November 5, 2014 --

LPR was struck by similar phrases that appeared in The New York Times, in articles on the John Adams/Alice Goodman opera, "The Death of Klinghoffer," that had its Metropolitan Opera premiere, October 20.

For example, Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the opera in the Times, October 22, wrote: "The piece is as much a ruminative reflection on the events of the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship as a dramatization of them...." Zachary Woolfe, in an October 19 Times article on the opera, wrote "of John Adam's ruminative unsettled, unsettling 1991 operative masterpiece, 'The Death of Klinghoffer'...a reflection on the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestine Liberation Front militants who murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish American passenger."

Tommasini wrote that "Goodman's poetic libretto, though often enigmatic, is powerfully so." Woolfe referred to "a poetic, often enigmatic libretto by Alice Goodman."

There was this difference in the Woolfe and Tommasini accounts: for Woolfe, the opera is a "masterpiece." Tommasini simply called it a "great opera."

Peter Gelb, Met general manager, wrote a defense of the "The Death of Klinghoffer" for the New York Post, October 22. He noted that the opera "attempts to understand the seemingly endless conflict of Jews and Palestinians." Compare Tommasini: "[I]n death, Leon Klinghoffer became a public figure, an innocent but defiant hero, lost to what still seems like a never-ending conflict in the Middle East."

Gelb, whose father was longtime Times editor, also asserted: "The libretto attempts to explore the motives of the criminals who perpetrated the Klinghoffer crime, something we should all strive to understand." Compare Tommasini: "This opera tries to explore what drove these Palestinians to take that ship and murder its most vulnerable passenger."

LPR is fascinated by these examples of New York Times mindthink, while the need to "strive to understand" the motives of the Palestinians remains, for LPR, well, enigmatic.

LPR is curious by Peter Gelb's description of the "conflict of Jews and Palestinians." LPR has been under the impression that the present phase of the conflict is between Palestinians who oppose Israel, not the Jewish people.