While Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League are welcoming the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to cancel its global video and radio simulcast of John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” I’m less enthusiastic. The opera has stoked controversy ever since it premiered with its purportedly sympathetic portrayal of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise…
The Metropolitan Opera has decided to cancel its global simulcast of the controversial work ‘The Death of Klinghoffer,’ which some critics say is anti-Semitic. The Met will still stage the production about the victim of a Palestinian terror attack but will scrap plans to beam it around the world. “I’m convinced that the opera is…
(Haaretz) — The contemporary opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” has been fraught with conflict since its premiere, and is poised to be as divisive when it is performed by the Metropolitan Opera here in November, and simultaneously transmitted in high definition to movie theaters around the world. The 1991 opera, by composer John Adams and librettist…
It would be ironic if the single sentence for which John Kerry, an articulate politician, were to be remembered one day were “Poof!” And yet Mr. Kerry’s pithy description of a breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations whose failure surprised no one but himself may go down in history as his most memorable utterance. What is surprising…
Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s parents and sister died in a concentration camp, his Yiddish-language actor father-in-law was killed on Stalin’s orders and the Polish-born composer himself was imprisoned by the KGB and only released after Stalin’s death. His moving Holocaust opera “The Passenger”, which revolves around a former camp guard who recognises a former inmate on an…
For nearly half a century, “The Passenger,” a gripping opera set in Auschwitz, lay dormant. Commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre in the former Soviet Union, it was supposed to receive its premiere in 1968, but that never happened. “Soviet authorities didn’t think a piece about Jews would further the interests of the communist state,” said…
The Budapest-born soprano Marta Eggerth, who died on December 26 at the age of 101, incarnated the fact that the frothy Middle European art-form of operetta had a vastly significant Jewish element. Both Eggerth and her husband the star tenor Jan Kiepura (1902-1966), Poland’s prefiguration of Mario Lanza, had Jewish mothers. This made life difficult…
During a phone conversation from his home in Paris, David Serero admits that his “is kind of a Cinderella story.” That’s an understatement. Frankly, Cinderella wouldn’t believe his story. Cinderella would call it a fairy tale. Deaf almost since birth, Serero began to regain his hearing after a three-year series of surgeries starting at the…
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