The Death of Klinghoffer is an American opera, with music by John Adams to an English-language libretto by Alice Goodman. First produced in Brussels and New York in 1991, the opera is based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, and the hijackers' murder of a 69-year-old Jewish-American wheelchair-using passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.
Composer John Adams, 2008
Peter Sellars, who originated the concept of the opera and directed its first performance
John Coolidge Adams is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music.
Adams, sometime before 2008
Adams' first opera, Nixon in China, is about President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China.
Adams has collaborated with theater director Peter Sellars on all of his operas.
Adams' third opera, Doctor Atomic, is about J. Robert Oppenheimer (shown above, in 1944) and the development of the atomic bomb in 1945.
