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Critic’s Notebook

Chances Lost in Dispute Over Opera

A scene from a 2003 production of “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Credit...Stephanie Berger for The New York Times

For an opera about such a horrific incident — the 1985 killing of a disabled Jewish American who was vacationing with his wife aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship when Palestinian hijackers shot him in his wheelchair and threw him off the deck — “The Death of Klinghoffer” begins like a passion oratorio.

The opera, with music by John Adams and a libretto by Alice Goodman, opens with a 17-minute prologue, beginning with an extended Chorus of Exiled Palestinians. The ensemble voices the roiling grievances and hatreds of the Palestinians. Yet the bitter words are set at first with haunting lyricism. Phrases spin off in elegiac melismas. The orchestra is on a low simmer, nervous and stealthy, until the final moments, when the Palestinians vent their anger in threatening, piercing music, singing:

Let the supplanter look

Upon his work. Our faith

Will take the stones he broke

And break his teeth.

This episode segues into the Chorus of Exiled Jews. Again, the inspired music is powerfully ambiguous: thick-textured and harmonically luminous, yet agitated and eerie.

Since the 1991 premiere of “Klinghoffer,” these paired choruses have been seized upon by the opera’s detractors as evidence that its creators are suggesting the moral equivalence of these Jews and Palestinians. I can understand this reaction, but do not share it. “Klinghoffer” is a raw, brooding work that in its brutal honesty provides a kind of tragic consolation. For me, it is Mr. Adams’s musically richest opera, with a stronger score, overall, than those for “Nixon in China” and “Doctor Atomic.”

Audiences at the Metropolitan Opera will have a chance to experience the work and decide what they think when the company presents a Met premiere production this fall, opening on Oct. 20. But, as those who follow cultural news know by now, the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, bowing to intense pressure from some Jewish groups that oppose the work, particularly the Anti-Defamation League, has canceled the “Live in HD” simulcast that would have brought “Klinghoffer” to tens of thousands of viewers in movie theaters around the world.

Mr. Gelb and Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who admits to having never seen the opera, portray the cancellation as a tough compromise between opposing imperatives: Mr. Gelb wanted to stand on artistic principle and proceed with the simulcast; Mr. Foxman, fearing the ramifications at a time of rising anti-Semitic acts abroad, wanted the entire production scrapped.

Despite this spin, the Met’s decision to cancel the HD simulcast and the radio broadcast represents a dismaying artistic cave-in. “Klinghoffer” has always drawn criticism by some for what is judged to be an anti-Semitic slant: The Jewish vacationers are caricatures, it is said, while the Palestinians are veritably sanctified by the opera’s attempt to explore their suffering. It is in the nature of art to provoke disagreement. Fine. So, simulcast “Klinghoffer” and let audiences grapple with the piece.

Art can offer insight and consolation, yes. It can also challenge, baffle and incense us. This “Klinghoffer” production could have been an invaluable teaching moment for the Met and its audiences. Mr. Gelb could have assembled Middle East historians, religious leaders and the “Klinghoffer” creative team to have a public dialogue, culminating in the simulcast.

Mr. Gelb made the choice to present “Klinghoffer.” No interest group pressured him. The company has staged two other operas from Mr. Adams with considerable success. So, by canceling the “Klinghoffer” broadcast, Mr. Gelb is, in effect, signaling to those who have not seen the opera that it is tainted. You have to feel terrible for Mr. Adams, who said in an interview on Wednesday that it’s “very hard when something’s been stained with an accusation” like anti-Semitism. It’s “almost impossible to wash it out.”

On Dec. 13, a month after what would have been the “Klinghoffer” simulcast, the Met will present Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” live in HD. This comedy about a guild of mastersingers in 16th-century Nuremberg is, for me, a glowing and miraculous work. Still, many people see not-so-hidden elements of anti-Semitism, especially at the end, when the kindly shoemaker Hans Sachs issues a warning about the threats to true German art from evil foreign influences. And Wagner had well-documented anti-Semitic attitudes. Should the Met cancel the “Meistersinger” simulcast if pressure comes from groups that combat intolerance?

New Yorkers had a special opportunity to see “Klinghoffer” when Mr. Adams conducted a concert performance in 2009 at the Juilliard School with a cast of inspiring young singers, the school’s impressive orchestra and the Concert Chorale of New York, who all received big ovations. I wrote at the time that seeing the real-life, hard-bitten characters portrayed by fresh-faced, aspiring artists lent grave poignancy to the drama. Klinghoffer (the baritone Nicholas Pallesen) came across as a decent man bearing up under physical hardships who heroically denounced the hijackers and fired unflinching questions at Mamoud, their leader (the baritone Kelly Markgraf), the most conflicted terrorist, though a man steeped in stony hatred.

The Met’s production of “Klinghoffer” was introduced at the English National Opera in 2012 to widespread acclaim and without incident. From its inception, though, the opera has generated controversy, even among — sometimes it seems especially among — those who don’t know it.

In his liner notes for the Elektra Nonesuch recording of “Klinghoffer,” released in 1992, the critic Michael Steinberg commented that the religious and economic conflicts that drove the terrible events of 1985 are “weighted by millennia of history.” We can read about them in the Old Testament, he wrote, and, sounding ominously prophetic, “guaranteed, on whichever day you read these words, there will be some new installment in the morning paper.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Chances Lost in Dispute Over Opera. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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