The Metropolitan Opera in New York City, yielding to what was reported as “unimaginable pressure” from Jewish groups that disapprove of the controversial 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer, by composer John Adams ’69, A.M. ’72, has canceled transmission of the opera to movie theaters around the world, according to a New York Times report. The opera, with a libretto by Alice Goodman ’80, tells the story of the 1985 hijacking of an Italian cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists and their subsequent murder of a wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer; his body was then thrown overboard. It is scheduled to open October 20 at the Met and will run until November 15; the global transmission was scheduled to appear as part of the Met’s Live in HD cinema program. On November 15, it would have been viewable on 2,000 movie screens in 66 nations.
“This is not just about artistic freedom,” says Adams. “Clearly, it's about a larger issue of freedom of speech, period. There are some anti-Semitic slogans in the opera, but they are clearly flagged as coming out of the mouth of a particularly brutal hijacker. No one could view this and not identify those words as reflecting his deranged vision.”
The pressure on the opera company apparently was intense enough to endanger even the New York production. In an interview with The New York Times, Adams said that the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, told him that only by agreeing to cancel the telecast could the stage production be saved.
“I’m convinced that the opera is not anti-Semitic,” said Gelb in a press release from the Met. “But I’ve also become convinced that there is genuine concern in the international Jewish community that the live transmission of The Death of Klinghoffer would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.”
“I think my opera is very fair and does present both sides of the issue in very human and emotional terms,” says Adams. “Most of those condemning it have not even seen the opera, let alone experienced it as a work of art. People have just cherry-picked some of the lines and pulled them completely out of context.”
“The simulcasts from the Met are watched and loved by all kinds of people who couldn’t possibly get to a live performance,” Goodman, who lives in England, told The Guardian. “One of the things being said by this decision is that New Yorkers can be trusted but people in the Midwest, say, or the South or the West, they can’t be trusted and, as for the Europeans! The notion that this can be watched live but not in a cinema is bizarre and foolish and I regret it.”
Adams described the creation of the piece in a 1991 feature he wrote for Harvard Magazine, “The Birth of The Death of Klinghoffer.”
