‘Death of Klinghoffer’: Standing Ovations for Great Art or Anti-Jewish Pornography?
THE WASHINGTON POST
By Anne Midgette
NEW YORK---Banning “Klinghoffer” from the stage is not the right answer. Neither is celebrating it as a perfect work. Alas, neither side has emerged with much understanding of the other, and the martyrdom of Klinghoffer has blurred into the martyrdom of “Klinghoffer,” the opera. Which means that either you celebrate the Met or castigate the Met for putting it on, and that the company, despite putting its best foot forward, once again provides a polarizing example of opera’s distance from the city it hoped, with this production, to engage. [link]
The critics speak on “The Death of Klinghoffer:”
By Anne Midgette
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| The chorus of exiled Palestinians sings in John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer.” The general critical consensus: you may like the opera or not, but it isn’t anti-Semitic. (credit: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera) |
The critics speak on “The Death of Klinghoffer:”
- Alex Ross in The New Yorker
- Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times
- Justin Davidson in New York Magazine
- James Jorden in the New York Observer
- Manuela Hoelterhoff on Bloomberg.com
- Martin Bernheimer in The Financial Times
- Heidi Waleson in The Wall Street Journal
- Mark Swed in The Los Angeles Times
- Joe Dziemieanowicz in The New York Daily News
- Paul Pelkonen on Superconductor
- Ivy on Poison Ivy’s Wall of Text
- Pamela McCorduck on Iron Tongue of Midnight
- Sam Reising on I Care if You Listen
- Four New Yorkers with four different perspectives in The Guardian
- Michael Walsh on Unexamined Premises (he writes about the brouhaha, and posts his review of the 1991 world premiere at the end)
- Ami Eden in the Jewish Telegraph
- Tim Smith in The Baltimore Sun
- David Patrick Stearns in The Philadelphia Inquirer
- David Patrick Stearns on WQXR’s Operavore blog
- Brian Schaefer in Haaretz
- Glen Roven on The Huffington Post
- Micaela Baranello on Likely Impossibilities … evenings at the opera