Kevin Puts

When the same-old saccharine Christmas music starts to wear thin, one can always count on opera for a bracing take on the holiday. In Puccini’s La Bohéme, the holiday is a prelude (spoiler alert) to Mimì’s grim death from tuberculosis. Massenet’s Werther ends with a suicide on Christmas Eve. Even Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel, though not explicitly a Christmas opera, typically arrives in December with its tale of negligent parenting and dangerous cravings.

A more recent entry in the Christmas opera canon is Silent Night, the debut opera by Kevin Puts, with a libretto by Mark Campbell. It had a sold-out premiere run in 2011 at the Minnesota Opera and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2012. After playing at more than 20 companies across North America, the U.K. and Ireland, it is now the subject of a Naxos release, recorded live during a 2018 revival at the Minnesota Opera, conducted by Courtney Lewis.

The opera has certainly outperformed the film on which it is based, the 2005 Joyeux Noël. It tells the true story of an impromptu ceasefire that broke out among French, Scottish and German soldiers stationed along the Western Front in the midst of World War I on Christmas Eve 1914. Characters sing in their native French, German and English; backstories are revealed and the futility of war is considered.

A decade after the premiere, Puts believes that the story of common people reaching across cultural boundaries continues to resonate. “This is an event which is unbelievable in the midst of war and yet it actually did happen,” he says. “Of course, there are some things in the opera that are fictional but in general, it really did take place.

“It takes a lot to convince a bunch of men that they should kill each other incessantly for four years. You’ve got to really indoctrinate them. And the fact is, [the soldiers] weren't really convinced enough to keep doing it. I know it's a good message and the reason that the opera keeps getting performed.”

A First-Time Opera

Puts, now 49, had scant experience with vocal music before Silent Night. He had never even written a song in French or German. “When I was in school, going back to the ‘90s, it wasn't something that most of my colleagues or my teachers at Eastman really aspired to,” he says, alluding to his undergraduate and doctoral studies at the Eastman School of Music. “They were all writing big orchestra pieces. I love the orchestra so I thought that's what I should aspire to.”

But in 2008, Dale Johnson, then artistic director at Minnesota Opera, was scouting fresh talent and was drawn to the lyrical, narrative quality he heard in Puts’ scores. “He heard some of my symphonies and thought, ‘This is the voice that I want for this piece,’” Puts recalls. With a joint commission from Minnesota and the Opera Company of Philadelphia, Puts cleared his schedule for the next two years to focus on Silent Night.

In 2011, soprano Karin Wolverton introduced the role of Anna Sørensen, an opera singer whose tenor husband, Nikolaus Sprink, is conscripted into the German army. Wolverton reprises the role on the new recording. “I told Kevin that his writing for Anna really makes me think of some Strauss heroines, because it can be incredibly lyric, with these beautiful long lines,” she says. “But then, when he goes for that Sturm und Drang, he really uses the range of the voice with those larger leaps to drive home the drama or conflict that she’s going through.”

Avoiding a generic neo-romanticism, Puts stays true to the identities of the characters, whether evoking German carols, a perfumed French idiom or British-style choral writing. At times the languages and styles overlap, as in the first-act chorus in which the soldiers express their hope for a night’s rest.

“That was one of the first ideas that Mark Campbell had,” says Puts. “When we were discussing the idea of three languages, he thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if all the soldiers could be falling asleep on the stage singing about home in three languages at once and then the snow starts to fall?’ I remember he had that image. We had a bottle-and-a-half of wine and we're kind of getting emotional thinking about it (laughs).”

Puts later asked Campbell to write some additional lines so as to let the music linger. “It's one of those things where the audience needs to be in that moment, and they want to stay in that moment,” he says. “They don't want it to pass quickly. It didn't matter if the pacing felt strange. We needed to embrace this moment musically.”

Silent Night has drawn particular praise for its inventive orchestrations. Modernist textures give the battle music its brutality, augmented by the sounds of mortar fire and screams. Bagpipes accompany a sentimental ballad sung by a Scottish priest, which opens the door to the ceasefire.

Strong Female Characters

Wolverton admires how Puts avoids the operatic convention of killing off the story’s heroine. “She’s not this stereotypical temperamental diva. She pulls herself up by her bootstraps,” she says of the moment when Anna goes to the front to try and steer her husband out of harm’s way. “I love the character because she is so strong. It’s nice to see those female characters being written and celebrated as well.”

In recent years Puts has written music for the soprano Renée Fleming, including Brightness of Light, a cycle based on the letters between Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz (premiered with baritone Rodney Gilfrey). Fleming is slated to star in Puts’ fourth opera, an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, which will receive a concert premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra in March 2022, followed by a full production at the Metropolitan Opera in the 2022-23 season.

Calling the recording the opera’s “final edit,” Puts hopes that it can continue to draw attention to a war that is often overshadowed by other events in history books. “When you get to the end of the opera there's definitely the feeling that ‘Let's not forget this moment because it happened,’” he says. “I just have a single held note that fades out and some very delicate harp notes. The idea is that it's becoming faint but let's not forget that we are capable of this.”

— Brian Wise