‘They said: You’ve lost your mind’: Luca Guadagnino on directing controversial opera ‘The Death of Klinghofer’ | Opera

IIn a rehearsal room perched above the labyrinthine backstage of Florence’s contemporary Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Luca Guadagnino shows the women of the chorus how to enter the second act. The Italian director runs forward, wearing a cardigan and slouchy trousers, and stops at a line of tape that marks the edge of the stage. After getting a little out of breath, he turned in front of the lying dancers to turn to conductor Lawrence Raines and ask if he would mind hearing the sound of feet stomping. “I don’t mind at all when we hear them talking, walking, or breathing,” Raines says. “It’s live theater.”

Best known for films like After the Hunt, Challenges, and Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino still occasionally punctuates stage rehearsals with instinctive cries like “Cut!” and “Work!”. But today he directs an opera. It’s his second time ever and his first in more than 15 years — and it’s highly controversial. The Death of Klinghofer, a 1991 opera with music by John Adams and a libretto by Alice Goodman, sparked accusations of anti-Semitism whenever and wherever it was performed. The film depicts the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by the Palestine Liberation Front, their murder of disabled Jewish American tourist Leon Klinghofer, and the grief and anger of his wife, Marilyn. The story is placed in a historical, even mythological, context.

This is the first new Klinghofer production to be conceived since the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023 and the Israeli bombing of Gaza that followed. “Hiding victims is absolutely violent, abhorrent and fascist,” says Guadagnino. “One of the great successes of not only authoritarian regimes, but also of so-called democracies, is to create a mirror in which you do not see what is behind it. One of Klinghoffer’s great qualities is that he destroys that mirror and turns the invisible, the indescribable, the unsayable, into something that you have to see, confront and think about.”

Along with Nixon in China, his predecessor from the same creative team, Klinghoffer is sometimes called the “opera of CNN.” But Guadagnino rejects this characterization, saying that it is a work of art that “elevates itself from the banality of the present.” The opera is modeled on Bach’s Passion, in which monologues delivered by the ship’s captain, the Klinghofer family, the other hostages, and the Palestine Liberation Front are studded with six choirs, beginning with the chorus of exiled Palestinians and followed by the chorus of exiled Jews.

“It begins with the catastrophic destruction of humanity, with the Nakba,” says Guadagnino, using the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that also refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians during the founding of the state of Israel. “The Nakba that the Palestinians sing about is the catastrophe that Marilyn Klinghofer is exposed to in the end. Opera is a two-sided mirror. There is always duality. The choruses are in the first person, and Klinghofer comes to contain crowds.”

Guadagnino became addicted to Adams’ music after acquiring a CD in the mid-2000s. “This music somehow preceded me inside,” he says. “I felt like unconsciousness was settling in him.” He built his 2009 film I Am Love — a meditation on class and eroticism in Patrician Milano starring Tilda Swinton — around Adams’ music, listening to it while filming scenes before convincing the composer to give him the rights.

It is beautiful to listen to but difficult to perform, due to Adams’ complex, repetitive rhythms and delightful choral writing. Raines, an experienced conductor of Adams’ operas, conducts his first Klinghofer. He describes it as “much more difficult for the chorus, soloists and musicians” than Adams’ other works. “There is a lot of room for interpretation,” he says. “Maybe not in how the first five notes are played, but in how the architecture is built.”

In Florence, French bass-baritone Laurent Naouri and British soprano Susan Pollock, who is now focusing on new music after a career singing the largest dramatic soprano parts in her repertoire, perform in Florence. Central to Guadagnino’s concept is the choreography, which he says will “bleed through” the accompanying choruses as well as selected monologues. He says dance can “challenge the need for clarity.” Ella Rothschild, who choreographed this show with 12 dancers assembled for the occasion, describes the score as “never a repetition for the sake of repetition, but an accumulation. You feel the heaviness as you enter.” I have developed a vocabulary in which specific movements and gestures are expanded almost infinitely. “In the contrast between movement, text and music, a space can open up in which people can understand in a new way,” she says.

Guadagnino made his first foray into opera in 2011, with a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff, but he was apparently so unhappy with the score that it seemed as if he had deleted it from his CV. Having been asked by several opera houses in recent years to direct, he is determined to do it right this time. “Every time, I suggested doing Klinghofer,” he says. “I said I’d be happy to do Traviata or Rigoletto one day – but my debut had to be with Klinghofer. Each time, it was to varying degrees, from ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about’ to ‘You’re completely out of your mind’. It was the end of the conversation, just bringing it up.”

The piece has generated heated debate since its premiere in 1991. San Francisco Opera’s 1992 revival was subject to protests, and planned performances at Glyndebourne and the Los Angeles Festival were cancelled. For a 2014 revival at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Leon Klinghofer’s daughters Lisa and Elsa wrote in a program note that the piece “presents false moral equations without context” and “justifies, romanticizes and legitimizes the terrorist murder of our father.” The revival was met with protest from Jewish groups as well as former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and the planned simulcast was cancelled.

In 2001, in the months following 9/11, musicologist Richard Taruskin accused the opera of “romanticizing terrorists.” His criticism centered on the introduction scene—set between the two choruses of “Exile” but cut since the work’s 1991 premiere—which featured Klinghoffer’s bickering neighbors. “The depiction of Palestinian suffering in the musical language of myth and ritual was immediately juxtaposed with a musically trivial depiction of contented and materialistic American Jews,” Taruskin wrote in The Scene.

This scene has never been performed since the work was recorded without it in 1992, and will not be shown in Florence. But scriptwriter Goodman says she would have preferred to have remained part of the work. She insists that the scene does not mock its characters, but instead serves as the moral center of the work, “setting the human moral decency of ordinary life, of ordinary people, against the grand romantic nationalism that devours ordinary people.” She says to her: “Romantic nationalism is the greatest evil of our time.”

“I think Klinghoffer’s is the best thing I’ve ever written,” she adds. “It’s about human beings. All the people who objected to it objected to making their enemy human. It was not supposed to make terrorists human.” Goodman, who was raised Jewish, converted to Christianity in adulthood and, after the uproar around the piece, found a new vocation as an Anglican minister. She says: “The audience receives the opera, and by receiving it, it contributes to shaping this work.” “In that respect, it’s a bit like the work I do now. It’s a formal oral method.”

Taruskin said the opera musically favors the Palestinians, honoring their feelings while mocking its Jewish characters so that they are honored by facing death. “This is a false claim,” Guadagnino responds. “Who can say that with a straight face, knowing that the opera contains the stunning aria that reminds Marilyn of her husband before she knows he is dead, or the chorus of exiled Jews, which is one of the greatest arias?”

Carlo Fortes, general manager of the Teatro Maggio Musicale, says the theater has not yet received any political pressure nor been informed of the protest plans. “Theater has to take risks,” he says. “We have to do something real, something that speaks to people, not just tradition or entertainment.”

For Guadagnino, criticism of opera demonstrates “false consciousness and moral hypocrisy. Goodman is able, like any great writer, to understand human nature and the complexities of how we perceive others.” He believes that opera is about pain and the dignity of pain. “The attacks this opera has received are immoral,” he says. “It is a testament to the decadence of our time, and to the continuing free fall into immorality in the decades since the piece was first performed.” He pauses and adds: “I don’t know how this opera will be welcomed here. But so far, things are very good.”