http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/arts/music/protests-over-klinghoffer-planned-for-mets-opening-night.html 2014-09-22 21:11:03 Protests Over ‘Klinghoffer’ Planned for Met’s Opening Night Street protests will greet operagoers on Monday night, with several Jewish groups urging the Met to cancel its performances of John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer.” === Some traditions of opening night at the Metropolitan Opera go back decades, like beginning with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” while others are more recent, like showing the operas free on movie screens in Lincoln Center and Times Square. When operagoers arrive for opening night on Monday, they will be greeted with an even newer tradition: street protests. Several Jewish groups are planning a protest outside the Met to call on the company to cancel its performances of John Adams’s 1991 opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which is set to have its Met premiere next month. At the Met, it will be the second opening night in a row to attract street protests: Last season’s opening-night performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” The “Klinghoffer” protests have been brewing for months. In June, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, Rabbi Avi Weiss, of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, in the Bronx, led a small group in prayers for Mr. Klinghoffer on Monday morning in a small park across from Lincoln Center. “I truly believe that his soul is being desecrated by the Met,” he said. “It’s being desecrated, and we’re out here, outdoors, to study Torah, to offer prayers in his memory to sanctify his soul.” The opera’s subject matter has always been incendiary. Some protesters are charging that the work is anti-Semitic or that it condones terrorism. Last week, Tom Morris, the opera’s director, told the cast at a Met rehearsal that the work dramatizes terrorism, but does not condone it any more than Verdi’s “Otello,” based on Shakespeare’s “Othello,” “tells people to kill their wives.” Mr. Gelb’s decision to cancel the movie theater transmission was criticized by some anti-censorship groups, but praised by the Anti-Defamation League, which said at the time that “while the opera itself is not anti-Semitic, there is a concern the opera could be used in foreign countries to stir up anti-Israel sentiments or as a vehicle to promote anti-Semitism.” Rabbi Weiss said that he “absolutely” hoped that the Met would cancel the production, and that if it did not, he would hold a vigil outside the opera house, saying, “As people walk in, I want them to hear a voice of moral conscience.” Like many of the work’s opponents, he said he had not heard it: “I’ve not seen it, but I’ve heard enough about it and I don’t want to see it, frankly.” Mr. Gelb said in an interview that “the opera is neither anti-Semitic or a glorification of terrorism” and described Mr. Adams as the “leading American composer of opera,” whose major operas have been presented at the Met in recent seasons. “It is, I believe, the best music he’s composed of all,” Mr. Gelb said of “Klinghoffer.” “It’s a great artistic work of genius, and there is absolutely no reason for it to be suppressed.”