When the Director Fights Against the Opera, No One Wins

Since its premiere in 1991, John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer has been surrounded by controversy. As readers will probably already know given the mountain of critical writing that has accumulated over the years, the opera takes as its subject the hijacking of the Mediterranean cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1982, ending with the murder of a wheelchair-bound Jewish American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer. Unfortunately, much of that mountain of criticism has been surprisingly uninformed and unintelligent, focusing on illusory accusations of anti-Semitism or simplistic moral evaluations, and failing to come to terms with the multi-faceted and perplexing opera that Adams (with librettist Alice Goodman, and original director Peter Sellars) actually created.

I might have hoped that this Edinburgh production, the first fully-staged…