About the work
The Death of Klinghoffer is an opera in a prologue and two acts by John Adams to a libretto by Alice Goodman, first performed on 19 March 1991 at La Monnaie in Brussels, staged by Peter Sellars with choreography by Mark Morris and conducted by Kent Nagano. Five opera houses, including San Francisco Opera and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, jointly commissioned the work after the success of Nixon in China.
Plot
The opera dramatizes the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front. Two opposing choruses — exiled Palestinians and Jews — frame the action with their own histories of suffering before the hijackers shoot the 69-year-old, wheelchair-using Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer and throw him overboard.
Cultural significance
The opera was controversial from the outset: Klinghoffer's daughters called it a "historically naive" equation of Palestinian suffering with their father's murder, and critics detected antisemitic undertones. In 2014 the Metropolitan Opera cancelled a planned cinema broadcast after mass protests. The German-language premiere took place in 1997 at the Staatstheater Nürnberg, directed by Barbara Beyer.