Reflections on guilt

There can be no doubting the nobility of John Adams’s intentions in writing The Death of Klinghoffer to a text by Alice Goodman, nor ENO’s courage in putting it on, though they do have a captive audience for minimalist and near-minimalist operas. The work is conceived, as all commentaries tirelessly tell us, in the spirit of Bach’s Passions, in which a dramatic narrative thread alternates with arias of reflection and choruses of penance and grief.

Yet Bach’s purpose was different in kind from Adams’s. Bach could take for granted an audience of unquestioning believers, and his sublime masterpieces embody their faith more powerfully than anything else a Christian has created, so they are immensely potent aids to devotion and reflection; and the most powerful challenge to those of us who don’t believe. The point of Klinghoffer is, by sharp contrast, to present the story of the hijacking of the Achille Lauro as objectively as possible, so that we can make up our minds about the balance of wrongdoing and guilt, which is the reason why the work has been so controversial.

Two questions arise: is an opera a good way to present this pressing issue, or set of issues? And is Klinghoffer in any case really an opera? One might have expected that the narrative would be taut and compelling, but after opening with two reflective choruses, of Exiled Palestinians and Exiled Jews respectively, the Captain of the ship launches into a lengthy account of the terrible events, but clearly from some temporal distance, since he has a penchant for verbose reminiscences of life at sea and is no more pressed for time than Conrad’s Marlow. There is no give-and-take dialogue, the characters make their points imperturbably, and Act I is, as a consequence, soporific.