After the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York City, a number of individuals in a variety of different academic and art fields became increasingly concerned about terrorism. In December of 2001, for example, the Boston Symphony Orchestra cancelled John Adams's ''Death of Klinghoffer'' choruses in deference to audience sensitivities about the opera's themes. There were those who were either in favor or against this decision. Richard Taruskin, who teaches and writes about music history at the University of California at Berkeley supported the cancellation.

             Taruskin who admits that "censorship is always deplorable," believes that in this case it was justified. The story of the "Death of Klinghoffer" is of the 1984 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and their murder of a retired, wheelchair-bound American Jew named Leon Klinghoffer. Controversy is not new to this musical event: After it played six performances at the San Francisco Opera in the fall of 1992, it was the second most attended opera of their season. However, a Jewish group picketed each showing and wrote letters of condemnation to the local press. Shortly later, the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, one of the work's co-commissioners, cancelled its planned series of performances.

             In a letter to the New York Times, Taruskin supports the Boston Symphony saying, "There is no need to shove Wagner in the faces of Holocaust survivors in Israel and no need to torment people stunned by previously unimaginable horrors with offensive ''challenges'' like 'The Death of Klinghoffer.'''.

             He adds that he is not, by far, making up such thoughts about the opera: Does ''The Death of Klinghoffer'' romanticize the perpetrators of deadly violence toward the innocent? Its creators tacitly acknowledged that it did, when they revised the opera for American consumption after its European premieres in Brussels and Paris.