I attended the world premiere of the opera Silent Night commissioned and first performed by the Minnesota Opera Company in 2011. The opera was disappointing to me and I didn't like it very much. (I was particularly incensed, I recall, by the vaguely atonal texture of the music -- it seems, at once, perverse and perversely difficult to write a Christmas opera without a whiff of the carols that so much characterize the Season. Misguided artistic purity, I think, boxed the composer Mark Puts into writing in the style of late Stravinsky or Benjamin Britten as his most acerbic and, as a consequence, no one emerges from the production whistling any of its tunes -- or, indeed, even remembering much about the music at all.) Apparently, I was in the distinct minority with respect to my disdain for the show -- the opera won a Pulitzer Prize and has been performed eight or nine times since its inception, mostly in the US and Canada. Silent Night was revived this Fall by the Minnesota Opera Company, perhaps in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, the subject of the libretto. At the end of the first Act, I was puzzled -- the show seemed much, much better than I remembered and, perhaps, my initial impressions had been callow or mistaken. At intermission, I was baffled. But by the end of the opera, my initial impressions were confirmed -- Silent Night has a completely disastrous second Act. In fact, if the show were to end with some sort of brief coda after the first Act, I think I would largely regard the opera as a success -- it's the last forty-five minutes that kills the production.
Silent Night chronicles the famous and improvised Christmas truce on parts of the Western Front in December 1914 (the opera adapts a French dramatic film on the subject Joyeaux Noel, a movie that I have not seen.) The libretto follows the fortunes of a German Heldentenor and a Norwegian soprano who we see in the first scene warbling out a Mozart-like duet (the composer is very good with pastiches of other, earlier composers). The proceedings on-stage are interrupted by a German officer who fiercely reads a news report of declaration of war. In Scotland, two young brothers enlist to partake in "the glory of the war." In France, a young married man leaves his sad new bride (she's pregnant) to go to the Western Front. There's an eight minute montage of fighting -- mostly somewhat absurd (this kind of thing is difficult to do on-stage) -- and, then, we see the main characters ensconced in trenches so close to one another that they can hear alarm clocks sounding on the other side of no-man's land. It's Christmas and everyone is completely miserable. The German tenor is ordered to the rear to perform a concert for the war-mongering Kronprinz -- fortunately, for the music, he encounters his former mistress, the sad Norwegian soprano. (The obviously problem here is to find a way to incorporate high voices into the opera's vocal register -- Britten would have just used countertenors like Peter Pears; Puts and his librettist have to find a way to get a woman to the trenches -- thus, the subplot involving the German tenor and the Norwegian soprano.) There's a beautiful pastiche song -- again a bit like Mozart or Rossini at his most melodious -- complicated by the fact that the tenor is shell-shocked and prone to wild, discordant mood-swings. The second pastiche is good enough that the audience on the night that I saw the show gave it an ovation, starved, I think, for something conventionally melodic. At the Front, the Scotsmen have received a bagpipe. One of the soldiers plays the bagpipe much to the derision of the German troops who mock the sound of the instrument. A Scottish officer sings a pastiche folk-song, also an effective number, and this leads the Germans to sing along. Gradually, the joshing across the battle-lines becomes warmer and more friendly. The tenor, who has arrived on the battlefield with the soprano, leaps out of his trench and stands between the opposing armies. This leads to the French and Scotsman agreeing to a truce that will end at midnight. This is the climax of the opera and, by far, its most satisfying scene -- the camaraderie between the troops is genuinely moving and the slow transition from hate to nasty joking to more gentle humor and, then, something approaching friendship is effectively, and realistically, done. This isn't a kumbaya moment -- intercut, as it were, with the celebrations are short brutal interludes where the Scottish youth, whose brother has been shot down by the Germans, swears murderous vengeance. There are several effective, muscular male choruses and the music portrays the reluctant rapprochement between the armies. But, things start to go a bit sour when the Scottish priest celebrates mass and, then, the soprano sings some kind of wordless threnody, a sort of very high-pitched and, even, unpleasantly screechy lament. Why wouldn't someone just sing a Christmas carol? Why does Puts feel he has to invent austere, very cold and cerebral church music for this scene? (It's invidious to Silent Night to imagine what Ives would have done here -- a cacophony of familiar carols and hymns all mixed together and sung in different keys with a thudding undertone to simulate the big guns and, then, remote, half-heard choruses wafted here and there on the breeze -- alas, there is none of this in the opera: instead Puts just illustrates the action; he's writing a sophisticated version of movie music -- it's all unimaginatively and literally illustrative.) Nonetheless, at the half-time, I was pleased with the opera -- I thought that it showed vaunting, almost excessive ambition, used a large cast, and was ingeniously staged. Furthermore, the climactic truce scene was intensely moving.
But there's another forty-five minutes to go and what follows is unreservedly bad. The field commanders reprise their suspicions of one another's motive in a way that feels simply repetitive. Then, everyone agrees to a truce to bury the dead. This is actually dramatized and, of course, it simply doesn't work. (In the opera, needless to say, the dead are very well-preserved and not fragmentary -- they look like people sleeping. But, nonetheless, the whole concept is grotesque and the staging verges on the risible, particularly when the Norwegian singer, still hanging around the gruesome battlefield, participates in collecting the corpses and sings about it. (A more imaginative and less literal-minded composer would have used a sardonic danse macabre for these scenes -- but, no such luck here.) The generals rage in three different languages -- the opera is staged in German, English (Scottish in fact) and French. They shout imprecations in a cacophonous trio. Then, Scottish are shipped off to another part of the front. The French are withdrawn from the line of battle and sent to Verdun -- this is supposed to be bitterly ironic. The Germans are loaded into sinister-looking freight cars and sent to the Eastern Front. (The librettist seems to think the Eastern Front in World War One had the same lethal connotations as in the Second World War -- in fact, the Germans were able to win most battles in on the Eastern Front in the Great War and the assignment of the troops to that place seems almost benign.) More heavy irony clouds the last Act -- the German field commander is Jewish and, as he extols his patriotism and the Fatherland, the German Kronprinz, suggests that he's not even really a "true German." This is all staged against a backdrop of railroad cars. Some critics claim that a great composer like Shostakovich can write music that is "ironic." I'm agnostic a to whether this is true. But Puts can't write "ironic" music and so the atonal, jagged and wide interval-jumping music in the last part of the opera doesn't really work on any level. The Norwegian Soprano and the Heldentenor cross No-Man's Land, taking advantage of some remaining comity between the armies -- they surrender to the French who note that they have come to the right army for l'amour. (I doubt very much that the soprano and tenor are going to be sent to same prison camp. Therefore, we can't really see their escape to the French lines as a happy-ending -- at best, it's problematic and neutral.) Most baffling, the last half of the second Act just concerns itself with the mechanics of getting all of its players off-stage. Once the plot has succeeded in getting all the singers and all the mud-daubed male choruses exiled from the battlefield, there's literally nothing to do but bring things to a wholly puzzling close. The Western front now is deserted -- a spotlight picks out the grave of the Scottish brother slain in action and the music skids into a dying fall, twenty-or-so inconsequential bars before the curtain comes down. This is the most diminished, self-effacing, and non-dramatic ending that I have ever seen attempted in any opera -- just get everyone off-stage and, when the singers and choruses are all gone, drop the curtain. The audience doesn't seem much inclined to applaud -- what are we applauding?: everyone being hauled away leaving us to behold an empty stage. It doesn't work and, in fact, the last five minutes are flat-out weird and emotionally confusing -- there's no one on which to affix our emotions, no one with whom to identify and the music doesn't really suffice to hold our attention.
I don't like the opera. However, the production was effective. The Heldentenor was a little growly in his lower register, but when his voice rang out mid- and upper-range, the sound was brazen, like a trumpet of the apocalypse, a tonal allusion to the man's incipient shell-shock and madness. The set consisted of a ravaged church overlooking a sort of inclined ramp tilting upward and comprised of sand-bag ramparts -- this scenery or, better stated, stage machinery was mounted so that it could be rotated. The back of the Church doubled as a bunker in the front-lines. Stagehands dressed as soldiers of the great war pushed the inclined ramp in circles -- it was laden with genteel-looking corpses. Rear projections depicted images from battlefields in the Great War and a single stark tree stood in accusatory way in the center of the stage.
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