The modern composer, Nicolas Nabokov once wrote, ''should not compose for eternity, but for fleeting occasions and for the fun of it. He should then let his work disappear in Lethe, just as the thousands of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century operas, cantatas and oratorios have fortunately disappeared.'' I wonder how many living composers would happily watch their scores lead a short life, relevant but finite? Not many; but John Adams might be one of them. First Nixon in China, now The Death of Klinghoffer: rarely before has a composer snatched subjects from yesterday's news and made operas out of them. They are works for instant consumption, for today rather than tomorrow.
Admittedly themes of lasting significance lurk beneath the work's immediate surface: conflict between cultures and ideologies, rival claims to ancestral lands, human rights in general, themes sufficiently perennial to project the opera from Lethe's lapping waters. Specifically, however, it takes us back no further than October 1985, when Palestinian terrorists hijacked the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro, and murdered wheelchair-bound passenger Leon Klinghoffer. The opera guides us through those events, albeit in an oblique fashion, but its impact is all the greater for the fact that television newsreel and newspaper reportage of the Achille Lauro crisis are still so fresh in the mind.
Whatever the long-term fate of the opera, Alice Goodman's libretto certainly deserves to be spared from falling into oblivion. It is eloquent and beautiful, compassionate and humanitarian, rich in imagery and spacious in its sentence-structure. Dialogue is virtually absent; the characters speak in long reflective soliloquies, sometimes as if to a diary, sometimes to a reporter, sometimes to a close friend, but hardly ever to one another. Surprisingly little action is allowed to take place on stage. It must surely rank as one of the least dramatic libretti ever devised, a poem in which everything borders on the confessional. It is marvellous to read, but how can it possibly be the stuff of opera?
John Adams has been hard pressed to come up with a solution. If The Death of Klinghoffer finally disappoints, it is because the marriage of words and music is so fragile. True, Adams has a sure sense of how to underpin the mood of the text. Had his music been made to accompany the spoken word, as in a film-score, all might have been well. Instead his setting never seems at ease with the verse. Some of Goodman's most elegant lines simply fail to register their meaning when sung, their structure is too complex, their style too sumptuous, for the medium of opera. Elsewhere Adams makes such a studied attempt to match the rhythms and inflexions of speech that the words are swallowed or emerge with prosaic awkwardness. For all that, the opera's musical language is firmly rooted in tradition, I doubt if anyone will come away from The Death of Klinghoffer with a single theme or memorable lyric moment lodged in the mind. My own memories are of the things that fell flat or jarred rather than those that worked.
The recording uses the cast of the original production, and it contains no weak links. As one expects from Adams, the score has been superbly orchestrated, and it is done full justice by the Lyon Opera Orchestra under Kent Nagano. Least satisfactory is the chorus: Goodman entrusts it with her most purple passages, but little colour emerges from singing that is so carefully accurate and lifeless. (Listen to the opening Chorus of Exiled Palestinians and see what you can understand from it without turning to the booklet for help.) On stage The Death of Klinghoffer may be sensational, but from the recording it's hard to see why the work's launch attracted so much media attention, its topicality apart.'