rebuilt our lives and the land, and all we got for it was more suffering and hardship and conflict. I don't particular enjoy the Jew as Victim narrative, and I work pretty actively against it in my own art, but given a choice between Jew as Victim or Palestinian as Bloodthirsty Murderer, I'll take Jew as Victim any day. In case it is unclear from the sarcasm, FUCK YOU JOHN ADAMS. FUCK YOU ALICE GOODMAN.
It takes a hell of a lot for me to be offended by a representation of the Palestinians. I am, you know, a politically right wing Jewish hawk who spends a lot of time on the alert for Anti-Semitism. I was incredibly skeeved out by the way the Palestinians were represented in The Death of Klinghoffer. I wouldn't have been skeeved out, I think, if it hadn't been for the choruses, but the unison choruses had the effect of seeming to suggest "All Palestinians are this way. All Palestinians suckle incoherent hatred for Jews from their mothers' breast." And that is absolute bullshit. [It's the same bullshit, in fact, that made me so angry at Caryl Churchill's "Seven Jewish Children". Remember how mad we got when Churchill thought it was acceptable to suggest Israeli mothers were saying "Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed /Tell her they're terrorists /Tell her they're filth" and "tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they're animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldnt care if we wiped them out"? I see no reason not to get just as angry when Adams and Goodman suggest the same thing of the Palestinians. Especially, as in the Churchill case, with no counterpoint offered.]
After these nightmare choruses, the opera attempts to tell individualized stories, but only halfheartedly. The setting of the show is in a kind of memory space... the captain of the Achille Lauro and several other survivors are at an event where they are retelling their stories, and the music and the staging drift back and forth between this narration and, I suppose, reenactments of their memories of the events. The memories of these non-Jews and non-Palestinians are privileged over the actual principle actors in the conflict, a sense of privilege that at times was the only source of (inadvertent) comic relief in the show for me. When Mamoud, the terrorist most fully humanized by the awkward libretto, speaks of his interest in music to the captain, the captain tells him "If only you would sit in a room with Jews and say these things, there would be peace." I thought it was a laugh line, a classic example of the kind of clueless solution outsiders come up with for the conflict. But it wasn't. The captain, voiced by star baritone Paulo Szot in this production, is the opera's protagonist. This was Goodman's version of a prayer for peace. Goodman's comeback for Mamoud is pretty typical of her writing for the terrorists: "The day that we sit in a room with Jews and have peace, that is the day that I die." Seriously, what the hell kind of research did Adams and Goodman do before writing this opera? It came off, repeatedly, like the narrative that would be formed by a bunch of clueless Americans sitting in a bar spouting off about their solutions to the world's problems. Based on having watched the 6 o'clock news once or twice.
The memories frame has another problem: It strips most of the actual drama out of the work. If you're doing Hamlet, you have to struggle with the fact that nearly everyone in the audience knows how it'll end. You make it work by trusting in Shakespeare. Hamlet takes place so in the moment that it doesn't matter if you know where it's headed, you are gripped by it. Everyone knows the ending of The Death of Klinghoffer, too, but because of Adams's jumps between his frame story and the actual drama of the Achille Lauro, there is no sense of immediacy. As soon as something dramatic happens- something sad, scary, maddening, powerful- the characters step back and analyze it, from their retrospective place as witnesses to a tragedy that wasn't theirs and which they still do not understand. Any attempt to actually individuate is sacrificed to the haze of history.
As a result, Leon Klinghoffer, the title character, gets two arias. (My program note calls it sketching his character with narrative economy.) His wife gets two arias, the last a sloppy, fumbling final aria that desperately grabs for meaning it can't seem to find. The Klinghoffers barely exist as human beings. Goodman builds their characters by checklist: affectionate if vague and commonplace memories of their life together stand in for actual conversation between the couple, actual demonstration of affection. I don't, in fact, think there is any conversation at all between Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer in the opera.
It's no wonder the Klinghoffers' children are offended by the work. It treats their father like a fetish object for a disturbing pseudo-Christian soteriology built on Bach's version of the Passion. I'd read about the Passion element of Death of Klinghoffer before viewing, because it is chief among Adams's defenses for 'humanizing' the Palestinian terrorists. They struck me as a bad idea then; seeing them implemented was actually worse. It was unmeasurably awful to see the Leon Klinghoffer die on stage (and the gunshot sounds the Met implemented were louder and more upsetting to me than any I can remember in any play I've ever seen), but what made it worse was when he afterward ascended to heaven in a column of white light, after what appeared to be an ableist parody of the Lamentation of Christ: Klinghoffer rising from his wheelchair as three attendants appeared behind him and wheeled it away. NO. FUCK NO.
I'm told by Wikipedia that Alice Goodman converted to Christianity during the process of writing Klinghoffer and became a rector in the Church of England. It shows in her text. The libretto is littered with codewords of the Passion, like someone clumsily trying to impose a new structure on the world around them. It is pretty damn insulting to see someone take the story of the struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a complicated multipartisan fight for dignity, humanity, and human comfort, and tell us that it's actually the universal struggle of mankind for Christian-style salvation.
And unlike some of the terrible operas I have sat through at the Met for the sake of the beautiful music, I was not that impressed overall by Adams's music. There were breathtaking moments, especially in the choral writing, but they were rare, and there were equally wrongfooted moments. Why the hell did Adams's score use a sitar? And Adams's recitative writing seemed vexed by Goodman's difficult, wordy libretto. His respect for the libretto's odd rhythms forced odd rhythms into his vocal writing. It was conversational, but in the way where you hear someone pretentious talking and you think "Who the hell talks like that?"
I don't know. I wanted to like it. I think Adams's Doctor Atomic is a masterpiece of modern opera, and I wanted to see more from that well. I probably would have even forgiven some anti-semitism if it had come from a thoughtful, sincere, emotionally resonant place. The Death of Klinghoffer missed by so much that it wasn't even in the same room.
It opens with a pair of choruses, from the Chorus of Exiled Palestinians and the Chorus of Exiled Israelis. I'd heard a lot about these choruses in the run up, accusations from Zionist organizations that these choruses lied about the origin story of the current Israel-Palestine conflict. I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far, but not because I think these choruses aren't misleading. What nobody had told me was that these are UNISON CHORUSES.- 30-60 singers communicating the same idea at once, as if speaking for all Palestinians or all Israelis. Imagine! Telling a century of bloody history in two voices, as if those experiences spoke for nations. It's grotesque. It's laughable. [It's also the opposite of the reason Adams's Nixon in China works so well. Nixon in China begins and ends with a cacophony of voices.] So while the opening choruses left me cold and a little angry, I thought perhaps that might be the end of it. We'd zoom in on the human drama, we'd leave these caricatures of Israeli and Palestinian life behind, and we'd sing a song of despairing, heartbroken hope.
NOPE.
I mean, before I go into that, let me say that of these two caricatures, the Palestinian was far less sympathetic and more offensive. Its arc was basicallY: We used to have beautiful, primitive and exotic Arab homes (eek, the Orientalism), but the Israelis destroyed them in 1948, so we want to kill all of them. The Israeli arc was: We left Europe with nothing, we came to Israel out of desperation, we rebuilt our lives and the land, and all we got for it was more suffering and hardship and conflict. I don't particular enjoy the Jew as Victim narrative, and I work pretty actively against it in my own art, but given a choice between Jew as Victim or Palestinian as Bloodthirsty Murderer, I'll take Jew as Victim any day. In case it is unclear from the sarcasm, FUCK YOU JOHN ADAMS. FUCK YOU ALICE GOODMAN.
It takes a hell of a lot for me to be offended by a representation of the Palestinians. I am, you know, a politically right wing Jewish hawk who spends a lot of time on the alert for Anti-Semitism. I was incredibly skeeved out by the way the Palestinians were represented in The Death of Klinghoffer. I wouldn't have been skeeved out, I think, if it hadn't been for the choruses, but the unison choruses had the effect of seeming to suggest "All Palestinians are this way. All Palestinians suckle incoherent hatred for Jews from their mothers' breast." And that is absolute bullshit. [It's the same bullshit, in fact, that made me so angry at Caryl Churchill's "Seven Jewish Children". Remember how mad we got when Churchill thought it was acceptable to suggest Israeli mothers were saying "Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed /Tell her they're terrorists /Tell her they're filth" and "tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they're animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldnt care if we wiped them out"? I see no reason not to get just as angry when Adams and Goodman suggest the same thing of the Palestinians. Especially, as in the Churchill case, with no counterpoint offered.]
After these nightmare choruses, the opera attempts to tell individualized stories, but only halfheartedly. The setting of the show is in a kind of memory space... the captain of the Achille Lauro and several other survivors are at an event where they are retelling their stories, and the music and the staging drift back and forth between this narration and, I suppose, reenactments of their memories of the events. The memories of these non-Jews and non-Palestinians are privileged over the actual principle actors in the conflict, a sense of privilege that at times was the only source of (inadvertent) comic relief in the show for me. When Mamoud, the terrorist most fully humanized by the awkward libretto, speaks of his interest in music to the captain, the captain tells him "If only you would sit in a room with Jews and say these things, there would be peace." I thought it was a laugh line, a classic example of the kind of clueless solution outsiders come up with for the conflict. But it wasn't. The captain, voiced by star baritone Paulo Szot in this production, is the opera's protagonist. This was Goodman's version of a prayer for peace. Goodman's comeback for Mamoud is pretty typical of her writing for the terrorists: "The day that we sit in a room with Jews and have peace, that is the day that I die." Seriously, what the hell kind of research did Adams and Goodman do before writing this opera? It came off, repeatedly, like the narrative that would be formed by a bunch of clueless Americans sitting in a bar spouting off about their solutions to the world's problems. Based on having watched the 6 o'clock news once or twice.
The memories frame has another problem: It strips most of the actual drama out of the work. If you're doing Hamlet, you have to struggle with the fact that nearly everyone in the audience knows how it'll end. You make it work by trusting in Shakespeare. Hamlet takes place so in the moment that it doesn't matter if you know where it's headed, you are gripped by it. Everyone knows the ending of The Death of Klinghoffer, too, but because of Adams's jumps between his frame story and the actual drama of the Achille Lauro, there is no sense of immediacy. As soon as something dramatic happens- something sad, scary, maddening, powerful- the characters step back and analyze it, from their retrospective place as witnesses to a tragedy that wasn't theirs and which they still do not understand. Any attempt to actually individuate is sacrificed to the haze of history.
As a result, Leon Klinghoffer, the title character, gets two arias. (My program note calls it sketching his character with narrative economy.) His wife gets two arias, the last a sloppy, fumbling final aria that desperately grabs for meaning it can't seem to find. The Klinghoffers barely exist as human beings. Goodman builds their characters by checklist: affectionate if vague and commonplace memories of their life together stand in for actual conversation between the couple, actual demonstration of affection. I don't, in fact, think there is any conversation at all between Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer in the opera.
It's no wonder the Klinghoffers' children are offended by the work. It treats their father like a fetish object for a disturbing pseudo-Christian soteriology built on Bach's version of the Passion. I'd read about the Passion element of Death of Klinghoffer before viewing, because it is chief among Adams's defenses for 'humanizing' the Palestinian terrorists. They struck me as a bad idea then; seeing them implemented was actually worse. It was unmeasurably awful to see the Leon Klinghoffer die on stage (and the gunshot sounds the Met implemented were louder and more upsetting to me than any I can remember in any play I've ever seen), but what made it worse was when he afterward ascended to heaven in a column of white light, after what appeared to be an ableist parody of the Lamentation of Christ: Klinghoffer rising from his wheelchair as three attendants appeared behind him and wheeled it away. NO. FUCK NO.
I'm told by Wikipedia that Alice Goodman converted to Christianity during the process of writing Klinghoffer and became a rector in the Church of England. It shows in her text. The libretto is littered with codewords of the Passion, like someone clumsily trying to impose a new structure on the world around them. It is pretty damn insulting to see someone take the story of the struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a complicated multipartisan fight for dignity, humanity, and human comfort, and tell us that it's actually the universal struggle of mankind for Christian-style salvation.
And unlike some of the terrible operas I have sat through at the Met for the sake of the beautiful music, I was not that impressed overall by Adams's music. There were breathtaking moments, especially in the choral writing, but they were rare, and there were equally wrongfooted moments. Why the hell did Adams's score use a sitar? And Adams's recitative writing seemed vexed by Goodman's difficult, wordy libretto. His respect for the libretto's odd rhythms forced odd rhythms into his vocal writing. It was conversational, but in the way where you hear someone pretentious talking and you think "Who the hell talks like that?"
I don't know. I wanted to like it. I think Adams's Doctor Atomic is a masterpiece of modern opera, and I wanted to see more from that well. I probably would have even forgiven some anti-semitism if it had come from a thoughtful, sincere, emotionally resonant place. The Death of Klinghoffer missed by so much that it wasn't even in the same room.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-06 05:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-06 05:32 pm (UTC)I spotted this post this morning: http://forward.com/articles/208527/aside-from-that-mrs-klinghoffer-how-did-you-like-t/ which largely agreed with my feeling about the Christian/Western nature of the storytelling.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-06 06:00 pm (UTC)Sheesh.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-07 02:03 pm (UTC)It's always upsetting when people you admire create works you find so unadmirable.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-07 01:21 am (UTC)It is pretty damn insulting to see someone take the story of the struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a complicated multipartisan fight for dignity, humanity, and human comfort, and tell us that it's actually the universal struggle of mankind for Christian-style salvation. Oh man, because what the world needs most is more things viewed through the frame of Christianity, obvs. Yuck.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-07 02:23 pm (UTC)The Klinghoffer children were given a page in the program to respond to the opera. Personally, I didn't find the statement too effective as a textual argument, but that wasn't the point. The point was just to register the childrens' anger: You made an entertainment out of our father's death. We are angry about this.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-08 02:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-09 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-09 07:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-10 12:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-07 08:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-07 02:58 pm (UTC)I do actually really love Bach's St. Matthew Passion (I have a Thing for Bach oratorio), but poking around reading about it vs. Klinghoffer, it sounds like they took exactly the wrong things from it, ugh. (I mean... I could see how it might be really interesting and thoughtful... but sounds like this wasn't it... and UNISON CHORUSES WHAT?! Knowing it's based on a Bach Passion makes that even MORE nonsensical!)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-07 03:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-07 09:14 pm (UTC)