UK Edition
Review
Silent Night, Opera North/Town Hall, Leeds, review: this fresh and engaging take on war and peace wins battle with Britten
Quite how far the Christmas truce in the trenches extended remains open to historical debate, but squaddies’ diaries and letters home certainly record sporadic ceasefire, some carol singing and exchange of goodwill.
It’s a potent myth, in any case, and this new opera by American composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell carries the legend into the realms of fiction. The plot is drawn from the French film Joyeux Noël. It focuses on three platoons – French, German and Scots – embedded on the Western Front. On Christmas Eve, their officers decide to call a halt to hostilities and strike a truce that will allow burial of the dead before the slaughter inevitably resumes. Interestingly (though I don’t know how authentically), it emphasises the top brass’s subsequent disapproval of the ephemeral attempts to fraternise and suggests that revenge was ruthlessly taken on those who participated.
First performed in Minnesota in 2011, Silent Night went on to win the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and earned enthusiastic reviews when it was shown at the Wexford Festival in 2014. Now it receives its British première courtesy of Opera North, as part of the Armistice 100 solemnities.
Using its customary panache and imagination, the company has done it proud, using the magnificent backdrop of Leeds’ High Victorian Town Hall to suggest the battlefields of the Western Front and mounting a programme of ancillary events and displays (including Jessica Walker’s intriguing programme of First World War songs written by or connected with women).
Silent Night is very good indeed, if not faultless. Aspects of the plot seem novelettish: I have no idea if such things actually occurred, but it is hard to buy into the idea of a Scottish padre who celebrates Latin mass or the German opera diva and her tenor husband who walk across the lines and surrender themselves to the French in an extravagant gesture of pacifist idealism.
Perhaps too the shorter second act doesn’t quite deliver the climax that the longer first act has led one to anticipate, but overall I found the drama fresh and engaging, the characters drawn with psychological acuteness, and the message uplifting without being maudlin. The most obvious clichés associated with the episode are mercifully avoided: despite the title, nobody sings a carol and there are no knockabout games of football. There are darker undercurrents too – it’s not all tearful embraces and swapping of cigarettes.
Puts’ score, conducted with unfailing assurance by Nicholas Kok, is virile and punchy. It transcends the generic idioms of American opera and doesn’t sound like an unholy mix of Bernstein, Adams and Sondheim: instead it emulates the grander passions of Shostakovich, Poulenc and Janáček, as well as cooking up some skilful pastiche of Mozartian arias, Lutheran chorales and Highland bagpiping. The counterpoint of the three languages is brilliantly handled, rising at times to a thrilling cacophony – but there is delicacy too, as when a haunting harp arpeggio accompanies the monologue of a French officer recording the melancholy list of the day’s casualties as his thoughts wander to his pregnant wife back in Paris.
This may not be the most sophisticated or complex music, but it has undeniable theatrical immediacy and grips an audience from its opening coup de théâtre (no spoilers) to its final dying fall.
Tim Albery directs the spectacle across the Town Hall’s platform with his customary clarity and economy, facilitating a clutch of excellent performances: Máire Flavin and Rupert Charlesworth as the operatic duo, Richard Burkhard as a waspish German major, Opera North stalwarts Quirijn de Lang and Geoffrey Dolton as the French officer and his hairdresser batman, and newcomer Alex Banfield as a Scots soldier driven mad with grief by the death of his brother. The male chorus, supplemented by amateurs, is terrific.
Over the last week, I’ve come in for a certain amount of flak from both friends and readers over my unfavourable review of ENO’s production of Britten’s War Requiem. I can only say that Puts’ foray into the same territory has consolidated my negative view: Silent Night has less pretension and leaves a subtler after-taste than Britten’s overblown breast-beating epic.
Until December 7. Tickets: 0844 848 2720. operanorth.co.uk