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Ricardo Rivera as Audebert, Brian James Myer as Ponchel.
All photos by Pat Kirk.
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Opera San Jose
Puts and Campbell’s Silent
Night
February 11, 2017
One hears the story of the Christmas truce of 1914 so often
that it’s tempting to suspect a little mythologizing, perhaps wishful thinking.
But no, the smallest bit of research reveals that not only did mortal enemies
meet in No Man’s Land to exchange tidings and small gifts that winter, it
happened at dozens of points along the front. Working from the 2005 French film
Joyeux Noel, librettist Mark Campbell
and and composer Kevin Puts did a masterful job of distilling those stories
into three squadrons – Scots, French and German – and creating a moving,
personal account of that astounding night. For their effort, they won a 2012
Pulitzer Prize.
After arranging for the composer to create a custom score
for its 47-person pit, Opera San Jose has put on perhaps its most ambitious
project ever. The opening battle scenes are at once visceral and chaotic, a
sort of combat ballet by fight director Kit Wilder, made all the more jarring
by the archival projections from set designer Steven Kemp. Puts’ swarming
strings are like a Stravinskian film score, echoed later (in a lighter tone) in
the cocktail-party chatter of the Christmas party.
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Ricardo Rivera as Audebert, Matthew Hanscom as Lt. Gordon, Kyle
Albertson as Lt. Hortsmayer.
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Post-battle, the opera’s ambition is to make things
personal, and they start at a very primal place: sleep. Playing French
lieutenant Audebert, baritone Ricardo Rivera displays a natural ability to
project world-weariness, and a compassion for his men that is, at times,
detrimental to his military assignments. He sings of a desire for a good
night’s sleep, in a passage that teases at lyricism (modern-opera listeners are
always a little thirsty for melody), then suddenly opens up to a lush chorus from
every single man on the darkened battlefield. This attempt to sing themselves
to sleep, along with their words (“Maybe when I wake, all will have changed”),
provides a hint at the upcoming unity of enemies. (Chorus director Andrew
Whitfield.)
The stories then turn personal. Baritone Brian James Myer
brings a little light to the scene as an upbeat French barber, Ponchel, singing
of his home, an hour’s walk from the battlefield, where he longs to go and have
coffee with his mother. Tenor Mason Gates plays Jonathan, a Scots soldier
whose brother’s death leads him into a downward spiral of denial and vengeance.
His eventual insanity leaves him as the only “effective” soldier left.
Bass-baritone Kyle Albertson plays German Lt. Horstmayer, driven to be fierce
and flawless to make up for his unfortunate Jewishness.
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| Julie Adams as Anna Sorenson. |
The moral driver is (conveniently enough), an opera singer.
Kirk Dougherty plays divo-soldier Nikolaus Sprink, singing his spinto protests
against a terrible, pointless war with the kind of artistic passion that drives
military folks crazy (“Artists make bad soldiers,” says his lieutenant).
Preparing for a command performance before the Kronprinz with his singing
partner/lover Anna, he refers to “all these fat old men, swigging their
champagne,” the true beneficiaries of the bloodshed. Anna manages to talk him
into taking her to the front for Christmas eve, and thus are the seeds planted
for a rebellious truce. The Germans have Christmas trees, the French have
chocolate, the Scots have whiskey. And the tenor arrives with an actual angel.
Many of those dozens of Christmas truces were initiated
through music, bits of carols and folks songs drifting across No Man’s Land.
Puts begins with the bagpipes (played by Lettie Smith), duly matched by
harmonica (Isaiah Musik-Ayala), German songs, and Latin hymns, as Ponchel
provides a running commentary. Puts’ setting is fully natural, and allows the
opening for Sprink to step bravely onto the battlefield and propose a Christmas
peace.
The truce is everything you might imagine, a few tense, darkly
humorous moments (Ponchel almost gunned down for drawing a chocolate bar from
his pocket), and a great sense of relief at the removal of danger. Followed by
a religious gathering (bass-baritone Colin Ramsey as the Scots’ Father Palmer)
and a soprano benediction. Julie Adams, an Adler Fellow set to play Mimi in San
Francisco Opera’s upcoming La Bohème,
is quite the find, a dramatic soprano who can nonetheless play lyric, drawing
heartbreaking pianissimos from the top of the range. Her Anna gives the
production a female moral presence very much on everyone’s minds (given recent
marches and such).
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| Mason Gates as Jonathan Dale. |
This production also demonstrates OSJ’s ability to throw
some impressive male firepower at a challenging project. One of the company’s
most-acclaimed alums, tenor Christopher Bengochea, appears as the Kronprinz for
fairly brief scenes, but lends the role a valuable authority. Baritone Matthew
Hanscom as the garrulous Scot Lieutenant Gordon, bass Kirk Eichelberger as the
German Officer, bass Nathan Stark as the fierce French General – all of them
have played and will play leads in other productions.
To their credit, Puts and Campbell don’t leave it at that glorious
Christmas. They proceed to the unsettling ramifications: the burying of the
dead, the ludicrous thought of having to shoot at people they now know, angry
superiors upbraiding underlings for treating enemy soldiers as if they were
human beings. (Which brings up another recent topic: demonization.) A
particularly moving scene leaves Father Palmer singing the hymn of Saint
Francis as the impending return of violence plays beneath him in dissonant
waves of strings. Nothing about this opera is easy, and that is wholly
appropriate. It will leave you thinking a lot
about the violence we do in the name of other-ness. And the pivotal role of The
War to End All Wars in introducing the bloodiest century ever.
Kemp’s rollaway bunkers allow a filmic continuity, providing
quick shifts from one faction to another. Joseph Marcheso forgot to bring his
score to the podium (a good laugh for the audience), but proceeded to do a
magnificent job of coordinating a small army of performers. (You could the same about stage director Michael Shell.) Some of the work’s
success comes from modern opera’s supertitle culture, which provides an
audience ready-made to take in a story sung in Italian, French, English, German
and Latin. The presence of xylophone and piano in the first act give the sense
of approaching magic (also the occasional snowfall). The horn passages on
Christmas eve mornings are sumptuous. I also enjoyed the device of lining up
several characters to deliver a fugue of information: soldiers’ concerns,
leaders’ complaints, and especially soldiers reading descriptions of the
magical truce from their letters.
Through February 26, California Theatre, 345 S. First
Street, San Jose. operasj.org, 408/437-4450.
Operaville was recently named the eighth-best opera
blog/website in the world by Feedspot.com. Michael J. Vaughn is a thirty-year
opera critic and the author of 19 novels, including Operaville and Gabriella’s Voice. (Photo by Janine Watson.)
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