unrighteous deaths
by Douglas Messerli
John Adams
(music), Alice Goodman (libretto), The
Death of Klinghoffer / the production I saw was at Long Beach, California,
the Terrace Theater, performed by Long Beach Opera Company on March 22, 2014
On October 7,
1985, four Palestinian terrorists, who had boarded the Italian cruise ship,
Archille Lauro, docked outside Alexandria, Egypt, overtook the ship, turning
off the ship’s engines and separated those tourists aboard into different
groupings, including Jews and Gentiles.
The terrorists, Ahmad Marrouf al-Assadi,
Bassam al-Asker, Ibrahim Fatayer Abdelatif, and Youssef Majed al-Molqui were on
a mission, organized by PLF leader Muhammad Zaidan, had, according to Zaidan’s
widow, Reem al-Nimer, gone through several practice runs.
The
goal of these terrorists, in part in reaction to the Israel bombing in October
1985 of the PLO headquarters in Tunis, was to stay aboard the shop until it
reached the Israeli port of Ashdod, and perform a mass suicide killing of
Israeli soldiers. A crew member, however, accidentally uncovered the terrorists
and the group acted prematurely in taking over the ship.
Using the ship’s captain as their
go-between, the terrorist group attempted to receive further instructions from
Tunis and elsewhere, and sought reaction from the world community which might
help to make them heroes. But despite their proclamations that these men were
not murderers, but were idealists, they chose, apparently at random, an elderly,
wheelchair-bound, Jewish man, Leon Klinghoffer, who had apparently spoken out
against them, for murder. The terrorists shot him in the head and forced the
ship’s barber to toss him and wheelchair overboard. Terrorists told his wife,
Marilyn, that he had been taken to sick-bay, and it was only after the ship
docked in Cairo that she was told of her husband’s death.
Although United States President Ronald
Reagan sent a US Seal Team and Delta Force to stand by for a possible rescue
attempt, most the world refrained from acting, and it was not until the
Palestinians threatened further lives that the captain was able to negotiate an
agreement that the terrorists would be removed from his vessel, freed in Cairo.
In the aftermath, US planes intercepted
the plane carrying the hijackers, delivering them over to the Italian
Carabinieri, disagreement between the Americans and the Italians allowed others
such as their leader, Muhammad Zaidan, to continue on their way. Egypt even
demanded a US apology for forcing the plane off course. Although all the
terrorists served some time, some escaped long imprisonments.
A few years after these events, in 1987,
shortly after the success of John Adams’ Nixon in China, director Peter
Sellars suggested the Klinghoffer affair as a new subject matter, and Adams and
his Nixon librettist, Alice Goodman, began working on the new opera, The
Death of Klinghoffer. The opera premiered in 1991 in Brussels with Sellars
directing. Reviews were highly mixed, some describing it as a “revolutionary”
opera, others chastising it for a cool and cruel meditation on, as Manuela
Hoelterhoff suggested, “meaning and myth, life and death.”
As new productions were performed at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music and elsewhere criticisms grew, some interpreting a
few of the Jewish figures aboard as representing negative stereotypes.
Performances in Germany, and elsewhere
followed, but productions in Glyndebourne and Los Angeles were canceled, the
latter, in part, I presume through the outrage expressed by our friend Betty
Freeman (see My Year 2009), a financial backer of Adams’ Nixon in
China.
The production Howard and I saw yesterday
at the Long Beach Opera, was based on Opera Theatre of Saint Louis production,
directed by James Robinson. This production was the first appearance of the
work in southern California.
My
reaction was also mixed, my negative feelings not based specifically on the
equal balance of the representation of both the views of the Palestinians and
the Israelis (or the Jews); frankly, as the opera suggests time and again,
perhaps only if people can come together and discuss their opposing positions
can any true peace be found. Nor was the highly unconventional structure of
this opera, which one might describe as more an oratorio than a standard work of
operatic narrative, a true problem. While there is no doubt that the series of
tableaux Robinson and Adams have created makes the opera, at times, very
static, as the choral masses, representing different viewpoints and
tensions—The Chorus of the Palestinians, The Chorus of the Jews, The Night
Chorus, etc—are presented through group friezes. And, yes, the interactions
between characters, except during the highly dramatic interchanges between Leon
Klinghoffer (a strong voiced Robin Buck) and the terrorists (Roberto Perlas
Gomez, Alex Richardson, Jason Switzer, and Peabody Southwell), are mostly
presented through individualized arias that allow for very little real
interchange.
Adams’ music, as always, is dark,
intense, and swelling, alternating between tonal dissonance and lyrical
passages that are almost always alive with awe and suspense. If nothing else
the score of The Death of Klinghoffer, like his Nixon in China and
the more recent The Gospel According to the Other Mary, represents
masterful composition that justifies that his work be performed often. Even if
the smaller Long Beach Opera orchestra could not quite recreate what one
perceives as the density of Adams’ tonal range, one can only recognize that
this is a work of art that deserves close listening.
Some of
the work’s arias, moreover, such as that performed by The Chorus of the Night,
by Klinghoffer, the terrorist Mamoud, and, at work’s end, by the furiously
accusatory Marilyn Klinghoffer (Suzan Hanson), represent extremely powerful
operatic statements that transform this work. Presumably The Chorus of the
Night, in its dark, clanging chordal structures and in the act of two groups of
passengers building up a wall of suitcases between them, hints of the ethnic
oppositions even aboard the Achille Lauro, differences presented in more comic
moments played out by Danielle Marcelle Bond as an Austrian woman who hides in
her stateroom quietly munching on chocolates and fruit while the others on deck
are threatened and mocked and the empty-headed British dancing girl she later
portrays, who perceives the whole even as a kind of school-girl game.
Klinghoffer’s aria, sung after his death, is an extremely gentle song,
reiterating the first “Palestinian” chorus of the opera, which recounts the
destruction of everything they (the Jews) had owned after World War II—the
welters of the furniture, the destruction of tables and bureaus, or doors and
drawers; but unlike the Palestinians, Klinghoffer suggests, although the Jews
also had nothing left, they did not attempt revenge or revolution but moved on,
creating new lives for themselves. It is a moving operatic statement,
thoroughly delineating the reactions of the two cultures.
On the other side, Mamoud describes, in a
gruesomely literal aria how his mother was killed by the Israelis and how,
discovering his brother’s severed head, he was able to close the tortured man’s
eyes. (Discerning, a bit after the fact, what Mamoud had just conveyed, a woman
on our loge suddenly cried out in shock).
Marilyn Klinghoffer’s impassioned screed
and plea, which ends the opera, is quite simply unforgettable, as out of
unspeakable pain and silence, she suddenly rejects the ship captain’s empty
condolences, shouting out that his suit smells of the Palestinians, and wailing
out her own stupidity for not comprehending the significance the events that
have just taken place. By the end of her powerful aria, she cries out for her
own death, insisting that she should have died instead of her husband, that she
“wanted to die.”*
In short, Adams’ music is not the
problem with the work. Even in Nixon in China, at moments I cringed at
some of poet Alice Goodman’s language. Her mix of prosaic nonsense and abstract
gobbledygook worked rather nicely, however, for the political double-speaking
figures such as Nixon, Mrs. Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Mao. Here; however,
with real people facing life and death dilemmas, Goodman’s abstract, new-age
like tropes, often seem to have nothing to do with the issues the opera is
attempting to engage. People sing of dissolution, of crescent-moons (yes, we
recognize its symbolic status in the Arab culture), of sand, and flying
frigates—and pigeons, terns, herons, hawks, etc. etc.. all presented as the
expression of the ability to be truly be free in a world of borders. This may
sound like a kind of poetic lyricism, but Goodman clearly cannot hear the music
in what she is attempting to express, often creating impossibly long and
illogically impacted sentences that must be quickly elided over in order to fit
into the musical phrase.
Some of this mix of abstraction and the
ordinary achieves its goal, as when, for instance, at the very moment her
husband is being shot, Marilyn Klinghoffer tells a friendly woman about the new
advances in hip and knee replacement, while discussing her husband’s paralysis
as being something doctors no longer want to deal with, describing them as men
and women busy “curing headaches instead of strokes.” But time and again
Goodman’s meandering linguistic tunnels take the opera’s characters nowhere, as
if they were speaking out of some moon-induced lunacy instead of the world
which they exist. And this tends to make Adams’ work far more elliptical and
drains it of his music’s inspired emotional poignancies.
Through Goodman’s libretto the real-life death of an elderly Jewish man
by murderous terrorists, no matter how holy their cause, becomes a kind of
dreamy fable that diffuses dramatic encounters, turning it, just as Hoelterhoff
argues, into a meditation of abstract concerns which cloak even the very title
with good intentions instead of a solid look into the heart of good and evil.
Interestingly enough, just the weekend
before, Howard and I had attended another opera, Billy Budd, which takes
place entirely at sea, wherein we also witness an unrighteous murder of someone
on board. In both cases, the ships’ captains are particularly culpable, in
Vere’s case because of his refusal to mitigate human justice over the law, in
the case of the Achille Lauro because the captain refuses to perceive himself
as morally responsible for his crew and passengers. Although, like Vere, he is
a moral man, even going so far as to insist that the terrorists kill him
instead of his passengers, he sees himself more as a hotelier among his crew of
barbers, masseurs, shopkeepers, cooks, and servants than as a legal entity. He
is a conciliator instead of a leader, a fact which Marilyn Klinghoffer
ultimately perceives. Melville clearly was focused, far more specifically, on
that very issue: who and what is good, who and what is evil, without providing
easy answers. Neither Billy nor Leon Klinghoffer can be saved by the outside
world. But the terrible vision of Klinghoffer’s wife reverberates with the Nazi
horrors of World War II: how many people must die before the world acts? Must
100 people be killed aboard, she asks? Or millions, history might echo? How can you talk with a people who cannot
even acknowledge that history itself? Although she cries out for death, it is
quite apparent that she and numerous others have already died for their
beliefs, for their very existence, long before her.
And so too, alas, have many been killed
from the opposing sides. The tragedy is that there can be no end to this
improbable stand-off of suffering communities. There can be, unfortunately, no
easy reconciliation between the escalating wars of hate, a tragedy repeated
over and over again in the history of our operatic archive.
*One of the
most grotesque and painful ironies of this event—although not mentioned in the
opera—is that after the events on the Achille Lauro, some accused Marilyn
herself as having killed her husband in order to receive his insurance. Later, Muhammad
Zaidan confirmed that Klinghoffer had, in fact, been killed by the terrorists.
Los Angeles, March 23, 2014
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance (March 2014).
