Kevin Puts, Silent Night (2011)

This is about that incident on Christmas Eve of 1914 when soldiers in World War I declared a truce and fraternized with each other--or at least, it's based on a movie, Joyeux Noël, that's about that. It's told from the perspective of Scottish, French, and German soldiers, and it's sung in a mixture of English, French, and German--plus, it opens with characters singing Italian opera and there are several hymns sung in Latin; this is definitely the most languages I've ever heard in a single opera.

There are a lot of characters, but these are the main ones. On the German side: Sprink, an operatic tenor, who's sent to go fight in the war; he's called back to sing at a party for the top brass when his lover, Anna, a soprano, pulls some strings, but he feels a sense of duty to go back, and she insists on going with him. There are actually few strongly delineated characters on the Scottish side, but the main one is a soldier named Jonathan, embittered because his brother, who was in the same unit, was killed. And the main French character is a young lieutenant named Audebert, missing his wife and infant son whom he's never seen. The opera treats of the events leading up to the truce and the fallout therefrom--obviously, the general are extremely unhappy about their soldiers displaying excessive amounts of fellow-feeling towards their enemies. In the end, there are actually surprisingly few casualties, but we are left with the grim knowledge that the war has just begun, and it's anyone's guess who's going to get out of this alive, let alone whole.

I find it an extremely dispiriting story. The truce was a real thing, of course, nor was it an isolated thing. People are not, by nature killbots, and their humanity can't be entirely extinguished even in the most extreme circumstances. On the other hand...this appears to have made zero difference in this war, if it ever does in any war. They may not have wanted to on some level, but they still slew half the seed of Europe one by one. One does sometimes feel extremely pessimistic about our chances as a species.

Well, I don't know if it's exactly a consolation, but at least I can wholeheartedly say that this is a really terrific, moving opera. Puts' music is defiantly old-school--more than anything else, it makes me think of the later Strauss' hypermelodicism. The story does a deft job of jumping around between the three encampments; there are probably a few too many characters for some of them not to get short shrift, but in all: very solid storytelling.

Do you want to see this? Well, you can't. I mean, you can, but only in a very legally grey way. An excellent performance from Minnesota Opera was broadcast on PBS, but since then it has disappeared: it's not available via streaming or official DVD or anything. The idea that Art should just disappear like that...I find it unacceptable. I mean, not as unacceptable as World War I was, but nonetheless.