The Death of Klinghoffer, English National Opera, ENO, London Coliseum, February 2012

This opera has sparked controversy at its first staging in London. Why?

All images by Richard Hubert Smith

The essential story is that in 1985 an Italian cruise ship at dock in Alexandria was hijacked by four Palestinian terrorists, who seem to have had a confused idea about freeing prisoners in Israeli jails. Many of the people on the cruise were away at a tour of the pyramids, leaving mainly women and children on board, along with a 70-year old American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer in a wheelchair. The terrorists ended up negotiating some kind of deal for landing the ship in Syria after shooting Klinghoffer in the back and dumping him and his chair overboard.

Klinghoffer and wife

The opera itself, created by John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman, serves to remind us of an unedifying spectacle in the recent history of terrorism, and the anti-semitic remarks made by the Palestinians surely do not reflect the opinions of either composer or librettist. The production by Tom Morris, with sets by Tom Pye, hews closely to the concept embodied in this creation, but does the whole thing work?

Five years ago I saw a rather lovely Adams opera called  A Flowering Tree, based on an old Tamil story, a far cry from the days when he went out of his way to tackle political issues. Nixon in China was wonderful, and Klinghoffer and Dr. Atomic have been acclaimed by some. Part of the problem with Klinghoffer may be that Alice Goodman delivered her libretto in pieces, the choral parts first, and as a result the whole work is structured around six choruses, making it a cross between an oratorio and an opera.

The choral pieces are conceived in pairs, like the days of creation in the first chapter of Genesis where days 1, 2, 3 are paired with days 4, 5, 6. Here though the first pair, the chorus of Exiled Palestinians and chorus of Exiled Jews, comes in the Prologue. The Ocean chorus and the Night chorus end scenes 1 and 2 of Act I, and their counterparts, the Desert chorus and the Day chorus end scenes 1 and 2 of Act II.

Conducting by Baldur Brönnimann brought out the beauty of these choral passages, which form the musical strength of this work, and some of the solo performances came off well, particularly Alan Opie as Klinghoffer. Richard Burkhard gave a strong performance as the principal terrorist and Jesse Kovarsky did a nice dance number to complement his singing as another terrorist, but the strength of Adams’ creation is musical rather than theatrical.

Jesse Kovarsky in the dance number

Video projections by Tom Pye helped this rather static opera, sometimes showing the wake of a moving ship, sometimes the background to the choruses, and perhaps a semi-staged version in somewhere like the Festival Hall would work well too. But certainly the production fitted the opera, unlike the Rusalka now playing at Covent Garden.

Performances continue until March 9 — for details click here.

Le Grand Macabre, ENO, English National Opera, September 2009

This musical work by Ligeti (1923–2006) is related to opera in the way a painting by Hieronymus Bosch is related to a landscape. It seems to be about death, of both body and soul, but is a surreal work based on a 1934 drama La balade du Grand Macabre by Belgian author Michel de Ghelderode. The action takes place in a principality called Breughelland, named after the painter Pieter Brueghel, whose Triumph of Death seems to have been an inspiration. Ligeti originally wrote the music in 1975–77, collaborating on the libretto with Michael Meschke. It was written in German but intended to be flexible in its language and translated for performance. There was originally a fair amount of spoken dialogue, but much of this was removed in the revised version of 1996, which is what was performed here. Perhaps more should have gone, because some of the invective was unnecessarily unpleasant, including phrases such as ‘dog f…er’ and ‘arse l…er’. Is this really necessary in a work of art? Are there not other ways of expressing things that can carry the emotions by clever understatement? These particular phrases were uttered by the white minister and the black minister, who looked and performed like stock characters from a pantomime.

To understand this strange work I found it helpful to recall that Ligeti had shocking experiences as a young man. He was drafted into a Jewish labour battalion in 1944, and his close family was all sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Only his mother survived. The central character of the opera is Death in the person of Nekrotzar, sung here by Pavlo Hunka. His slave Piet the Pot was sung by Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, and the two lovers Amando and Amanda, who perpetually have sex together, were sung by Frances Bourne and Rebecca Botone. There is a court astronomer named Astradamors and his sadistic wife Mescalina, sung by Frode Olsen and Susan Bickley, and in the second part we meet Prince Go-Go, sung by counter-tenor Andrew Watts, and Gepopo, the chief of the secret police, sung by Susanna Anderson.

The action seems to lack a clear narrative, and I shall not go into a long exposition of the various scenes, but the production by Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco showed a variety of things going on, in and around a huge female corpse crouching on stage. The lighting by Peter van Praet was very clever as it threw some strange views on the corpse and even seemed to show its skeleton on occasion. Set designs were by Alfons Flores, and costumes, which I wasn’t wild about, by Lluc Castells. The production is being done jointly with the theatre La Monnaie in Brussels, the Gran Teatro del Liceu Barcelona, and the Teatro dell’ Opera di Roma. Baldur Brönnimann conducted and did a fine job with the orchestra. When I closed my eyes it sounded wonderful, but the grotesque action on stage was a distraction, and lovers of Ligeti might prefer a simple recording.