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My father, who knows nothing about opera but who has taught me virtually everything I know about fighting against anti-semitism, sent me a link to the ZOA's protest of the Met's upcoming staging of John Adams's "Death of Klinghoffer", an opera about the 1985 murder of an elderly Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, by Palestinian terrorists who had hijacked the boat he was vacationing on. Readers of this blog who pay attention to my opera posts know that not only have I bought tickets to see "Death of Klinghoffer", but I have noted my particular excitement to see it performed. [Since I began writing this post, the Met has announced that it will go forward with the performances, but will not simulcast the performance to theaters. This does not substantially change my feelings.]

I was not unaware of the criticism levelled at the opera by Jewish critics. There are probably good reasons to think that at least parts of the opera are (with some amount of intentionality) built on anti-semitic lies, and to try to speak out against those lies, and I imagine after I see the performance I will speak out. Of course, it should be recalled that the Metropolitan Opera is far from a safe space for a Jew. When metamorphage invited me to see the Met's new Das Rheingold several years ago, I told him I would only go if he could assure me that the Met had gotten rid of the opera's portrayal of Alberich as a hooknosed, gold-seeking dwarf, but of course that antisemitic portrait is at the heart of a presentation that the Met has been putting front and center for over a century. Only a month or so ago, I raved about Mandryka in Strauss's magnificent "Arabella", but glossed over the part where Mandryka says that in anticipation of the expense of a trip to Vienna, he called his broker to sell one of his forests. Only he didn't call his 'broker', he called his 'Jew'. Somehow the ADL stayed home on that one.

Opera is a mess of uncritical attitudes about race, gender, ethnocentrism, etc. Opera is a broken artform whose greatest merit is its sense of unmasterable bigness: Its racism is in a sense the opposite of that of a Jack Chick tract, emerging not from anything as simple as polemic hatred but from the doomed attempt of a single artist or small group of artists to portray massive chunks of the human condition in a complex multimedia presentation. An opera is an attempt to cram too much art into too small a space. Set design, costuming, sound design, lighting design, poetry, music, theater, acting, all must be blended together to create an opera, and every one of those artforms must contribute effectively to create an operatic masterpiece.

When it works, and it works effectively surprisingly often in the classic operatic repertory, opera reflects a whole world back onto its viewers, profoundly altering the narratives we impose on the world around us. That's why opera is addicting, but it's also it's hugest problem, because when the narratives are broken, they can break us. This problem of opera has always been a preoccupation of 20th century opera, which has attempted through various techniques to tell effective stories while critiquing the operas that have come before and critiquing the way we respond to those operas.

Consider two of my favorite operas of the 20th century: Berg's "Wozzeck" centers itself around a 'mad scene', the classic 19th operatic trope in which a heartbroken, hysterical woman sings a virtuosic, acrobatic aria of madness that delivers to the audience an unearned, misogynistic catharsis. When a mad scene works, it is an immense, powerful moment, but if you step back and think about your experience you realize just how terrible it is that you have been moved. The operatic mad scene is a great disservice to our vision of womanhood, to our vision of mental health treatment, to our vision of how love should work. And yet the combination of beautiful music and powerful pathos moves us anyway, to our horror. Wozzeck centers itself around a mad scene, only the singer is an impoverished man instead of a jilted princess, and the difference focuses the audience's attention where it should have been all along, on the misery and suffering of the mentally ill. Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" similarly deconstructs the mad scene, this time by immediately following Ariadne's mad scene with a chirping, gleeful comic aria from Zerbinetta mocking Ariadne for thinking her romantic problems worthy of our pity.

And yet we still stage Lucia and I Puritani and all the classic bel canto mad scenes, because even though we've seen them deconstructed they still have a profound and disturbing and awful ability to move us. We continue to let the brokenness of opera damage us, however more sophisticated we are as consumers of its narratives.

The critical reimagining of the classical operatic storylines and tropes has been central to Adams's technique as well. In "Nixon in China", he tells a story literally ripped from the headlines, but he tells it as if he were telling Turandot, asking us as viewers to try to fight against our narrative programming and read this East vs. West confrontation as something other than a racist storybook, by making explicit the seductive lure that Puccini's fairy tale has on us and setting it besides other stories that challenge the fable: 'behind the scenes' glimpses of Nixon cum Calaf's relationship with his wife, as a human being instead of a prince, by showing Mao cum Turandot's office work as a thoughtful politician (Ping, Pang, and Pao, the ministers who serve as racist comic relief in Puccini, are reimagined as a trio of Mao's secretaries, and particularly a play-within-a-play motif where Pat Nixon does as the audience of any piece of theater wishes they could, standing up and walking onstage to stop an offensive display from continuing.

I would not be surprised if the antisemitism in Klinghoffer functions in similar ways, daring us to look past narrative and rethink the humanity of both sides of the conflict precisely BY confronting the lies we tell ourselves and each other about the conflict. One of Adams's defenses of some of the scenes called out as specifically awful, such as a quiet aria which humanized one of the murderous terrorists right before he kills Klinghoffer, is that he was drawing inspiration from the Bach Passion oratorios. As I can make it out from my readings, in this reading Klinghoffer is the Christ figure and the terrorist is Pilate, washing his hands. Adams HAD to write this scene in this way to make his structural deconstruction, and yet... The Passion of St. Matthew is one of the most tragically anti-semitic works in the classical canon, the reason I have long had a struggle between my deep love for Bach's music and my uneasiness with his message. The message of that work is that the Jews killed the Christ, and transplanting a modern day Jew into that role is an uneasy, difficult process about which I have mixed feelings even before seeing Klinghoffer performed.

In general, I think a lot of the outrage over Klinghoffer is problematic, that it's a spasmodic reflex of the industry of anti-semitism mongering, and that we should not hound anti-semitic works of art in this way if the art is genuinely present. I think my right (and as much as my right, my ability) to speak out against anti-semitism is dependent on allowing a diversity of ideas, even hateful ones, to have their chance in the marketplace of ideas. But at the same time I think it's important that we recognize that opera has a power to sell bad ideas to us, to sneak them past our guard, and this remains true even in our cynical age, and we need to be careful that Klinghoffer be presented in a way that acknowledges that danger.