Met stages vile show as protesters rail

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The thing I kept thinking about at the opening night of “The Death of Klinghoffer” is that it’s not the first time that the Metropolitan Opera has put on its boards a drama about the murder of a Jew — or Jews. There is, after all, Nabucco, Giuseppe Verdi’s masterpiece about the conquest of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews. It features Va, Pensiero, known as the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves — a profoundly sympathetic melodic evocation of Jewish longing.

“Klinghoffer,” John Adams’ opera about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, turns out to be a different story. This had already been figured out by the Jewish leadership in New York. They have for months been protesting plans to mount this production. The protest Monday, across the street from Lincoln Center, included an ideological cross section of politicians, such as Mayor Giuliani, Representatives Peter King and Carolyn Maloney, Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress, and a former governor of New York State, David Paterson.

Jewish protests had already won cancellation of the Met’s plan to broadcast “Klinghoffer” globally, but the Met insisted on going ahead with the stage production, using the slogan: “See it. Then Decide.” I tried to get several friends to join me for opening night, but one after another they demurred. No one in my circle wanted to see a celebration of a Jew being murdered as he sat in a wheelchair. I, however, am besotted with the newspaperman’s vice, even if my heart is with the protesters.

Before the opera, I spent two hours with the several hundred gathered in Dante Park across from the Lincoln Center. In front of the Opera’s own plaza, across Ninth Avenue (and the police lines), a line of more protesters sat in wheelchairs. Their backs were to the Met’s vast windows, through which shone the magnificent murals by Marc Chagall, the same artist who did the paintings in the Knesset.

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