NEW YORK // Patrons attending the New York Metropolitan Opera’s first ever production of The Death of Klinghoffer – a work many supporters of Israel consider anti-Semitic – wove their way through hundreds of angry protesters screaming “Shame!”.
Arriving for the Monday night premiere, they also passed through heightened security, including a police bomb squad, at one of the country’s premier cultural institutions before the first showing in New York City in 23 years of the opera that centres on the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by PLO militants and their murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheel chair-bound American Jew.
Many art critics have hailed composer John Adams’ 1991 opera as a modern masterpiece, but it sparked controversy when it debuted, and has long been condemned by supporters of Israel as overly humanising and even glorifying the militants, and hence inherently anti-Semitic.
The Met denies the charges. “Klinghoffer is neither anti-Semitic nor does it glorify terrorism. The Met will not bow to this pressure,” is said in a statement. “We firmly believe that artistic explorations of politically charged subjects should be presented to the public without fear of censorship.”
The Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, said before the first performance that cast members had received threats and that security would be enhanced.
But once the curtain was raised, there were only two major disturbances, one of them by a man who chanted, “the murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgiven”, before he was escorted out and arrested.
But the disruptions were drowned out by applause, and at the end of the show Mr Adams took the stage to an ovation.
Monday’s performance was to be streamed live around the world, but in a compromise with the Anti Defamation League, which said it would stoke anti-Semitism in Europe, Mr Gelb agreed to cancel this.
The performance of Klinghoffer, which has always drawn protests, comes at a time of particularly heightened emotions around the issue of Middle East peace, after Israel’s latest war in Gaza that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, the collapse of peace talks, and the dramatic expansion of Jewish settlements.
Criticism of the Israeli government’s policies has increased in visibility and even mainstream acceptability in the US, perhaps more so than at any point in the past 20 years.
In New York, which has large Jewish and Arab populations, tensions over the Gaza war led to a number of incidents, including harassment and attacks on Muslims at a mosque in Brooklyn.
It is also election season in the US, for both Congress and the beginnings of the 2016 presidential race. Former New York mayor and Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani spoke at a rally before the performance with other local politicians, some of whom called for the opera to be cancelled, saying it presented a “distorted view of history”.
Bill de Blasio, the current mayor, defended the performance in separate remarks, saying, “I think the American way is to respect freedom of speech. Simple as that.”
Protesters interviewed by local media admitted they had not read the libretto or seen the opera, but believed it "legitimises terror because it presents the terrorists…as heroes", one of them, Rabbi Avi Weiss, told the New York Post. "We are just a few miles from Ground Zero. Are we going to see on this stage a justification of what Al Qaeda did?"
The opera, whose libretto was written by a Jewish-American woman who said in a 2012 interview that she grew up in a Zionist household, explores the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and suggests that Palestinian militancy was a product of their mass displacement in 1948.
An art critic writing in the New York Times in 2001 said the opera romanticised terrorists by playing evocative music during the Palestinian choruses.
The librettist, Alice Goodman, has said she was never commissioned to write another opera after Klinghoffer debuted in 1991. Speaking to US National Public Radio last week, she said that “the whole point of the opera is we are all related. It has to do with the humanity even of the person you least wish to acknowledge the humanity of. It’s so important. That people you most hate are human beings.”
tkhan@thenational.ae
