John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer stages the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. This essay proposes that the representations of Palestinian hijackers in three different productions show the opera reinventing itself before and after 9/11, when Arab identity hovers ambiguously in the U.S. Imaginary. Analyses focus in particular on distinct forms of collaboration among artists and media. In 1991 thorny associations among media produce an ambiguous Arab subject that reflects, and encourages, a capability for dialogue around the topic of terrorism. By contrast, two productions in 2003 rely on film and photograph to situate rigidly delineated Palestinian characters—demonstrating a dependency on visual media and a consequent highlighting of race that may be emblematic of a post-9/11 era. The essay concludes that different forms of collaboration in The Death of Klinghoffer can be approached as a microcosm of social and political interactions taking place far beyond the opera proper.

Framing opera as a collaborative genre compels an examination of differences. In particular, opera's media may be understood as simultaneous but not necessarily as cooperative or neutral. This conception of opera raises issues of power dynamics and the politics of voice, both within the work and among its artists. In Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice, musico-dramatic dissonances center on the protagonist's homoerotic obsession with a young boy. His momentous ““I love you”” at the end of the act 1 finale is accompanied by a musical gesture that does not affirm but rather resists this coming-out event. The gesture's subsequent transformations in other passages that contain no text, and two years later in Britten's Third String Quartet, reinforce the sense of musical opposition to the libretto's homosexual trajectory——a trajectory that results in the protagonist's shame and untimely death. If musical detachment from the libretto suggests subtext, then it also points to alternative voices. Britten's homosexuality, and the pressures that accumulated around sexual identity in postwar England, argue for connections between musical distance and closeted discourse. Analysis must acknowledge the role of the composer's experiences in the varying characterizations of the protagonist but must also cope with the limits to this type of investigation: The attempt to draw definitive connections between music and sexuality limits the suppleness of our critical apparatus. Conceiving of opera as collaboration prompts a reevaluation of the work as potentially contradictory and fragmented but also advocates against the resolution of such contradictions into coherent authorial statements. Collaboration dislodges autonomy and unity and in their place recommends polyphonies——of authors and voices, among media but also within them.

A multivalent conception of opera, one that understands each operatic domain as functioning independently of every other domain, is one way of accounting for marks of contention: passages in which the music seems not to fit the events, characters, or atmospheres of its accompanying text. With that analytical framework, opera, frequently conceived of as two media subsumed under a cohesive initiative, emerges as a site of elaborate, sometimes contentious, interactions.Scene 11 of Death in Venice exhibits considerable signs of multivalence. The unusual musical construct of this scene suggests points of reference that are absent in the libretto, and, accordingly, the two media do not distil the protagonist's character in this passage but rather broaden the representational space into a heteroglossic network of associations.The incongruities in this scene thereby disrupt the sense of ideological affinity between media, and signal significant differences among artistic perspectives and values. In particular, musico-dramatic dissonances highlight varying concerns regarding the opera's topic of homosexuality. If the protagonist's homosexual trajectory in Death in Venice's libretto ends in shame and death, this is a trajectory that the music might be heard as opposing, even if we cannot translate its meanings precisely.

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