John Adams Redux

For opera lovers, the Metropolitan Opera's live in HD broadcasts may be the best thing that has happened in recent years.   The Met's announcement in June that it was cancelling its worldwide broadcast of John Adams’s masterpiece The Death of Klinghoffer may be one of the worst.

In a press release, the company said that the decision was made in response to “genuine concern in the international Jewish community” that the broadcast would be “inappropriate in this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.”  The Boston Globe newspaper responded: "The wrong-headedness of the Met’s decision sets a bad precedent for arts organizations and violates the vital notion that difficult ideas can be confronted and discussed through the arts."

Composer John Adams

Like most operas by John Adams, The Death of Klinghoffer is inspired by true events - this one by the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by four members of the Pelestinian Liberation Front.  The event is remembered mostly because of their gruesome killing of disabled Jewish-American tourist Leon Klinghoffer whose body was then thrown overboard.

I have been looking forward to the Met simulcast of The Death of Klinghoffer for many reasons.  First because I appreciate Adams's music, and this rarely performed opera is considered to be one of his best works.   Then I have a strong personal reason.  A few years before the hijacking, I also was a tourist on the Achille Lauro, sailing from the South African port of Durban to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean on a Christmas cruise.  It would take a short novel to describe the two weeks on the ship with an Italian crew making every effort to keep passengers entertained during the lengthy voyage.

Achille Lauro at Cape Town

Apart from a three-day stop at Mauritius, the entire time was passed on the ship at high seas, so cabin fever was a constant threat, and yet there was never a dull moment.  One of  my most hilarious memories has nothing to do with organized entertainment.  It involves a Jewish couple who shared our dining table.  I did not immediately realize they were Jewish as such things were not of vital interest to me.  But I could not fail to notice that the wife regularly directed suspicious sniffs muttering to her husband "don't you think this smells of bacon?"  Sometimes she would ask the server if there was bacon in a dish. Initially, I thought her concern was about calories or just plain dislike of bacon.  The husband largely ignored her remarks and one morning ordered bacon and eggs for breakfast to her indignant dismay.  Unperturbed, he said "this is kosher bacon," and proceeded to devour his breakfast with gusto amid hilarious uproar at the table.  It was only then that I understood the real reason for his wife's concern.

Hawaiian Evening on the Achille Lauro

As fate would have it, during my moves from continent to continent, I lost my Achille Lauro album, but one of the only two photos I have left is of the Jewish couple with whom we shared many enchanted evenings on the ship.

Could I imagine at the time that the Achille Lauro would enter history as a setting for a terrorist act, and later an opera?

Adams's now famous opera Nixon in China had not yet been performed and the term docu-drama was largely unknown.  I don't think I had heard about the composer either, even though he had already garnered success with instrumental works such as Shaker Loops, Harmonium, and Grand Pianola Music.  I think I first heard of Adams when his opera Nixon in China arrived in Washington in 1988 and I was dying to see it, but could neither afford the ticket nor a baby sitter.  Who wouldn't like to see Kissinger, Nixon and his wife, and various Chinese politicians on the operatic stage?  When the opera premiered in Houston in 1987, all of the principals could have attended except for Mao Zedong and Chou En Lai, who were dead.

Lounging by the ship's pool 

The Death of Klinghoffer was co-commissioned by several opera companies and it premiered in Brussels in 1991.  When it was staged later in the year by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it created an immediate controversy causing cancellations, especially from the American theaters.  The San Francisco performance in 1992 was picketed by Jewish advocacy groups, while the Los Angeles Music Center and Opera Glyndebourne – both co-commissioners of the opera – dropped plans to perform it.

Music critics gave The Death of Klinghoffer good reviews, some even said it was his best work.  And the composer’s reputation seems to have suffered little from the controversy. Quite the contrary, the New York Philharmonic commissioned him for a new work to mark the first anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center in the terrorist attacks. That composition, titled On the Transmigration of Souls, received the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

I met Adams in 2004 at a concert in Alexandria, Virginia, which he conducted.  He explained what he did in The Death of Klinghoffer.  “I gave a voice to the Palestinian nation. I wrote choruses for them, and one of the terrorists tells the story of his childhood and the murder of his brother. And I gave them beautiful music as well as to Jews, and many people, particularly in America, thought that this was a terribly naive, even anti-Semitic thing to do," said Adams.  "I was in effect 'glorifying terrorism.'  But, he argued, “Shakespeare writes for Iago in Otello.  He gives him every bit as beautiful poetry.  Otherwise, it just would not have any impact, or power.”

In the meantime, the continued relevance of The Death of Klinghoffer spurred numerous revivals, especially in Europe, including a film version on BBC television, which is now available on DVD.  No particular disturbances were reported during those performances.And now, after more than 20 years, this masterpiece has finally reached the Metropolitan Opera. The Met has previously staged Adams's Dr. Atomic, which was written much later than Klinghoffer, and when this proved to be a success it also showed the much older Nixon in China. A planned live-in-HD transmission of  The Death of Klinghoffer would make it accessible to tens of thousands of people around the world, and those of us in the United States who cannot afford to fly to New York to see it. But shortly after the good news was announced, the Met's general manager Peter Gelb made it known that the simulcast was off. It is hard to believe that this is happening in the country that so celebrates freedom of expression and so likes to criticize those that don't. 

Adams himself said that the cancellation of the international video and radio transmission “goes far beyond issues of ‘artistic freedom,’ and ends in promoting the same kind of intolerance that the opera’s detractors claim to be preventing.” Gelb said he personally did not consider the work anti-Semitic. But he apparently was persuaded that it could fuel "rising anti-Semitism, especially in Europe." 

Like the Boston Globe commentator, I ask myself how that could happen. "Are the goons who dominate far-right parties in European countries really going to tune into opera broadcasts for their inspiration?" asks the Globe critic. "The only other justification for cancelling the broadcast of the production (which will still be performed on stage at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, as planned) is that some audience members might take offense. If that’s the case, why produce opera at all?"

Exactly!  John Adams said his music seeks to document his era for future as well as present generations.  “The themes that I have used in my theatrical works and the general emotional tenor of my instrumental music, I think, expresses what it is like to be alive right now," he said.  

Twenty-three years after its world premiere, The Death of Klinghoffer remains as relevant as ever, and will clearly remain so for many years to come.   Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti and other great opera composers battled censorship throughout their lives, but their masterpieces survived.   The broadcast cancellations must be painful for Adams, but they cement his place in the most exalted company. 

To hear the composer's comments see video attached in the article below:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/18/new-york-metropolitan-opera-cancel-death-of-klinghoffer-simulcast

Al-Andalus, Islamic World in Medieval Spain

After crossing from North Africa in the early seven-hundreds, Muslims ruled in southern Spain for almost eight centuries, interacting with the populations they found there.  The golden age of al-Andalus has offered some lessons for a modern pluralist society. But do we learn from history?

Many medieval Spanish songs combine Jewish, Christian European and Arabic music traditions.  A convergence of three distinct cultures marked almost every aspect of life in Islamic Spain: from economy, technology, science and medicine to philosophy, literature, art and architecture.

Al-Andalus, Land of "Convivencia"
Al-Andalus, or Andalusia, originated in 711, when an army of Arabs and Berbers crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to depose Visigothic ruler Roderic.   Jews supported and welcomed Muslims in Spain because initially they prospered better under Islamic rule than Christian.   Osman bin Bakar, a scholar and author from Malaysia, says in contrast to the rest of Europe, at the time Andalusia was enlightened and tolerant.

“Andalusia was perhaps the only place in Europe then where followers of the three Abrahamic faiths - Muslims, Christian and Jews - lived together in relative peace to produce a common culture and civilization over such a long period of time,” says Bakar.

The fertile mixing of cultures on the Iberian peninsula was partly the result of a moderate kind of Islam practiced by the first ruling dynasty of the Umayyads. Their reign ended in the early years of the eleventh century. As the poetry from their time indicates, the Umayyads reveled in the pleasures of the body as well as the mind.  They also appreciated other cultures, for example, Greek philosophy and science, which they helped spread to the rest of Europe.

By the tenth century, Andalusia reached what was called a golden age in terms of cultural and political development, prosperity and power.  Its capital city of Cordoba had some 200-thousand houses, 600 mosques, 900 public baths, 50 hospitals, and lighted and paved streets. Libraries and research institutions spread rapidly in Muslim Spain, while the rest of Europe remained largely illiterate.

Cordoba, Spain

With Discord Comes Decline
But some analysts warn against idealizing Andalusian “convivencia,” Spanish term for religious and cultural tolerance of the era.  With time, liberators turned into conquerors.  Conversion to Islam was encouraged and sometimes compelled, and the Arabic language was dominant in all aspects of life.  Some philosophers were banned, their books burned.  Uprisings were answered with mass executions.  Jane Gerber, professor of history at the City University of New York, says by the 12th century, religious tolerance was on the wane.

“When we speak about the science of the 12th and 13th centuries, we are already talking about a period in which Jews no longer lived in the realm of Islam in Spain.  They had in fact been forced to flee or convert,”says Berger.

Significant changes began during the 11th century.  British historian Richard Fletcher says al-Andalus, once centrally ruled, became divided into smaller states, centered around cities such as Seville, Granada, Malaga and Cordoba:  “These little statelets of 11th century al-Andalus were individually small and vulnerable.  They could only survive among their predatory neighbors by adroit diplomacy and warfare.”

Fletcher says Christian rulers to the north of al-Andalus were willing to supply arms for cash, spurring political and business interaction on all levels and enabling individual rise to power: “The most famous Spaniard of all time, Rodrigo Diaz, known as El Cid, “the boss,” was a Castilian nobleman who became an exceptionally skillful and lucky mercenary soldier who sold his skills to a variety of pay masters, Christian and Muslim, and ended his career as the independent ruler of his own little principality of Valencia on the eastern Mediterranean coast of Spain.”

Divisions like these weakened Islamic rulers of Andalusia, paving the way for Christian forces to gain control of the peninsula in the 13th century.  Granada, last of the Muslim outposts, finally surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in 1492.  Crusader nobles and clerics from the north, who helped local Christian rulers defeat their Muslim rivals, also put an end to multiculturalism.  Within three months of Granada’s fall, unconverted Jews were expelled and Islamic practices banned.  Fletcher notes that legend would soon turn El Cid into a Christian hero, a loyal Castilian patriot, who was supposed to have spent his life fighting to expel Muslims from Spain.

Lasting Legacy
The legacy of the golden age of al-Andalus is widespread and lasting: from advances in agriculture, science, medicine, astronomy, cartography and navigation to the beauty of architecture, music, poetry, silk weaving, ceramics and marble carving. Some Andalusian products are still today hallmarks of quality: Toledo steel, Cordoban leather, Granada silk and Seville oranges.

Malaysian scholar Osman bin Bakar says this golden age offers some important lessons: “Fraternization! For scientific progress, you have to have fraternization. And the other one is universalism. I think the [Andalusian] emphasis on the universal aspects of Islam should be imitated by Muslims today, rather than going to sectarian thinking. I think universalism is the way to scientific progress. And certainly internationalization and globalization of science.”

Analysts say the Islamic world flourished through contact and cooperation with other cultures.   Its creativity declined with the onset of ethnic and religious conflict.