More on the Klinghoffer HD Broadcast Decision

 Links to some relevant articles and a few thoughts of my own about the opera. More to come, no doubt.

• Joshua Kosman has an opinion piece in the Chronicle today about the Met's decision to cancel the HD broadcast of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer. He doesn't mince any words, calling the decision "craven" and "a new marker for institutional cowardice." Yep, yep, yep.
• Looking back to 2001, here is the notorious Richard Taruskin post-9/11 article. If this is what Joshua is referring to as the article that makes a good case for the problems with the opera, I disagree. It reads to me like a load of straw men and ranting before Taruskin, on page 3, finally comes to the clanging conclusion that the BSO's cancellation of choruses from Klinghoffer was right because it showed self-control and respect for the feelings of others. He does not call Klinghoffer anti-Semitic, either, though for all I know that is what he was thinking.
• NY Times editorial: The Klinghoffer Tragedy. They oppose the cancellation, but they're way too polite to the Met.
• Jessica Duchen: How to shoot yourself in both feet at the opera
•  NMB: Readers Respond to Death of Klinghoffer Simulcast Cancellation
• Anthony Tommasini: Chances Lost in Dispute Over Opera 
• Michael Cooper: Adams Responds. Apropos of the Klinghoffer daughters getting to use the program as their platform, gosh, would the Met have published a letter from Richard Nixon's daughters when Nixon in China was finally performed at the Met?? Of course, Nixon comes off pretty well in the opera.

I think there is a case to be made against the libretto, but it's not one I have seen before: if you want to present the Israel/Palestinian conflict in an even-handed way, which is what I believe Adams and Goodman have said they were trying to do, having Israel represented by an American Jew and Palestine represented by terrorists misrepresents both sides. An American Jew isn't an Israeli and isn't Israel; Palestinians deserve better representation than the minority of terrorists. Consider an alternative plotline unrelated to the Achille Laura hijacking: a Palestinian family that lost its land after fleeing in 1948, an Israeli family that lost its home in the Holocaust or after fleeing Iran. And there's an obvious bad side in murdering an old man who has no power in the conflict. I haven't seen or heard the opera and have no opinion as to whether it is anti-Semitic. I will say that the portrayal of Henry Kissinger in Nixon made me squirm, though.