Seeking Answers in an Opera

Serious times call for serious art, and classical music has responded. Beauty is balm, and the fervent beauty of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, for instance, has served us well in concert after concert as a national song of lamentation.

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms nurse nervous uncertainty. Their wonderfully rational music, whether it seeks to represent spiritual grandeur or simple elegance, offers us respite from the anxiety of a chaotic world.

But however valuable the soothing of wounded psyches may be, art can accomplish more. OnSept. 12, preferring answers and understanding to comfort, I put on the CD of “The Death of Klinghoffer,” John Adams’ opera about terrorists and their victims. Its characters are based on the Palestinians who hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 and on the crew and passengers they held hostage.

Opera is often called the most irrational art form. It places us directly inside its characters’ minds and hearts through compelling music, often causing us to enjoy the company of characters we might normally dislike. Adams’ opera requires that we think the unthinkable.

As a profoundly disturbing meditation on the tragic death of an innocent man, “Klinghoffer” hardly supports or apologizes for terrorism. But it does require, in the way that only opera can, that we identify with the emotions that drive actions we despise. And by presenting the terrorist act from all points of view, it becomes not just a study in suffering, a painting in the simple strokes of the banality of evil, but a wrenching panoramic expression of the complex interaction of motives and actions, all against a background of the biblical imperatives that both enliven the Middle East and tear it apart.

Although paid little attention in the past few years, “Klinghoffer” can tell us a lot about why the world is the way it is today, and our neglect of it, it is now clear, has been to our detriment.

The Achille Lauro hijacking riveted the world. The terrorists shot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old American Jew who used a wheelchair, and then they announced that they had thrown his body overboard.

When Adams began his opera, the image of Klinghoffer falling from the ship in his wheelchair was still fresh, and the times were charged. In the notes accompanying the Nonesuch recording, Michael Steinberg writes that Adams began it in 1989 while “the United States was lavishly supporting Saddam Hussein” and “completed it on 12 February 1991 while we were dropping ‘smart bombs’ down Baghdad ventilator shafts.”

The premiere was held under tight security in Brussels one week after the end of the Gulf War. Controversy was inevitable, and the critical response included accusations of namby-pamby evenhandedness, of craven opportunism and of exploiting personal tragedy.

At one extreme, the opera was called a Zionist plot; at the other, Adams, director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman were denounced for being unashamedly pro-Palestinian. Goodman received death threats. The U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music later in 1991 was picketed by Jewish protesters. “Give me a break!” a woman sitting next to me at BAM loudly exclaimed in response to nearly every Palestinian remark onstage.

There were certainly those who recognized in the opera a rare insight into the most troubling and destructive political and cultural division of our age. But it was an opera ahead of its time, and it wasn’t long before timid companies dropped “The Death of Klinghoffer” like a hot potato. San Francisco Opera mounted the Sellars production in 1992, but Los Angeles Opera and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, both part of the consortium of “Klinghoffer” commissioners, never did.

In a curious twist of fate, a renewed surge of interest in the opera has already begun in Europe. In February, the Finnish National Opera mounted a production by the British TV director Tony Palmer. Concert performances were scheduled in Amsterdam later this month and in London next January. Meanwhile, an avant-garde British stage and film director, Penny Woolcock, decided to make a film of the opera for British TV. On Sept. 11, as the airliners were flying into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Adams was in London rehearsing the singers in “Klinghoffer” for a soundtrack recording for that film. Neither he nor any of the other artists wanted to comment.

In the wake of Sept. 11, “Klinghoffer” shocks with inescapable, prescient power, even in an almost silly aria, a bit of mild comic relief sung by a passenger, a character called British Dancing Girl. She is accompanied by a snappy Minimalist version of ‘60s bubble-gum rock as she distinguishes between two of the terrorists--the dreamy, poetic Omar, who “kept us in ciggies the whole time” and the brutal Rambo, who slaps the hostages around. Actually, she observes, men like that aren’t capable of much:

You watch out for the type

Who looks as if he wouldn’t fight

If he were paid.

Because the music is cute, the observation doesn’t immediately sink in. Now, look again at the seemingly soft, shy face of Osama bin Laden in the photographs.

“Klinghoffer,” I was also reminded by a fresh listening, is one of the most beautiful operas written in my lifetime. But the beauty--in the music, the words, the memories, the images--doesn’t always illuminate what we want it to.

The opera opens with a chorus of exiled Palestinians who sing:

My father’s house was razed

In nineteen forty eight

When the Israelis passed

Over our street.

That house was a place of sacred hospitality, idyllic, and the music draws you in through simple sketchy melody that becomes ever more enticingly elaborate, like an Arabic chant. The images are sensual: On a hot day, coolness rises like a wave from a pure well, and one practically tastes it in the refreshing pulsing of the orchestra. But as the pulse increases, the feeling of rapt nostalgia mutates into rage, an electrifying, exhilarating climax with a shocking sentiment:

Let the supplanter look

Upon his work. Our faith

Will take the stones he broke

And break his teeth.

That sucker punch is thrown repeatedly in “Klinghoffer.” Late at night on the ship, a terrorist, Mamoud, tunes into Arab radio stations and hears songs of his youth. Sad laments of parted lovers magically travel over the water, his own operatic singing matching the eloquence of melismatic Arab music. But again, almost imperceptibly, his nostalgia turns to memories of childhood, exploding metal, closing the eyes on the head of a decapitated brother.

Once we begin to share the characters’ dreams, to feel their motivations, we become aware of the startling power of opera. No one protested two melodramatic television movies about the Achille Lauro hijacking, one starring Karl Malden, another with Burt Lancaster. The terrorists were comic-book villains. Tension was undercut by commercial breaks. But in “The Death of Klinghoffer,” Mamoud is flesh and blood, one of those characters into whose dreams we are drawn without choice. And so the woman next to me at BAM offered her “give me a break” refrain as if it were a mantra to ward off evil.

Still, the opera does not side with the terrorists. Nor is it ultimately evenhanded, not after we’ve endured Klinghoffer’s death and witnessed the unassuagable rage of his widow, Marilyn.

The death itself is one of the most moving in the history of an art form that would be nothing without dying. After Klinghoffer’s body is thrown off the ship, his soul sings a very slow, time-stop aria as it falls through the water in a timeless journey to another world. The fall, staged by Sellars (whose idea the opera was) with choreographer Mark Morris, is a dance between Klinghoffer and his body: a dancer slowly drags the singer across stage on a flowing white shroud.

The opera ends with the ship captain offering his condolences to Marilyn Klinghoffer. He is a weak, vacillating character, and she won’t have it. She sees through him, just as her husband had eloquently debunked the terrorists’ claims of righteousness in an earlier aria. She is not eloquent. She is beyond words, beyond any affirmation of life, left with pure, raw emotion. Her last words are “I wanted to die.”

And yet one does not leave the opera house devastated.

It is the audience’s difficult role to sort through the contradictions and conflicts “Klinghoffer” raises, but Adams and Goodman offer help by turning to the model of Bach’s passions, those penetrating tellings of the death of the Christ, from several points of view.

Like Bach, Adams and Goodman frame the central drama in grand choruses of ocean and desert, day and night, anger and fear, full of biblical allusions that place us in the seat of civilization. After Marilyn Klinghoffer sings her terrible last words, there is one more chance for beauty in haunting counter melodies from a background chorus and a solo oboe. In them, we hear her sorrow against a larger context. Her tears are reminiscent of those of Mary in the passions, and Klinghoffer’s death comes to seem almost Christ-like, suggesting that there is a greater good to be gained from all this.

That, alone explains why “Klinghoffer” is exactly the work of art we now need.

Not surprisingly, no company in America has indicated an intention to present “Klinghoffer” as a vehicle in which to examine the international situation. In Europe, however, the show will go on, with precisely that in mind.

Jan Zekveld, presenter of “Klinghoffer” in Amsterdam in two weeks, said that he never had the slightest doubt about going ahead with the performance by the Netherlands Radio Orchestra at the Concertgebouw.

“I think the piece has a very strong message to all human beings,” he said by phone from Holland. “It is a great work of art and I am absolutely convinced that the message can’t be misunderstood.”

Channel 4, the London network producing “Klinghoffer” for television, has also confirmed that it will proceed as planned. The filming is on schedule for February, on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean; the broadcast is set for 2003. A concert performance of “Klinghoffer” at the Barbican Centre in January will be conducted by Leonard Slatkin as part of a weekend Adams festival in London sponsored by the BBC Orchestra. In all three cases, the attitude in Europe seems to be that John Adams is a great American composer; “Klinghoffer” is one of his most important works; and it has a resonance for our time that no other opera can possibly equal.

That American opera companies shy away from “Klinghoffer” is part of their tendency to avoid controversy altogether. Unlike their European counterparts, they rely on private, and to a large extent corporate, support. Understandably, they have wanted a piece of the late ‘90s economic boom and have sought to serve complacent corporate culture with “safe” contemporary operas, based on already accepted works in the literary canon: Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” William Bolcom’s “A View From the Bridge” and John Harbison’s “Great Gatsby.” Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” based on an unflinching look at crime and punishment, might have bucked the trend, but saccharine music turned it into a sentimental, feel-good opera.

As opera houses have forgotten or avoided Adams’ opera, so the rest of us have conveniently forgotten about the story of Leon Klinghoffer and its aftermath. The investigation in 1985 quickly identified Palestinian Abul Abbas as the mastermind of the Achille Lauro takeover. After slipping through the hands of the Italians, who arrested the hijackers, Abbas found protection in Iraq. In a memoir, “A Spy for All Seasons,” Duane Claridge, then head of CIA counterterrorism, tells of traveling to Baghdad in 1986 to exchange U.S. satellite intelligence for custody of Abbas. The Iraqis got their intelligence but then reneged on turning over the terrorist.

Abbas has since publicly apologized for the death of Klinghoffer, which he says was not intended. As part of negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he was permitted to move to Gaza City, where he openly heads the Palestinian Liberation Front and has close ties to Yasser Arafat. A lawsuit brought by Leon Klinghoffer’s daughters (their mother died of cancer) against the Palestinian Liberation Organization was settled for an undisclosed amount in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in 1997 after 12 years of litigation.

Now, of course, everything to do with terrorism has extraordinary resonance. And “Klinghoffer” demands the American stage.

Of all American companies, Los Angeles Opera is in the best position to now offer “Klinghoffer,” especially given that its new principal conductor, Kent Nagano, conducted the opera’s premiere in Brussels. That it has attempted to brush this work under the rug has been a blight on the company’s reputation over the years.

At a moment when bravery is so prized, Los Angeles Opera has an exceptional opportunity to demonstrate real artistic courage. But will it or any other American opera company dare to participate in the deepest way art can in these grave and troubling issues? *