{"id":539272,"date":"2026-04-19T11:13:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T11:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/539272\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T11:13:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T11:13:09","slug":"they-said-youre-out-of-your-mind-luca-guadagnino-on-directing-controversial-opera-the-death-of-klinghoffer-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/539272\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018They said: You\u2019re out of your mind\u2019: Luca Guadagnino on directing controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer | Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a rehearsal room perched above the labyrinthine backstage of Florence\u2019s starkly contemporary Maggio Musicale Fiorentino theatre, Luca Guadagnino<\/a> is showing the women of the chorus how to make a second-act entrance. Dressed in a slouchy cardigan and slacks, the Italian director runs forward and stops short at a line of tape indicating the rim of the stage. A little out of breath, he turns past stretching dancers to conductor Lawrence Renes and asks if he minds the sound of stamping feet. \u201cI never mind when we hear them talk, walk, breathe,\u201d Renes says. \u201cIt\u2019s live theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n

Better known for films like After the Hunt<\/a>, Challengers<\/a> and Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino still sometimes punctuates stage rehearsals with instinctive cries of \u201cCut!\u201d and \u201cAction!\u201d. But today he is directing an opera. It\u2019s his second ever and his first in more than 15 years \u2013 and a highly controversial one to boot. The Death of Klinghoffer, a 1991 opera with music by John Adams and libretto by Alice Goodman, has sparked accusations of antisemitism whenever and wherever it has been performed. It depicts the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation Front, their murder of disabled Jewish American tourist Leon Klinghoffer, and the grief and rage of his wife, Marilyn. The story is placed in a historical, even mythic, context.<\/p>\n

double quotation markThis opera transforms the invisible into something you can see<\/p>\n

This is the first new production of Klinghoffer to be conceived since the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023 and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that followed. \u201cThe invisibility of victims is violent, odious and definitely fascistic,\u201d Guadagnino says. \u201cOne of the great successes of not only autocracies but also so-called democracies has been to create a mirror where you do not see what is behind it. One of the great qualities of Klinghoffer is that it destroys that mirror and transforms the invisible, the unspeakable, the unsayable, into something you have to see, be confronted by and think about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018There is a lot of scope for interpretation\u2019 \u2026 Luca Guadagnino. Photograph: Kate Green\/Getty Images for BFI<\/p>\n

Along with Nixon in China, its predecessor by the same creative team, Klinghoffer is sometimes called a \u201cCNN opera\u201d. But Guadagnino rejects the characterisation, saying it\u2019s a work of art that \u201celevates itself from the banality of the immediate\u201d. The opera is constructed like a Bach passion in which monologues by the ship\u2019s captain, the Klinghoffers, other hostages, and the PLF are studded with six chorales, starting with a Chorus of the Exiled Palestinians and followed by a Chorus of the Exiled Jews.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou start with the catastrophic destruction of humanity, and with Nakba,\u201d says Guadagnino, using the Arabic word for \u201ccatastrophe\u201d which also refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians during the founding of the State of Israel. \u201cAnd the catastrophe that the Palestinians sing about is the catastrophe to which Marilyn Klinghoffer, at the end, is subject. The opera is a two-faced mirror. There is always duality. The choruses are in the first person, and the Klinghoffers come to contain multitudes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guadagnino got hooked on Adams\u2019 music after being given a CD in the mid-2000s. \u201cThis music somehow preceded me within me,\u201d he says. \u201cI felt my unconsciousness was inhabited by it.\u201d He built his 2009 film I Am Love<\/a> \u2013 a meditation on class and eroticism in patrician Milan starring Tilda Swinton \u2013 around Adams\u2019 music, and would listen to it while shooting scenes before convincing the composer to give him the rights.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s lovely to listen to but difficult to perform, due to Adams\u2019 complex, repetitive rhythms and melismatic choral writing. Renes, an experienced conductor of Adams\u2019 operas, is conducting his first Klinghoffer. He calls it \u201cinfinitely harder for the chorus, for the soloists, for the musicians\u201d than other Adams works. \u201cThere is a lot of scope for interpretation,\u201d he says. \u201cNot in how you play the first five notes, maybe, but in how you build the architecture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Guadagnino\u2019s 2017 film Call Me By Your Name. Photograph: Sony Pictures Classics\/Sundance<\/p>\n

In Florence, the Klinghoffers are being played by the French bass-baritone Laurent Naouri and the British soprano Susan Bullock, who is now focusing on new music after a career spent singing the largest dramatic soprano parts in the repertoire. Central to Guadagnino\u2019s concept is choreography, though, which he says will \u201cbleed out\u201d of the chorales, accompanying them as well as selected monologues. Dance, he says, can \u201cdefy the need for clarity\u201d. Ella Rothschild, who is choreographing this production with 12 dancers assembled for the occasion, describes the score as \u201cnever repetition for repetition\u2019s sake, but accumulation. You feel the weight as you go in\u201d. She has developed a vocabulary in which specific movements and gestures become extended, almost endless. \u201cIn a contrast between the movement and the text and music,\u201d she says, \u201ca space can open up in which people can understand in a new way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018False moral equivalencies\u2019 \u2026 the 2014 Metropolitan Opera production. Photograph: Jack Vartoogian\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Guadagnino made his first foray into opera in 2011, with a production of Giuseppe Verdi\u2019s Falstaff, but he seems to have been so unhappy with the result that it\u2019s as if he has scrubbed it from his CV. Having been approached by several opera houses to direct in recent years, he is determined to get it right this time. \u201cEvery time, I proposed doing Klinghoffer,\u201d he says. \u201cI said I\u2019d happily do a Traviata or Rigoletto one day \u2013 but my debut had to be Klinghoffer. Every time, it was various degrees of, \u2018We don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about\u2019 to, \u2018You\u2019re completely out of your mind\u2019. It was the end of the conversation, just bringing it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The piece has been hotly debated since its 1991 premiere. A 1992 revival at the San Francisco Opera was subject to protests, and planned performances at Glyndebourne and the Los Angeles festival were cancelled. For a 2014 revival at the Metropolitan Opera<\/a> in New York, Leon Klinghoffer\u2019s daughters Lisa and Ilsa wrote in a programme note that the piece \u201cpresents false moral equivalencies without context\u201d and \u201crationalises, romanticises and legitimises the terrorist murder of our father\u201d. That revival was met with protest from Jewish groups<\/a> as well as former mayor Rudy Giuliani, and a planned simulcast was cancelled.<\/p>\n

double quotation markAll the people who have objected to it have objected to their enemy being shown as humanLibrettist Alice Goodman<\/p>\n

In 2001, in the months after 9\/11, the musicologist Richard Taruskin accused the opera of \u201cromanticising terrorists\u201d<\/a>. His criticism centred on a prologue scene \u2013 set between the two \u201cexile\u201d choruses but cut since the work\u2019s premiere in 1991 \u2013 that featured the Klinghoffers\u2019 bickering neighbours. In the scene, Taruskin wrote, \u201cthe portrayal of suffering Palestinians in the musical language of myth and ritual was immediately juxtaposed with a musically trivial portrayal of contented, materialistic American Jews\u201d.<\/p>\n

The scene has never been performed since the work was recorded, without it, in 1992, and will not feature in Florence. But librettist Goodman says she would have preferred it to have remained part of the work. The scene doesn\u2019t mock its characters, she insists, but instead serves as the work\u2019s moral centre, \u201cpositioning the human moral decency of ordinary life, of ordinary people, as opposed to the grand romantic nationalism that chews ordinary people up\u201d. To her, she says, \u201cromantic nationalism is the great evil of our age\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2018Best thing I\u2019ve written\u2019 \u2026 an English National Opera and New York Metropolitan Opera co-production. Photograph: Donald Cooper\/Alamy<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Klinghoffer is the best thing I\u2019ve written,\u201d she adds. \u201cIt\u2019s about human beings. All the people who have objected to it have objected to their enemy being shown as human. One was not supposed to make the terrorists human beings.\u201d Goodman, who was raised Jewish, converted to Christianity in adulthood, and after the furore over the piece<\/a>, she found a new career as an Anglican minister. \u201cThe audience receives the opera, and by receiving it contributes to what that work is,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd in that respect it\u2019s a bit like the work I do now. It\u2019s an oral, formal medium.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taruskin argued that the opera favours the Palestinians musically, ennobling their sentiment while mocking its Jewish characters until they are ennobled by an encounter with death. \u201cThat is a false claim,\u201d Guadagnino responds. \u201cWho can say that with a straight face, knowing that the opera has the incredible aria where Marilyn is reminded of her husband before she knows he\u2019s dead, or the Chorus of the Exiled Jews, which is one of the great arias?\u201d<\/p>\n

Carlo Fuortes, the general manager of the Maggio Musicale, says the theatre has not yet received any political pressure or been informed of protest plans. \u201cTheatre has to take risks,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have to do something real, something that speaks to people, not just tradition or entertainment.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Guadagnino, the criticism of the opera evinces \u201cfalse consciousness and moral hypocrisy. Goodman is able, like every great writer, to understand human nature and the intricacies of how we perceive the Other.\u201d The opera, he believes, is about pain, and the dignity of pain. \u201cThe attacks this opera has received,\u201d he says, \u201care immoral. They are a testament to the decadence of our time, and to the constant freefall into immorality in the decades since the piece first premiered.\u201d He pauses then adds: \u201cI don\u2019t know how this opera is going to be welcomed here. But so far, so good.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Death of Klinghoffer is at Maggio Musicale Fiorentino <\/a>from 19 to until 26 April, and will be available for streaming on RaiPlay<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a rehearsal room perched above the labyrinthine backstage of Florence\u2019s starkly contemporary Maggio Musicale Fiorentino theatre, Luca…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-539272","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}