Re.: the attack on John Adams, his "Death of Klinghoffer" and - in advance - on "Doctor Atomic," condemning all three as "anti-Semitic," here's a response from a musicologist, who has been studying Adams' music in recent years (and who happens to be Jewish - a sadly necessary qualification in this increasingly ugly discussion). I know "Klinghoffer" pretty well, and believe firmly that there was no antisemitism whatsoever in the minds of the creators. Alice Goodman, who wrote the libretto, was Jewish. Certainly Peter Sellars knew what he was doing as an agent-provocateur, and perhaps went too far in original concept, but it was moderated during rehearsals and early performances. The opening scene with Klinghoffer's friends chatting about their trip was in principle a writerly, clever way to introduce the characters--we learn about Mrs. K's illness and other hints about their characters, which when omitted makes Mrs. K's early aria about her pain harder to understand and contextualize. The scene was =not= cut because of anti-semitic content, but because it a) detracted from the intensity of the drama and b) John insists that he felt the music was second-rate. I've got a copy of the original hand-written score, and agree that the music for that scene was weak compared to the more powerful music of most everything that follows. It's somewhat along the lines of the British dancing-girl's aria, which I also find somewhat less entrancing than much other material. "Klinghoffer" the opera stands as a transformation of the mundane into the mythic, an all-too-human Passion (consciously modeled on the Bach Passions), transfigured by the central Hagar Chorus, recounting the biblical story of the origins of the Semite/Hamite split. Tho there are numerous complexities involved that I can't get into in a brief email, I think that the film version of the Opera, while fascinating in the valiant effort to find a new way to present opera on film, serves to reinforce the notion of antisemitism by a) rooting the story firmly in the world of News and Media and Current Events, this militating against the intended effect of transforming quotidian tragedy into myth--essentially tying on sandbags to keep the story On The Ground; and, b) by omitting the central Hagar Chorus and other material, reduces the carefully chosen mythic elements--thus clipping the story's wings. As a Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust, whose family was intensely (and pragmatically) Zionist, and who has suffered from overt and covert anti-semitism in both personal life and career, my "anti-semite" sensors are in good working order. I was not insulted in any way by "Klinghoffer" the opera. And over the past four or five years of knowing and working with John Adams have never felt anything but his sincere concern for people who hear such a message in "Klinghoffer." The creators' intent was to address through art difficult, age-old questions that still need to be asked and pondered over seriously, rather than through increasingly shrill and biased sound-bite media. Janos Gereben www.sfcv.org [log in to unmask]