It’s rare that an opera’s choruses forge its reputation. But consider The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’s second opera with Peter Sellars, which was given in concert (with the composer conducting) at the Juillard School last night.
“Even before Nixon in China was off the ground,” the composer writes, “Peter Sellars had another idea, an opera also drawn from a recent news event but which would be as tragic and elegiac in tone as Nixon was celebratory and ironic. The story was of the 1984 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and their eventual murdering of one of the passengers, a retired, wheelchair-bound American Jew named Leon Klinghoffer.” The Death of Klinghoffer opened in 1991 in Brussels during the first Gulf War, was picketed by Jewish groups during its 1992 San Francisco run, and was subsequently cancelled by both Glyndebourne and Los Angeles Opera, two of its co-commissioners. New York last heard it in concert under Robert Spano at BAM in 2003.
Most of The Death of Klinghoffer consists of alternating monologues by the characters involved: a haunted and ineffectual captain, various passengers, the four young hijackers, and Leon Klinghoffer and his wife Marilyn. Unlike Doctor Atomic, which takes a similarly static approach to a politically charged subject, The Death of Klinghoffer offers a writer, Alice Goodman, who fills these monologues with enough telling personal detail to hold the ear. Goodman’s anything but terse—the Captain’s first monologue alone stretches over 80 lines—so Adams’ underscoring must most often remain just that: the orchestra rotates its pensive figures while the voice counts and talks. (For good or ill, I often thought that I’d be perfectly happy to hear these speeches without any scoring at all, given how little necessary the music seems to them.) But the script gives you quirky people recounting piquant details of an intrinsically charged situation. You listen intently throughout the first act.
You listen, that is, if you can—or are inclined to—get past the gobsmacking unevenness of the opening choruses. Here’s the first strophe of the text of the Chorus of Exiled Palestinians:
My father’s house was razed
In nineteen forty-eight
When the Israelis passed
Over our street.
This continues for six more verses, telling how, of a lovely stone dwelling with a courtyard and a well, “not a wall…was left to stand: Israel laid all to waste.” But you don’t need them. In one quatrain, you get the sound, the stance, the situation of these characters.
Contrast, now, with the first verse of the Chorus of Exiled Jews:
“When I paid off the taxi, I had no money left,
and, of course, no luggage. My empty hands shall
signify this passion, which itself remembers.”
What passion? The passion of empty hands? Of no luggage? (And who retreats into exile in a cab?) Listening further, we hear Israel imagined as a beloved if faithless woman (“I have forgotten how often we betrayed one another”) now aged but neither poor nor alone: doctors crowd her bedside, and “a woman comes in to keep the place looking occupied.” But her lover urges her to bed:
“…Let us, when our lust is exhausted for the day,
recount to each other all we endured since we parted.
There is so much to get through, it will take until night…”
By calling this chorus not, say, the Chorus of Israelis, or the Chorus of the Settlers, but the Chorus of Exiled Jews—a group of people whose history, it is safe to say, began well before 1948—The Death of Klinghoffer’s writers equate a bone-simple and convincingly local narrative of invasion and grievance with a convoluted and metaphorical romance, the principals of which are affluent, treacherous, and attuned to no suffering but their own. And this is just the Prologue.
This may help to explain why The Death of Klinghoffer has been thought so odious by so many over the eighteen years since its première. (Had they cut that opening—begun with the Captain, stayed within the frame of the story—the career of this piece might have been hugely different.) While the opera’s scenes are lightly fictionalized, they hew closely to the historical events. So no reasonable listener resists the terrorist Molqi calling himself “a man of ideals,” or the libretto’s rendering of his diatribes:
“..wherever poor men
Are gathered, they can
Find Jews getting fat.
You know how to cheat
The simple, exploit
The virgin, pollute
Where you have exploited,
Defame those who cheated…
America
Is one big Jew.”
As we know only too well these days, these attitudes exist: and to quote hatred isn’t necessarily to endorse it. Nor do the writers deprive Klinghoffer of tough rejoinder:
“I know how
Children in the Promised Land
Learn to sleep underground
Because of your shelling.
Old men at the Wailing
Wall get a knife
In the back. You laugh.
You pour gasoline
Over women
Passengers on
The bus to Tel Aviv
And burn them alive.
You don’t give a shit,
Excuse me, about
Your grandfather’s hut…
You just want to see
People die.”
Good playwrighting consists of just this sort of emotional ventriloquism: of telling the story from the point of view of the characters, not the writers. (That lovely, bourgeois “Excuse me,” for example, is a masterly detail: reminding us that Leon is a real person, not just a handy megaphone for authorial homily.) But that first Chorus of Exiled Jews strikes a strong and meanly ahistorical note: and nothing in the scenes that follow ever really mutes it. Adams claims, “For many, Alice Goodman’s libretto was disturbing…because, in her text, she gave utterance not only to the sufferings of the Jews, but to the Palestinians as well.” This is not quite true. Observe how Penny Woolcock’s film of The Death of Klinghoffer inserted a terrified young Israeli couple into her mise-en-scène, although, following the opera, they had no lines: i. e., no voice. What the director was addressing was the wincingly obvious fact that neither Israel nor Israelis exist as real quantities in The Death of Klinghoffer. The writers use the Achille Lauro incident to portray its Palestinians in million-pixel detail—ever-ready with a reference to the Balfour Declaration or Lebanese refugee camps—and to contrast them with a hazy, almost theoretical notion of Jewishness embodied only by suburban Americans as self-involved as those mythic characters in the Chorus of Exiled Jews. Note, in Act Two, what Leon Klinghoffer sings about as his corpse, thrown overboard, sinks to the bottom of the sea:
“…After the war
In this part of town
Good furniture
Exposed to the rain
Buckled and warped
Malachite and brass
Were quickly stripped
And inlays worked loose
Locked bureau drawers
Had their locks broken
The souvenirs which would be taken
Fetched not a cent…”
Which town? Which war? Clearly this is no longer the naturalistically-conceived American Klinghoffer, who wishes he’d worn a hat as he was left on deck in the burning sun. This is as authorial, as extra-narrative an idea of Klinghoffer as the first chorus was an authorial, an extra-narrative idea of Jews. And what does Klinghoffer sing about, moments after he is shot through the forehead and chest and tossed, bleeding, into the waves? “Good furniture/Exposed to the rain.” Yes, neither luggage, nor cabfare: but close enough to make one squint at the choice. If I hesitate, at the last, to call this intentional caricature, it’s merely because Sellars and Adams (without Goodman) have been as tone-deaf to ethnicity in other pieces as well: the Erda-in-buckskin sketch of the Tewa maid in Doctor Atomic makes you want to cover your eyes. But I can see why audiences, particularly Jewish ones, would care little whether the piece sounds willfully scornful or merely bumblingly so.
I linger so over the political and dramatic aspects of The Death of Klinghoffer because the music seems to vanish into them. One problem with ostinato-driven music in the opera house is that it is inherently anti-soloistic: it’s more idiomatic for an orchestral or choral section to spin out or divide the repeating figures amongst themselves than for a singer to take such a figure for himself. To me, such music miniaturizes the characters: as they unspool their recitative in whatever obbligato Adams (as well as other minimalist composers) writes for them, the orchestra accompanies, but doesn’t seem to hear, its own people. (This may also explain the dearth of conspicuous minimalist concerti.) Certainly Adams works to gives each of his people a sound: boogie-woogie flutes chirp behind the words of a British dancer, and Sprechstimme distinguishes an Austrian woman from her fellow Swiss or American passengers. And he knows how to build a chorus: both the Palestinians’ and the Night choruses come to thrilling peaks. But the texture is so monotonous (solo recit, chorus; solo recit, solo recit, chorus), the speeches so sprawling, and the music under them—largely slow, largely dark, largely repetitive—so disconnected from their language that it feels like the actors have to act despite the score, rather than with it. The text of Marilyn Klinghoffer’s final aria, in which she learns of her husband’s murder, is clearly and movingly written, but even here, at the last moments of the piece, her vocal line is embedded in the music: it doesn’t lead it. I am bewildered by Sellars’ and Adams’ counterargument that “the models for The Death of Klinghoffer…were the Bach Passions: grave, symbolic, narrative poems, supported by large choral pillars.” Bach’s Passions were the very definition of preaching to the choir: a Lutheran musician presenting a Lutheran take on a Christian narrative with which no one disagreed. They’re liturgical, not dramatic experiences: and they’re conceptually impossible without consensus. Apart from their air of gravity and their basic alternation of solo and choral textures, how exemplary, musically or dramatically, can the Passions be for an inevitably incendiary drama—for the theatre, not the church—on a subject about which disagreement has raged for millennia?
It dispirits me to feel this critical of The Death of Klinghoffer. It dispirited me to feel so disappointed by Doctor Atomic. Adams works hard: and this piece, like his others, draws from an appealingly big idea. I want to love these operas. I want them to energize, rather than exasperate, the often-new audiences they attract. But it seems the preferred method of the Sellars/Adams team consists of taking a big subject: carefully excluding any potential conflict (i. e., drama) implicit within it (Did the bomb end the war sooner, thus saving lives? Might Israelis be human, too?); and presenting the anti-operas that result as if their longeurs proved their seriousness. God knows all of us who make new music-drama are, or should be, on the same side. But—if you respect opera at all—it’s depressingly difficult to support the work of a theatrical composer, no matter how ambitious, who for over twenty years has written as if learning anything about making vital theatre were beneath him.
Update: the conversation continues here.