The Artside

Alice Goodman, in a Guardian interview of 2012:

"The guards at Auschwitz were able to do what they did because they had dehumanised the people who came through. It's that whole process of dehumanising that I hate. To have made Klinghoffer into the Klinghoffer the critics wanted would have been to play into that enterprise of dehumanising – dehumanising your enemy, dehumanising your friends as well."

I wasn't planning to see the new production of Alice Goodman's and John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met, not for political reasons. I can't afford to see even a small fraction of everything I want, and I saw the opera at Brooklyn Academy of Music in the semi-staged production of 2003, and frankly I thought it was static and the music weak. Then came Monday's twitterstorm in advance of the production premiere and the demonstration outside the opera house, and opera fan Rodolfo Giuliani pitted against Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Bill de Blasio, and I said to myself, boy, whose side are you on? and ordered tickets. For Guy Fawkes Day, as it happens.

I certainly didn't think 11 years ago that the opera was anti-Semitic or offensive in any way, and couldn't imagine how anyone not a fanatic—someone who thought it was wrong to portray humans as human—could imagine it was. It would be like calling In Cold Blood anti-Kansan, or anti-farmer.

But I've also been rethinking Adams as a composer, since seeing his very strong Robert Oppenheimer opera Doctor Atomic in 2008 and the wondrous and hilarious Nixon in China in 2011. His music is never as minimalist as it often sounds. A lot of it is not essentially different from Wagnerian diddling with the motifs, just making necessary space,  like the undertow at the beach, for a great breaking emotion.

It may be that The Death of Klinghoffer can't be that good because of the subject matter, that in order to take out the politics you have to take out the point of view and in the end bleed out all the feeling of it. They already had to take out all the humor, for fear of pandering to stereotypes. It may be that for a primarily political tragedy (which Nixon in China is not), you have to have some way of distancing the audience from the particular politics, the way Don Carlos and Aida attack the Catholic church by moving it to the Spanish Renaissance or the Egyptian 18th Dynasty (no humanization there, Verdi is openly hostile to the priests and a brutal caricaturist). Perhaps it takes a discursive form like the novel (Turgenev to Le Carré) to deal with the subject of terrorism.

But I think you have to give The Death of Klinghoffer a hearing in any case if you possibly can, not in defense of the artist's right to explore such matters, which should go without question (though Rodolfo Giuliani has always been willing to question it), but the artist's duty. Whose side are you on? The artside.

Art by Christopher Cardinale from George Ella Lyon, Which Side Are You On?, 2011.