“Death of Klinghoffer” Is Immoral, but Not an Endorsement of Terrorism

There is nothing inherently wrong with making an opera about a terrorist attack, argues Walter Russell Mead in his review of the Met’s production of The Death of Klinghoffer. The opera does not defend the terrorists who murdered Leon Klinghoffer, even if its attempts at moral sophistication fall flat. Nor is the problem the music, although it frequently calls to mind words “like boring, cliché, and predictable,” or the libretto, “a self-conscious and not particularly successful effort to achieve a high poetic tone [that] often comes across as awkward and long.” The opera’s real failing lies elsewhere, writes Mead: