Reflections on guilt

There can be no doubting the nobility of John Adams’s intentions in writing The Death of Klinghoffer to a text by Alice Goodman, nor ENO’s courage in putting it on, though they do have a captive audience for minimalist and near-minimalist operas. The work is conceived, as all commentaries tirelessly tell us, in the spirit of Bach’s Passions, in which a dramatic narrative thread alternates with arias of reflection and choruses of penance and grief.

Yet Bach’s purpose was different in kind from Adams’s. Bach could take for granted an audience of unquestioning believers, and his sublime masterpieces embody their faith more powerfully than anything else a Christian has created, so they are immensely potent aids to devotion and reflection; and the most powerful challenge to those of us who don’t believe. The point of Klinghoffer is, by sharp contrast, to present the story of the hijacking of the Achille Lauro as objectively as possible, so that we can make up our minds about the balance of wrongdoing and guilt, which is the reason why the work has been so controversial.