Private parties have no power to censor. PERIOD.

So such assertions are straw arguments, best dropped — for shame.

To argue that ALL points of view must be worthy of artistic articulation is anti-cultural… like a compass that points in all directions at once.

And it’s in the mode of anti-culturalism that this operatic screed has been penned.

Being a notorious librettist is a specific instance of extreme narcissism. This is a deliberate crime against culture for the express purpose of self-grandiosity. For other than this polemic, this zany creature would be totally unknown.

Somehow I have to figure that there’s a (silent) Muslim backer for this insult.

Muslims are engaged in every manner of cultural insults all the time: starting with the Mossad 9-11 ‘connection’, a totally insane idiocy that is sustained for years on end in the whacko pages of YouTube.

The Muslim gambit of lying — massively — and without end — is just one of the reasons why they make totally uneconomic employees.

{

Cafeteria Muslims throw the infidels off the scent. They are the source of “I know a good one” tales. If they are economically functional adults — then they can’t really be orthodox Muslims. Study the Koran and the Hadiths to comprehend why.

}

Of course I know that Leon Klinghoffer is dead, was murdered, in fact, in a most barbaric fashion.

We disagree, perhaps, on the primacy of artistic freedom, with you more willing to defer to the feelings of the family than I or the Metropolitan Opera Company, but to imply that wanting to see “The Death of Klinghoffer” is some sign of ignorance of or callousness toward the actual death of Leon Klinghoffer does not do you credit.

In the real world, this doesn’t matter much. A three-month old baby is blown up at a Jerusalem rail stop and performances of Adams’ opera continue, neither one doing much to illuminate the other.

No, the real aggrieved party is Leon Klinghoffer. He’s dead, remember?

You write:

The opera has been elevated to a cause, however, by people who wouldn’t go to see Carmen, but who believe that they are fighting evil, so no one should see it, and to that end anything goes. This is what Michael Walsh of PJ Media calls “intolerant yahooism.”

There are so many things wrong with that statement I really don’t know where to start.

Let’s start with this: do you think that describes Judea Pearl, who has campaigned against the Met’s performing it?

We were often at each other’s house for such dinners, parties, and special noodling sessions. These always included music that had us singing with guitars and keyboard for accompaniment. Judea is an accomplished guitar player, keyboardist, and has a great singing voice. He’s also a world class choral conductor and has performed numerous times at the LA Music Center. (I was the less practiced one on both instruments, making up in volume for what I lacked in technique.)

Or does it describe the many eminent music critics who criticized the work?

And what on earth do you mean by “anything goes”? Are peaceful demonstrations asking the Met not to produce the work “anything?” I’m unaware of terrorist attacks perpetrated by the protestors.

And watch out for the use of the word “intolerant” to describe these people. Being tolerant of something means allowing it. Tolerance does not require supporting it or wanting to promulgate it. And supporting something that advocates terrorism or that excuses it, or even that gives it a sympathetic forum, is not tolerance.

As far as tolerance goes, maybe you should familiarize yourself with the work of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which is the very model of tolerance. But not stupid, suicidal, destructive, tolerance, not tolerance of the sort that sympathizes with terrorists.

The prologue was not a mistake, not in the sense that would excuse it in any way. It was not a slip of the tongue. It was not an accident. It was not a case of unconscious writing.

It was thought of, written, rehearsed, produced, performed, and defended (at least, before it was removed, after protests). It is no accident. It was a product of the mind of the librettist, with the collaboration of the composer. As such, it was indicative of their mindset, intent, and thought, and key to unlocking it. That thought and mindset underlies the entire work. In a much more subtle way, it permeates it.

The reason they removed it was because it created such a furor. Their “mistake” was drawing the curtain on their point of view and thoughts and revealing them too obviously. (I write “they” but I think it actually tells us much more about the mind of the librettist than about the composer, although I doubt he objected to it; it was a collaboration).

The scene was not part of the Klinghoffer story or the events that transpired when Klinghoffer was killed; it was gratuitous, a fantasy of the librettist, thrown in there for background. As such, it might just be the most revealing part of the entire opera.

Speaking of Alice Goodman (who of course does not think her libretto is anti-Semitic), here’s an interesting article about her:

She recalls seeing Holocaust documentaries as an eight-year-old. “I remember a film of a little man who’d been put in a vacuum chamber with a window so scientists could observe what would happen to him when the air was withdrawn. The whole film was shown to us as children and the look on his face is something I will never forget. Our very traumatised junior rabbi quoted afterwards the song that begins, ‘Cast out your wrath upon the nations that know ye not.’ In Hebrew it is, ‘Cast out your wrath upon the goyim [a disparaging term for non-Jews],’ which is what he said. My infantile brain thought, ‘No, that’s not the right answer.’ That thought is the thing that’s brought me here. And it has to do with Klinghoffer as well.”

When she says “brought me here”, where does she mean? “I mean into holy orders, into the rectory in Fulbourn. It had nothing to do with writing Klinghoffer really, but I was converted about halfway through writing it.” Did your conversion shock your family? “It was really difficult. If you’re Jewish, Christianity is an apostasy. If my family had been more traditional, they would have said a kaddish [a Jewish prayer often used to mourn the dead] over me. But they didn’t.”

We walk to the churchyard. In the driveway, she explains the two bumper stickers on her car. WTFWJD stands for “What the fuck would Jesus do?” The other, in Hebrew, translates as “the transformation of the world”…

And yet you can understand why Klinghoffer’s daughters hated the depiction of their father. Goodman tells me they could have been involved in the project but she resisted. “They had already been consultants for two docudramas.” One starred Karl Malden, the other Burt Lancaster. “So it seemed to me they didn’t really need a third. Also, having been advisers to these docudramas, they couldn’t really say this is all a private family matter because it had become part of the public discourse.”

But her libretto gave voice to his murderers’ motives. “Yes. It was suggested that I was making excuses for murder.” Which she wasn’t? “No, I don’t think there’s any excuse. All the hostages had been moved on to the top of a covered swimming pool. Mr Klinghoffer’s wheelchair would not go up there. He was shot below decks and his body thrown into the sea. I think in many ways he was killed as a wheelchair user more than anything else.”

Actually, that last sentence might just be one of the most inane things I’ve ever read.

So, I’d like to point out that no matter what one thinks of this piece of “art” it is nice to know that most folks remember the name Klinghoffer and cannot remember the name of the barbarians who killed him.

And, that’s how it should be.

The prolog is cut from the film and from current productions and was generally viewed as a mistake. Librettists make mistakes.

I want to emphasize that I am not a fan of the opera. I think that the view of the Palistinians contains a fair portion of mush-headed twaddle. I think that there are dramatic problems in contrasting dynamic characters who are terrorists with passive characters who are average Americans and Europeans. At best the passive characters engage our sympathies, but they cannot seem to function as more than victims.

Moreover, I can think of other recent operas I would much rather have had the Met stage. They are stuck on Adams and have done Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic, so I suppose this is the hattrick. I wish the Met did more modern works. I wish modern works were better.

This is all opera criticism and perfectly legitimate discussion. The opera has been elevated to a cause, however, by people who wouldn’t go to see Carmen, but who believe that they are fighting evil, so no one should see it, and to that end anything goes. This is what Michael Walsh of PJ Media calls “intolerant yahooism.”

If you don’t like the Met’s decision, take it up with the Met. They were free to do whatever they wanted about the simulcast, and the protesters were free to ask them not to do it.

I’ve read enough of the opera’s libretto to think it promulgates dangerous and destructive lies about the history of Israel. If the libretto doesn’t correct those lies about what occurred in 1948 (and I am fairly certain it does not), that’s already a big problem as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s even before we get to anything in the opera about the death of Klinghoffer himself, or the specific characters.

I am sure the opera is very “humane,” especially to the terrorists. In fact, the post I wrote about it (not this one; the other one) makes it clear that the opera’s big message is “sympathy.” I understand the opera is not not trashing the Klinghoffers (at least, not for the most part) but that’s not my point. My point is that, as Adams and Goodman themselves said, “no sides were taken” (by them, that is).

No sides?? When terrorists kill an unarmed guy in a wheelchair, on a cruise, because he’s Jewish? Excuse me? No sides? It’s the moral relativism and the historical distortion that I’m objecting to. That is the propaganda.

There’s also this sort of thing, which is more subtle (and keep in mind the person who wrote the following was defending the opera, not attacking it). I think it makes very very clear the stupid and destructive moral relativism of the opera’s creators:

Adams was somewhat more worried, and yet even as he defended the opera’s depiction of the Palestinians, he inadvertently outlined the complex matrix of domestic issues that defined its New York reception. No one was trying to justify murder, the composer argued, ‘but there was also violence perpetrated on the other side. Keeping someone bound up in a refugee camp his entire life is a different kind of violence than assassination, but nevertheless violence. I think that’s very hard for comfortable, middle-class Americans watching the world go by via their TV sets to get in touch with’.

In Brooklyn the sweeping geo-political canvas proffered by Sellars, Adams and Goodman was received on more parochial terms. It would not be the operatic adumbration of a rough moral equivalence between Israelio ccupation and Palestinian terror alone that would outrage New York Jewish critics. What would prove truly intolerable was how the shadow of that moral equivalenc efell across an opera containing a direct, insider’s attack on their own position as passive, assimilated ‘comfortable’ members of the American bourgeoisie.

There was a scene in the original that was cut from the current production because it had received so much criticism. I think it was another indication of the sympathies of the composer and librettist:

…[The critic] Rothstein chose to focus on one of the most ‘realistic’ moments of the original production, an intimate family scene for a trio of soloists that was framed by the two large symmetrically constructed choruses, one for Exiled Palestinians,one for Exiled Jews, that opened and closed the opera’s Prologue. This suburban vignette, set in New Jersey, attracted little attention in Europe, even from American critics, who at worst found its ‘skittishness’ somewhat at odds with the general elegiac tone, and felt that it got the opera off to a slow and confusing start.

…for Rothstein, the scene was not inept or out-of-place; it provided the key to unlocking the opera’s anti-Jewish bias:
“[The opening chorus and its] empathetic evocation of the intifada suddenly comes to an end as a family gathers on a couch and chair on a raised platform in midstage. They are the Rumor family, Jewish friends of the Klinghoffers. Mr. Rumor sits crankily with a television remote control in hand, squabbling with his missus over the tourist items she picks up every time they travel. She berates him for spending so much time on the toilet overseas, and also manages to suggest to her son that he check out Myrt Epstein’s daughters. The music burbles along like a theme song from a 1950s television show, raising its voice along with the family’s. In the midst of this bourgeois fricassee, Mrs. Rumor spots an item in the newspaper about Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and is outraged. Then, as if on cue, begins the languorous chant of the ‘Chorus of Exiled Jews’ “. . .

The Wall Street Journal had also objected strenuously to this scene (‘so kill them for their knickknacks, these tasteless shoppers!’), but Rothstein went much further, reading the rest of the opera through the lens of this domestic situation comedy…

When you saw the opera, did you happen to see that scene? Apparently even Edward Said thought it excessive:

Even Edward Said, whose long review of
Klinghoffer in the November issue of The Nation lauded the opera as a gratifying exception to ‘the neoconservative attack on the literary and pictorial arts [which] has also taken a significant toll in the world of classical music’, and who as a prominent Palestinian activist could hardly be accused of pro-Israeli bias, found himself somewhat ambivalent about ‘the studiously anti-bourgeois quality’ of the work. He had to admit that ‘in sticking to the American-Jewish, banal, middle-class aspect of the episode’, Goodman had biased the libretto against its Jewish protagonists. Even a staunch defender of Arab nationalism could not, as a New Yorker, really defend the Prologue’s bridge-and-tunnel comedy, which he agreed provided the lens through which the author meant us to view the work’s Jewish characters.

Even without that scene, there are echoes in the rest of the work that hark back to it, although it’s now absent:

Wieseltier, like Rothstein before him and Taruskin after him, proceeds to read the entire opera as a long trope on the opening domestic scene. The banality of the Rumors’ domestic chit-chat is not accidental; it sets the libretto’s tone, and Wieseltier goes to some lengths to discover it in specific moments in the narrative of suffering and grief that dominates Act II…

…The Rumors have risen; they have made the leap that the Goldbergs dreamed of in 1955; but by 1991, their secular, suburban, consumer-based identity was simply no longer equal to the strain of being Jewish in America. Jonathan appears to have wandered into his parents’ living room, in fact, from another sitcom, one more characteristic of the 1990s ‘Jewish’ sitcom trend — Seinfeld

.He views Mom and Dad, and their attempts to enfold him in an old-fashioned American Jewish identity, with detachment bordering on contempt. (It is central to the structure of the opera as originally conceived that the high tenor who plays this part later comes back to play Molqui, the ‘idealistic’ leader of the Palestinian terrorists.) At one point he makes wicked fun of the Klinghoffers, to whom Alma and Harry have recommended the Achille Lauro. He imagines Marilyn as the overprotective Jewish mother, organising a whirlwind tour for her incapacitated husband:
Harry:
The dollar’s up —
Jonathan:
Good news for the Klinghoffers.
Harry:
Hope all the logistics get worked out.
Jonathan:
Oh, Marilyn will see to that.Friday, Manhattans by the pool, Saturday, Eretz Yisroel!

There’s much more; the essay is long—and, as I said, the author doesn’t believe the opera is anti-Semitic, and is basically defending it. But the argument of the author is so convoluted and strained it amounts to something like this: well, the Jewish characters have some good traits, they’re not all bad; and if they’re trivialized and mocked as shallow materialistic petty people, it’s only in the same way that Jews mock themselves in humor and sitcoms, so it’s okay; and the very nuanced among us can see their humanity shining through.

The cut scene is provided in an appendix to the essay, if you want to take a look.

I apologize for any strawman or any argumentitiveness on my part.

I cannot say what Peter Gelb is implying since there is simply too wide a gap between his premise and his action. I think he is trying to compromise on a matter of artistic freedom where I believe he should be steadfast. I push back against the illiberality of those who want the production halted, because I believe in liberty.

I used to think that most Americans agreed with the spirit of the Voltaire quote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” but I’ve discovered that Voltaire didn’t actually say it and most people are suprisingly okay with stepping aside should someone actually require defense.

I am very much aware of both the kookiness and the danger of those pushing boycotts of Israel and the reflexive support for the Palestinians, even when they lapse into barbarism. I believe that false narratives need to be pointed out and objected to, but “helping” Palestinian propaganda is not the same as “being” Palestinian propaganda, and the willingness of people to embrace the supression of unwelcome art and ideas, because of the rightness of their own views or the need to protect their gullible neighbors, is not something I am willing to support.

No one is implying that someone goes to an opera and becomes a terrorist. That’s both an absurdity and a strawman.

The point is that the opera helps Palestinian propaganda along, helps it get credibility, and encourages more and more people in the West to think Israel is in the wrong, to demonstrate against it, support boycotts against it, and support politicians who are against it. This sort of thing has been growing on the left and is now mainstream in Europe. If you don’t think that’s dangerous, you’re wrong.