The Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino has never shied away from sensitive subjects in his movies, from the age-gap relationship in “Call Me By Your Name” to the fallout from the #MeToo movement in last year’s “After the Hunt.” Now, he’s wading into controversy in the world of opera, directing a work that from its 1991 debut has been a magnet for controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The piece, “The Death of Klinghoffer” by the American composer John Adams, is based on the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists, and the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair user from New York.
Protests and boycotts have plagued productions, most notably when the Metropolitan Opera staged the work in 2014. In a 2022 New York Times profile of Adams on the occasion of his 75th birthday, the critic Joshua Barone wrote that Klinghoffer was now “virtually impossible to produce in the United States.”
Guadagnino’s production will premiere on Sunday in Italy, at the Maggio Musicale Theater in Florence. In an interview at the theater, Guadagnino said he had “always loved” the opera, which he’d “thought about at length” over the years. He has used parts of the score — as well as other works by Adams — on the soundtracks of several films.
In fact, almost every one of Guadagnino’s movies features music by Adams, from “I Am Love,” (seven pieces) through to “After the Hunt” (five). In that film, the composer even gets a name check when the protagonist, played by Julia Roberts, asks her husband to stop blasting “The Death of Klinghoffer” on the stereo, and he replies, “Don’t you like my beloved Adams?”
Adams was unavailable for an interview because of conducting engagements, but through a spokesman he said he appreciated “Luca’s enthusiasm for my music and how he has, over the years, incorporated it into his films.”
Adams’s music “is part of my cultural imaginary,” Guadagnino said. He had long wanted to stage “The Death of Klinghoffer,” he said, and though he’d been courted by several opera theaters in northern Europe, they always balked when he proposed the piece.
When he suggested it to Carlo Fuortes, the general manager of the Maggio Musicale Theater, Fuortes immediately said yes.
“We both understood very clearly,” Guadagnino said, that “The Death of Klinghoffer” “is a masterpiece that has withstood the specious controversies that have accompanied it.”
The opera tells the story of the two-day hijacking of the Achille Lauro by four militants of the Palestine Liberation Front while it was traveling from Egypt to Israel. The terrorists murdered Klinghoffer, a disabled 69-year-old Jewish American passenger, and tossed his body into the sea along with his wheelchair.
From its debut, the opera drew criticism from some who saw it as antisemitic and sympathetic to the Palestinian terrorists. Others have defended it as a timeless tragedy that gives voice to all sides of a divisive geopolitical conflict that remains all too timely.
“The Death of Klinghoffer” was first produced — with a staging concept by the director Peter Sellars — six years after the horrific events on the Achille Lauro, when the episode was still fresh in the minds of many, especially the Klinghoffer family.
“They hate it,” Guadagnino said of Klinghoffer’s daughters, Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer. In a program note of the Met’s 2014 production, they said the work “rationalizes, romanticizes and legitimizes the terrorist murder of our father.”
Guadagnino said that what had gotten lost among the furious debates over the opera’s perceived political bias — which Adams and his librettist, Alice Goodman, have always denied — was Adams’s elegiac and mysterious score and the power of Goodman’s poetic and enigmatic words.
“Knowing that the opera was met with more or less controversy is irrelevant,” he said. “For me, what matters is that — from a musical standpoint, from the perspective of the libretto — this is a major work.”
While some “Klinghoffer” productions, including the one at the Met, have provided specific historical context to the opera, including photographs of Klinghoffer and his wife, Marilyn — reasoning, perhaps, that 21st-century audiences may not remember the 1985 incident — Guadagnino’s telling concentrates more on the work’s eternal themes.
An important element is the choreography conceived by Ella Rothschild, who said she used dance to manifest a slew of emotions. In one powerful moment, a stylized statue of a man, by the Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere, descends during an aria sung by Klinghoffer after he has been killed, and it is shorn apart.
The body, Guadagnino said, “is fundamental in this opera. There is constant talk of how these bodies are torn apart, thrown about, killed or dragged off the deck of a ship.” He added that the “traumas these bodies have endured” were “archetypal” and as important as “the traumas each character recounts about themselves.”
Fuortes said Guadagnino’s interpretation was “an exploration of humanity, of the body, and of what is almost a sacred interpretation of that incredible tragedy.”
Lawrence Renes, a longtime conductor of Adams’s works who will be in the pit in Florence, said that he understood that “The Death of Klinghoffer” could be upsetting, but that he hoped this production would be successful in communicating what he said was the opera’s universal, humane message: What was important was “what unites us not what divides us.”
“Luca and I have both tried to infuse that into this production,” Renes added, and to “enter into this realm of the sublime” via the music.
Adams will not be present at Sunday’s premiere, but his wife, Deborah O’Grady, will be, as will Goodman, the librettist.
Renes, who is in regular contact with Adams, said the composer had told him he had been “extremely touched” that “The Death of Klinghoffer” was being staged in Florence. “He was literally worried he would never hear his piece performed in his lifetime again,” Renes said. “But to him, as well as to me personally,” he added, the opera “is about humanity — the humanity of the story behind the controversy. And this is what we’ve been focused on.”
Guadagnino said he hoped his production would give new impetus to the opera. “It’s a title of our time,” he said, “and therefore one that needed to return to the stage.”
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
The post Luca Guadagnino Wants a Difficult Opera to Break Free of Polemics appeared first on New York Times.
