Some of the most militant critics of the opera had threatened to shut it down, although nobody ever said exactly how they might do that.
I am neither Jewish nor Palestinian, so I can’t claim to fully understand, much less experience, the deep feelings aroused in some hearts by the John Adams/Alice Goodman opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer.”
The 1991 opera opened Monday night at the Met. In the months-long run-up to the opening night performance, we heard accusations and counter-accusations, most of them centering on the question of whether the opera romanticizes terrorism, and whether it is more generally anti-Semitic.
On opening night, hundreds of protesters (including, for some reason, former New York mayor RudyGiuliani) gathered on the Lincoln Center plaza to decry the piece and the Met for putting it on. (If you would like to form your own impression of the opera’s political leanings, you might want to read the libretto, something that many of the protesters openly acknowledged they had not done.)
So much has been written about this production that in recent days it seemed even the combatants had been growing tired. At a recent anti-“Klinghoffer” rally, one of the protesters had been quoted as saying something to the effect that, we’ve said our piece, so now let’s just see the show already, and then we’ll be done with it.
I have just two quick thoughts:
One, I’m glad, and relieved, that the Monday performance went on at all. (The production will run for seven more performances, with the last being November 15. Check the schedule here.)
Some of the most militant critics of the opera had threatened to shut it down, although nobody ever said exactly how they might do that. Even just talking about trying to suppress or silence works of art is a bad idea. It smacks of fundamentalist zealotry and intolerance, and considering the themes of this particular opera, the ironies are too obvious to belabor.
For the record, however, the victory here was only partial, because as not all of the news stories bothered to point out, the anti-“Klinghoffer” forces did succeed in persuading the Met management to cancel its planned HD movie theater transmission of the opera. That was too bad; I hope the show is being videotaped for some kind of later distribution.
Two, the “Klinghoffer” episode, as it played out at the Met at least, has unexpectedly affirmed the power of art. The opera’s detractors repeatedly said that they were especially troubled that “Klinghoffer” would be given a forum by an institution of the “stature” and “influence” of the Met. In a year when the Met has been making massive, painful modifications to its union contracts, and had been publicly talking about the possibility of bankruptcy, it must have been oddly comforting for the company to know – even as it was being furiously denounced – that it was still seen as having stature and influence.
Opera as a genre is often derided these days as an irrelevant, frivolous, aristocratic diversion. The “Klinghoffer” episode at the Met shows, in its own messy, contentious way, that it need not be any of those things.
The Career Hipster
As Duke Ellington didn’t exactly say, good music is good music. In that spirit, I’d like to say a few words abut Tim Hauser, the founder, and lone continuous member of the vocal quartet, The Manhattan Transfer. Hauser died last week at age 72.
MT has had a nice, if unorthodox, career. The group, which, after some false starts, came together in the early '70s, has almost uniquely maintained both a pop and a jazz identity. But they have paid a price for this risky dual citizenship.
The jazz police has often scorned them for being too slick and show-bizzy, while the pop world gave them grudging notice only when they covered some certified mainstream hit like “Boy From New York City.”
But the Transfer did the thing that all real artists do: they kept moving, and kept trying things.
The group’s 1979 album “Extensions” was the first loud announcement that they were willing to move beyond a comfortable career doing cheerful swing and doo-wop covers, and to try their hand at something that at times felt like close-harmony Art Song. The group’s 6-minute version of Joe Zawinul’s “Birdland” did not immediately have “hit’ written all over it, but it eventually became the Transfer’s signature tune, and an enduring emblem of their enterprising, genre-defying spirit.
By all accounts Hauser was the guiding force, and even though he was perhaps the least vivid of the four vocally, he functioned onstage as the anchoring presence among his three more overtly theatrical colleagues, Cheryl Bentyne, Alan Paul and Janis Siegel.
Here’s Tim singing lead, in his patented, weary hipster voice, on Tom Waits’ brilliant “Foreign Affair":
An Ordinary Man With an Extraordinary Gift
I got the chance to interview composer Stephen Paulus only once, but it was most of the most engaging, mainly pleasant interviews I ever did. This was in 1999, and Paulus was up in the Berkshires overseeing rehearsals to his new opera “Summer,” based on an Edith Wharton novella.
Paulus was by this time recognized one of the leading American composers of our time, but he was a pleasingly unaffected, regular guy, who could have just as easily have been the theater’s handyman as the award-winning composer of the work about to be premiered.
He talked about growing up listening to the Stones and the Beach Boys, how he balanced being a composer with being a husband and a dad to two then-small children, about his unremarkable suburban guy life in St. Paul, Minnesota, the state in which he had grown up and continued to live.
Last year Paulus suffered a severe stroke that left him incapacitated. A few days ago he died of complications from that stroke. He was 65.
Paulus left behind an impressively large and varied body of work, including his well-known -- and by modern standards, rather frequently performed – opera, “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” based on the steamy James Cain novel and its subsequent 1946 movie starring Lana Turner.
He also composed a great deal of choral music. Here is one of his most famous and affecting pieces, the “Pilgrim’s Hymn.”
Hardly Worth it Department
I’m composing a hip new contemporary techno piece – it’s going to be called Quartet for Four iPhones (“Sirioso”).
Steve Metcalf was The Hartford Courant’s fulltime classical music critic and reporter for over 20 years, beginning in 1982. He is currently the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School. He can be reached at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.
