My first objection is that the title evades the difference between “death” and “murder.” This provides a strong clue to the moral equivalence that one can be expected to witness. If the opera is a condemnation of the terrorists from start to finish where is the dramatic conflict that one expects to find in a work of art? Why not create an opera depicting the holocaust by looking at it from the perspective of the Nazis? I am glad that you say that the terrorists meet a just end at the conclusion, but I’m concerned about what is happening in the middle. Is there any sense in which we can understand the plight of the terrorists that would make them less culpable for murder. If all the production does is create an atmosphere of ambivalence when no ambivalence is justified, that is its evil.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-mets-klinghoffer-problem
An article in The New Yorker makes this point about the Opera’s ambivalence, which arises from two opposing reviewers of the production:
Quote:
It has inspired a meaty debate in critical and scholarly circles, with the musicologist Richard Taruskin leading the prosecution and his colleague Robert Fink mounting a defense. Taruskin, in a
2001 article, charged that, in its original version, the opera catered to “anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-bourgeois” prejudices—a sitcom-like scene involving a chattering Jewish-American family was later dropped—and that those prejudices remained visible even in the revised version. Fink, in 2005,
responded that, in the end, the work celebrates precisely those middle-class values that Taruskin believes it rejects: the “life-affirming virtues of the ordinary, of the decent man, of
small things.” That two intelligent commentators should reach such radically disparate conclusions points to an abiding problem at the heart of “Klinghoffer”: its pensive, ambivalent attitude toward present-day issues about which a great many people feel no ambivalence whatsoever.
Here are some statements from those who are objecting to the production:
http://jewishvoiceny.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8689:thousands-demonstrate-against-the-death-of-klinghoffer-at-the-metropolitan-opera-in-nyc&catid=112:new-york&Itemid=295
Quote:
In a recent article that appeared on the Breitbart.com web site, author and opera aficionado Phyllis Chesler wrote, “The libretto presents a false and defamatory narrative of Jews and America; depicts an entirely untrue, unbalanced, and maliciously immoral history of the founding of the state of Israel.”
Quote:
Lisa Klinghoffer, the daughter of Leon Klinghoffer said: “I cannot imagine that an opera would romanticize the murder of my father. Peter Gelb is trying to rehabilitate the Met by appealing to the lowest common denominator. He is seeking to attract young people with anti-Semitism and moral equivalency.”
Quote:
A letter denouncing the opera, written by Judea Pearl, the father of slain Wall Street Journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by terrorists in 2002 was read aloud.
He said: “In joining you today to protest the New York Metropolitan Opera production of this opera, I echo the silenced voice of my son, Daniel Pearl, and the silenced voices of other victims of terror, including James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and including thousands of men, women and children who were murdered, maimed or left heartbroken by the new menace of our generation, a menace of savagery that the Met has decided to elevate to a normative, two-sided status, worthy of artistic expression.”
He added, “I submit to you that choreographing an operatic drama around criminal pathology is not an artistic prerogative, but a blatant betrayal of public trust. We do not stage operas for rapists and child molesters, and we do not compose symphonies for penetrating the minds of ISIS executioners.”
