Solomonia Archive: Killing Leon Klinghoffer Again

Monday, August 8, 2005

JTA: Play on terrorist attack provokes ire (no permalink, but here is the full piece)

The upcoming British theater premiere of an opera based on the 1985 Palestinian hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship is causing controversy.

“The Death of Klinghoffer,” a 1991 work that details the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled American Jew, is due to be performed at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland later this month. A fictionalized account of how Palestinian terrorists stormed the Italian cruise ship and shot the wheelchair-bound Klinghoffer, 69, before throwing him overboard, the play has been accused of anti-Semitism and giving a voice to terrorists.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he hoped “the people of Edinburgh would respond appropriately by allowing these moral midgets to do their opera to an empty house.” He added, “To actually have to talk about this in real time when you are deploying soldiers to safeguard people getting into the Tube in London is almost beneath contempt.”

Indeed. You can listen to samples of the music at Amazon here (Where the customer reviews are decidedly more positive than others I have found). Here is a snip from a review of the film adaptation. Yes, so help me, there is a film adaptation.

Apparently John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer has something to offend everyone. When it was new back in 1991, this quintessential CNN opera, based on the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists, created a mild stir among those who perceived it as insufficiently hard on terrorism and more than a bit unfriendly to Jews. Since 9/11, the smoldering resentment has fairly exploded. The Boston Symphony hastily canceled a performance of concert excerpts. Musicologist Richard Taruskin, in an article in the New York Times, accused Adams of romanticizing terrorists and being un-American. The editor of England’s Opera magazine was appalled by Alice Goodman’s libretto, which he dismissed as “desperately naïve,” and even went so far as to say that the opera is “best left unperformed.” After seeing a production in Helsinki, one critic in the same journal hated the work so much that he declared it “an operatic corpse.”...

I am almost tempted to rent it, but life is too short.

From Jay Nordlinger:

...Abbas, of course, was the leader of the Achille Lauro terror attack — the one in which Leon Klinghoffer was shot, killed, and thrown overboard in his wheelchair. Singled out because he was a Jew. (Mrs. Klinghoffer, who looked on, was spared. She lived to spit into the faces of the murderers — literally. In an Italian jail. This was before they were released. And they were released, of course, by the Italians, in no time.)

I thought of Klinghoffer, and Abbas, a couple of hours ago as I was listening to an orchestral program that included a new work by John Adams. Come again? Yes, Adams is the composer of The Death of Klinghoffer, the opera that endeavors to understand and represent both sides of the Achille Lauro affair — you know, aggrieved Palestinians and Leon Klinghoffer.

Abbas is dead. That opera is not. Win some, lose some.

I remember an incident when I was a young, rebellious college freshman. I was at a party, and there was this guy there I knew to be kind of religious and politically active. I forget exactly what I said, but I was needling him in some way, trying to get a rise out of him just for fun -- I might have said something about why should I care about being Jewish, or worry about persecution, after all I wasn't religious at all...something like that, I forget exactly what I said. I do remember his answer, though, because it's a good one and I remember it to this day. He said, "No one asked Leon Klinghoffer if he was a good Jew or a bad Jew before they shot him and tossed his body into the sea."

I thought that was a pretty good answer.

That's one of the things that hearing the words "Leon Klinghoffer" makes me think of.

The thing this opera makes me think of is, "How must the family feel?" I found only vague references (derided by composer Adams) to the daughters being less than pleased.

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