SILENT NIGHT AT
Washington National Opera
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th year of the 20th century, a hundred years ago, the World War I Armistice was signed. It had been over four years after the Great War had begun.
Washington National Opera’s production of Kevin Puts’s and Mark Campbell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night, takes us back to the first Christmas at the beginning of the conflict in 1914, to a battlefield near Belgium, where soldiers in French, German, and Scottish trenches begin recalling songs of home.
The story is true not only in recreating an actual event but in the emotions that it evokes of shared humanity, bitterness, conflict of duty, loss of loved ones and just plain missing the family at home. As an opera, it has everything: grand universal themes, love duets, choral pieces, and musical interludes with a libretto using multiple languages as appropriate (English, French, German, Italian, and Latin.)
Silent Night also provides a range of possiblities for singers. The lovers, Raquel González as Anna Sørensen and Alexander McKissick as Nikolaus Sprink, are opera singers. The two are singing a duet like from Mozart or Gluck, when everything stops for the announcement that war has been declared.
At a church in Scotland we see Hunter Enoch as William Dale excitedly tell his brother Jonathan sung by Arnold Livingston Geis that war has broken out and encourages him to join. Kenneth Kellogg as Father Palmer looks on knowing what this means. Already we know that Jonathan is going to die on the battlefield.
In a Paris apartment, we see Michael Adams as Lt. Audebert, tell his pregnant wife Madeline sung by Hannah Hagerty that he must go despite her protests.
The scenes that follow are on a three level stage, with Scottish, French and German soldiers on each tier with Aleksey Bogdanov is Lt. Horstmayer, Norman Garrett is Lt. Gordon, Christian Bowers is Ponchel. There are mounds of unburied dead from the previous skirmish, causing Jonathan anguish in attempting to bury his brother.
With the sound of a bag pipe, soon a white flag appears and a truce is reached to call off the fighting for Christmas eve. Nicholas had been called to sing at a holiday event for the top brass but he returns to the field with Anna, where they sing for the troops. That holiday truce ends with a morning shooting of Ponchel and again the conflict starts with men questioning their humanity in time of war.
Anna and Nicholas will escape the battlefield by going as prisoners to the French side even as angry leaderships -Timothy J. Bruno as the French General, Michael Hewitt as the German General and Joshua Conyers as the British Major—discover the events and take actions to order these soldiers to the front line.
Thus the opera ends as the war has only begun.
A note on this production: Silent Night has been described as balancing turmoil with introspection even as it never turns into sentimentality. Accomodating many styles of music including a Scottish bagpipe and prayerful chants, it never uses it title hymn nor other Christmas melodies. While WNO is a re-orchestration to fit this opera into their more intimate space of the Eisenhower theater, there is no loss of intensity of the war is on shared humanity.
The singers are young from the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program. Least we forget, so were the real characters portrayed in this story, those soldiers who died in World War I, were young.
From November 10- 25, 2018, in the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater.