However, an aspect of Flight that its creators could not have predicted at its 1998 premiere is how its plot points regarding The Refugee have become ever more relevant in the decades since. In contrast to these other contemporary operas, Flight does not name its characters explicitly and is also largely a comedic opera, which makes it an outlier among modern operas in general. While Adams and his co-creators have strenuously denied those accusations, the family’s outrage seems like a wholly predictable (and maybe not unreasonable) reaction. The opera has been surrounded by controversy since its premiere, with Klinghoffer’s children leading the charge with accusations that the opera exploits their father’s murder while glorifying terrorism and anti-Semitism. While Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic dealt with relatively anodyne subject matter (Nixon’s 1972 summit with Mao Zedong & nuclear scientists at Los Alamos, respectively), The Death of Klinghoffer dramatized a oceanliner hijacking by the Palestinian Liberation Front that had taken place only five years earlier and which resulted in the murder of Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer.While opera has a long history of courting controversy, it tends to do so from the vantage point of “long, long ago and far, far away,” and the response to The Death of Klinghoffer perhaps shows one reason why. The trend was sparked in no small measure by John Adams’s operas Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), and Doctor Atomic (2005). Recent examples include Mark-Antony Turnage’s Anna Nicole (2011), based on the life of then-recently-deceased model and actress Anna-Nicole Smith, and Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (2000), one of several adaptations of the 1993 book on capital punishment by Sister Helen Prejean. Jonathan Dove’s Flight could be considered part of a recent tradition, or at least trend, of contemporary historical operas based on events in recent memory and in some cases portraying persons who are still alive. Flight online course by Ross HagenPart 3: Flight and Mehran Karimi Nasseri
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