Music|Tenors Amid the Turmoil of War in the Trenches
Tenors Amid the Turmoil of War in the Trenches
Silent Night Kelly Kaduce and William Burden, center, and Troy Cook, standing, in the Opera Philadelphia production at the Academy of Music.CreditCreditDominic M. Mercier
By Anthony Tommasini
PHILADELPHIA — You can be a brilliant composer with a strong musical voice yet not be suited to opera, an enticing but unwieldy genre. It usually takes someone a few tries to write an effective work.
This makes the success that the American composer Kevin Puts, 41, has had with "Silent Night" all the more remarkable. Based on the 2005 French film "Joyeux Noël," "Silent Night," Mr. Puts's first opera, with a libretto by Mark Campbell, played a sold-out premiere run in 2011 at the Minnesota Opera. It went on to win the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for music.
Co-produced by Opera Philadelphia with the Minnesota Opera, "Silent Night," a tautly paced and involving work, opened a five-performance run here on Friday at the Academy of Music. At the second performance, on Sunday afternoon, the academy was packed, and the audience responded with a sustained ovation, especially for Mr. Puts and Mr. Campbell.
I cannot say that I left "Silent Night" with a clear impression of Mr. Puts's musical voice. Loosely based on true events from World War I, it tells of a spontaneous one-night truce among French, Scottish and German soldiers holed up in trenches near the Belgian border on Christmas Eve 1914. True to the identities of the characters, the libretto is mostly sung in English, French and German, and Mr. Puts writes music that effectively evokes the differing national styles and idioms.
But being a gifted polystylist can be an advantage in opera. And this score, conducted with supple pacing and vitality by Michael Christie, balances turmoil with introspection in a way that keeps drawing you into a story that could easily turn sentimental, a criticism some reviewers leveled at the film.
In the Prologue "Silent Night" is almost like a movie. After anxious stirrings in the orchestra we are taken into a performance of an opera at a house in Berlin featuring two well-known singers: the soprano Anna Sorensen (sung by the radiant Kelly Kaduce) and the tenor Nikolaus Sprink (here William Burden in a multilayered performance). They are singing a duet in Italian in the style of Mozart or Gluck. The performance is halted by a German general, who announces (in shouted German) that the country is at war. Sprink is soon conscripted.
We then shift to a small church in Scotland. William Dale (the bass-baritone Brandon Cedel), full of patriotic fervor, bursts in to tell Jonathan (Zach Borichevsky), his brother, that war has come, and they must go fight together, which dismays Father Palmer, their priest (the baritone Troy Cook). The scene segues to the Paris apartment of young Lieutenant Audebert (the appealing baritone Liam Bonner), who explains to his distressed, pregnant wife (Angela Mortellaro) that he must leave for the front.
Mr. Puts's feel for the opera genre comes into its own with the ensemble that ends the Prologue, where the five main male characters we have met voice their thoughts simultaneously as a male chorus in the background sings war anthems in three languages.
Act I is set mostly in the trenches, vividly depicted in this production, directed by Eric Simonson with sets by Francis O'Connor. A plateaulike mound represents the no man's land in the midst of the trenches, which are separate set pieces rolled around the mound by soldiers. During scenes of fighting Mr. Puts draws from modernist vocabulary. In one battle the music sounded like steely Varèse with machine-gun sound effects.
His most personal and affecting music comes in intimate scenes, for example a poignant aria that Audebert sings in the bunker when he tallies the casualties and questions the entire enterprise. Mr. Puts dares to keep the music simple, with an obsessive three-note accompaniment riff in the harp, hazy orchestra chords and a wafting, aching melody.
At the end of Act I the tentative steps toward the temporary cease-fire are convincingly portrayed in the music and the libretto. The soldiers hear singing coming from the other trenches. A sentimental Scottish song with bagpipes rouses Sprink to sing a Christmas song in his operatic tenor. Impulsively he leaps into the no man's land and keeps singing. Eventually the warring enemies emerge, swapping chocolate and whiskey, showing one another photos of girlfriends and wives. This is Mr. Puts's most inspired music, at once mystical and elusive, spiritual and dangerous. In Act II the various generals discover what happened on Christmas Eve and, incensed, take action, sending soldiers to the front lines. By the end the no man's land is deserted.
If the singers seemed immersed in their parts, it was because the creators gave them real roles to work with. Mr. Burden brought an ardent voice and bafflement to his portrayal of the frustrated opera singer Sprink. The young baritone Gabriel Preisser was wonderful as Lieutenant Gordon, a valiant and questioning Scottish officer. Mr. Bonner brought warmth and wistfulness to Audebert, and the baritone Andrew Wilkowske had a star turn as Ponchel, Audebert's hearty, goofy aide-de-camp.
The robust baritone Craig Irvin is at the moral crux of the opera, playing the jaded Lieutenant Horstmayer, a German Jew with a French wife, we learn. Horstmayer, who loves Paris, sees the futility of war but grimly does his job.
"Silent Night" runs through Sunday at the Academy of Music, Broad and Locust Streets, Philadelphia; (215) 893-1018, operaphilly.com.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Tenors Amid the Turmoil Of War in the Trenches. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe