There is some well-crafted and effective music in The Exterminating Angel. The orchestral interludes have been widely praised; I also liked the sickly, dwindling two-note descents for the suicidal young lovers, and some of the music for Blanca (the pianist). But I had to fight hard to keep an open mind, and I don’t see how it’s promising to try to extend the operatic canon by presenting one of its key elements as caricature.

***

If, as I think, Adams has shown the strongest operatic gift among composers of the last few generations, it must be regarded as another tragedy that his second attempt, The Death of Klinghoffer, brought his opera-house career to an almost complete halt in 1991. I do not think there is anything anti-Semitic in the opera, as was charged at the time and charged again when it reached the Met a couple of seasons ago. But I do think Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman bear some blame. They chose to dramatize a traumatic event fresh in memory, and to give musical valorization to a group (Palestinian exiles resolved on violence) whose sentiments and actions were still at the time, and are still today, the subject of painful controversy in the countries where opera is part of the cultural landscape.

This is provocative in the wrong way: it provokes people to pay attention to the existence of your opera without paying attention to what’s in it. Your piece is reduced to a sound-bite in still-raw arguments about the real-world events you’ve prematurely addressed. If you have something to say about Israeli-Palestinian relations, maybe you should either join the argument openly where it is happening, the way Zola did with J’accuse, or write a piece about non-current events that might lead the audience to reflect on current ones, the way Arthur Miller did with The Crucible. And if you have an aesthetic take on Jewish life in the American suburbs, as in a Klinghoffer scene that the frightened creators quickly tried to expunge from the historical record, don’t expect it to be interpreted benignly in the midst of a work already likely to pour salt on the wounds of those living that life.

I actually think The Death of Klinghoffer is a worthwhile opera, and that the infamous New Jersey scene, closely read and properly understood, is an important and touching part of it that should one day be restored (and, to repeat, not anti-Semitic, or even anti-suburban). But I think the creative team was foolish to expect close reading and nuanced understanding for a heads-on treatment of this story in 1991. The stock phrase that once accompanied redactions in the published correspondence of recent historical figures – “out of consideration for living persons” – reflected decency and common sense. Hurting the feelings of living persons may be necessary in political struggle, but it is not a good recipe for public art. The problem with “CNN opera” is that if it is not trivial, it is likely to spend itself like a puff of hot air in an already burning room.