Joseph is proud to support Mo. Renes this year on John Adams’ Death of Klinghoffer at the Maggio Musicale in Florence, Italy.

Previously unperformed in Florence, with Lawrence Renes on the podium — a major champion of John Adams’ music, which he has frequently conducted and recorded — and staging and set design by Luca Guadagnino, appearing at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino for the first time.

“The Death of Klinghoffer has, since its very first appearance, confronted the profound complexity of conflicts that are rooted in myth before erupting into history,” comments director Luca Guadagnino, who also designs the sets. “The sublime purity of John Adams’ music and Alice Goodman’s libretto will be my steady guide in staging this immense work at the Maggio Fiorentino, which I am honored to open for the 2026 season.”

The Death of Klinghoffer is an opera in a prologue and two acts by composer John Adams, with a libretto by poet Alice Goodman. It premiered in Brussels at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in 1991. In Italy, it has been performed only once before, in 2002 in Ferrara and Modena.

The opera is inspired by the dramatic real-life events of October 1985: the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by terrorists from the Palestine Liberation Front. The incident, which drew worldwide attention, ended with the murder of one of the passengers, Leonard Klinghoffer — an American citizen of Jewish faith, who used a wheelchair — whose body was thrown into the sea by the terrorists.