All publicity is good publicity: Death of Klinghoffer @ MET protests

[armadillo]

I wouldn't have known, nor cared about this opera. Now I actually want to see what the controversy is all about.

 

 

At the Metropolitan Opera’s first performance of John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” on Monday night, men and women in evening attire walked through a maze of police barricades, while protesters shouted “Shame!” and “Terror is not art!” One demonstrator held aloft a white handkerchief splattered with red. Others, in wheelchairs set up for the occasion, lined Columbus Avenue.

 

Political figures, including former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, joined a rally, several hundred strong at Lincoln Center, to denounce an opera that has become the object of a charged debate about art, anti-Semitism and politics.

 

But after months of escalating protests, including threats of opera officials and online harassment of the cast, “Klinghoffer” finally went on, only a few minutes late. There were cheers when David Robertson, the conductor, arrived in the pit and a few boos after the opening “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians” ended.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/arts/music/metropolitan-opera-forges-ahead-on-klinghoffer-in-spite-of-protests.html?_r=0