Across the Lines

Following the success of The Hours in 2022, composer Kevin Puts returns to the Met on March 8 with Silent Night, his Pulitzer Prize–winning first opera set to a libretto by Mark Campbell, inspired by the extraordinary Christmas truce of World War I. More than a century after the war that was meant to end all wars, Silent Night arrives in a striking new production by James Robinson that offers a sobering reminder of the power of music and human connection—even across the deepest divides. By Jonathan Minnick

“Yesterday, the British and Germans met and shook hands in the ground between the trenches and exchanged souvenirs,” wrote British private Henry Williamson to his mother on December 26, 1914. “Yes, all Christmas Day, and as I write. Marvelous, isn’t it?” Marvelous indeed are the many accounts of the extraordinary Christmas truce of World War I, when soldiers laid down their arms, entered no man’s land, and engaged the enemy on friendlier terms, exchanging gifts, singing together, holding joint burials, and even playing soccer. One of the most famous episodes of the war, the Christmas truce finds one of its most vivid artistic expressions in composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell’s Silent Night.

Set in the trenches of the Western Front, Silent Night follows French, German, and Scottish soldiers who briefly escape the dangers and monotony of war through an unexpected Christmas detente. At the heart of the story are two acclaimed opera singers, Norwegian soprano Anna Sorensen and German tenor Nikolaus Sprink, whose romantic relationship is pushed to its limits when Nikolaus is drafted into the army and sent to the front. What begins as a portrait of life on the front lines becomes an exploration of the bonds that can emerge even between sworn enemies. Yet as soldiers begin sharing songs, stories, and moments of friendship, their commanders move to restore the barriers war depends upon.

In a conflict that claimed upwards of 40 million casualties in four years, it is unsurprising that the Great War inspired a vast body of art. Like Britten’s War Requiem and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Silent Night attempts to make sense of the horrors of World War I—yet Puts and Campbell’s opera achieves its emotional impact not through combat or battlefield heroics but through the kinship briefly revealed when the fighting stopped. “The fact is, we’re not all that different,” Puts says, “and as soon as you come face to face with one another, you find there’s not that much separating us.” That idea is central to Campbell’s approach, which focuses on “the humanity of these soldiers and not on the people who are creating this war,” a perspective he says makes the story all the more devastating.

Based on filmmaker Christian Carion’s screenplay for the Oscar-nominated movie Joyeux Noel, Silent Night places human connection at the fore. “The screenplay has such strong elements of humanity in it that demanded to be heard in music,” Campbell says, explaining that he put the libretto in five languages—English, French, German, Italian, and Latin—to reflect the factions gathered on the front. The Scottish, French, and German soldiers sing in their native tongues, while Italian and Latin appear in the songs Anna and Nikolaus sing both in a Berlin opera house and on the front lines. This linguistic divide is crucial for dramatic friction because, as Campbell explains, “it adds conflict to the story when characters don’t speak the same language.” It also creates a musical opportunity: A duet can quickly become a trio with the addition of a translator, as when the multilingual Nikolaus acts as the intermediary between the Scottish lieutenant Gordon and French lieutenant Audebert as they arrange the truce. Campbell recalls that the libretto only fully came together once he identified the opera’s central message. “There was a sentence that came to me,” he says: “War is not sustainable when you come to see your enemy as a fellow human being.” Once he wrote those words above his desk, the rest of the libretto quickly fell into place.

When Minnesota Opera approached Puts in 2010 to write what became Silent Night, he had no idea how to start. But once the libretto arrived and he sat down at the piano, “my heart was racing,” the composer recalls. “I was so excited by the newness of this.” Campbell recognized the result immediately: During a visit to hear the music, he began to cry. “Is it that bad?” Puts asked. Campbell responded, “No, Kevin, it’s that good.” The opera’s premiere sold out in Minnesota, and the following year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music; the committee praised the work for “versatility of style and cutting straight to the heart.” Silent Night has since become one of the most performed operas of the 21st century, with productions across the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Despite its title, Silent Night is filled with music. “This is an opera that takes place around Christmas, and there’s a lot of singing at Christmas,” Campbell says. Alongside the sounds of gunfire and artillery, diegetic music pervades Puts’s score, with much of the storytelling taking place in the orchestra. Audiences can look forward to hearing Puts’s cinematic style, with a grand, sweeping score that not only evokes the front lines of the war but also includes folk songs, Christmas carols, and excerpts from the Latin Mass. “I think the sound world has a lot of variety,” Puts explains. “I don’t necessarily think of myself as a polystylist, but all these little moments, from the classical pastiche to the Scottish ballad, all suggested this approach.” Puts cites moments in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, and operas by Britten and John Adams that he never tires of hearing, and says that when composing Silent Night, he sought to create similarly satisfying and memorable musical moments.

Though the opera contains many of these, one scene in particular forms the emotional core of the story, featuring the most unlikely of instruments in the realm of opera. “The bagpipes are very important,” says Puts. “That’s the beginning of the truce. Everything else that comes from the German and French singers begins with the bagpipes.” In this scene, Father Palmer sings a Scottish ballad “Many the miles I have travel’d,” which in turn inspires Nikolaus to respond with his own German carol “Hab Freude im Herzen O Christianheit!,” also accompanied by the bagpipe. Suddenly, to the shock of all the soldiers, Nikolaus climbs out of the trench and into no man’s land, still singing, where he convenes a meeting with Gordon and Audebert to usher in the Christmas truce. “This opera is about the power of music,” Campbell emphasizes. “That’s how we get to peace, through this commonality of music.”

For the Met premiere, Puts revised the entire opera for both orchestra and singers, drawing on lessons from his three subsequent operas. “I think every single line in the opera has been altered in little ways,” Puts says. “It’s almost like when you clean an old painting; they do these meticulous things, and suddenly the work is more vibrant.” The Met edition also expands the chorus and adds new choral material to existing orchestral moments, showcasing the full power of the Met Orchestra and Chorus. The result is an opera that “just comes off the stage better now,” says Puts, who hopes this version of Silent Night, which will also be transmitted worldwide as part of The Met: Live in HD, will become the performance of record.

While Puts’s revisions reshape the musical experience, the Met premiere also introduces an entirely new visual world with a striking production by director James Robinson, who returns to the company to direct his fourth staging, following the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and Terence Blanchard’s Champion and Fire Shut Up in My Bones. “Silent Night is one of the great American operas of the past decade,” Robinson says, “and it didn’t take me long to realize this was a project I really wanted to tackle.” His production brings the audience directly to the Western Front, via Mimi Lien’s two-tiered set, which reveals the French, German, and Scottish bunkers beneath a snowy no man’s land, and Catherine Zuber’s authentic uniforms. Lap Chi Chu’s lighting and Sean Curran’s choreography further evoke the harsh environment and the soldiers’ common ground. Robinson’s production is brought to life by a large ensemble cast led by Met favorites soprano Elza van den Heever and tenor Ben Bliss as the opera singers Anna Sorensen and Nikolaus Sprink. Tenors Rolando Villazon (who sang the role of Nikolaus on the soundtrack for Joyeux Noel) and Ben Reisinger, baritones Mattia Olivieri and Justin Austin, and bass-baritones Ryan McKinny and Kyle Ketelsen round out the principal cast as the soldiers whose lives intersect. Dalia Stasevska makes her Met debut on the podium.

Now, more than a century later, the Christmas truce continues to exert its unlikely hold on the popular imagination, perhaps because it offers no victory, triumph, or lasting peace. The power of this monumental historic event—both in real life and on the opera stage—lies in the brief recognition that the people on the other side of the battlefield were not so different after all. “We hope the one thing audiences take away is that there’s so much more that draws us together than pulls us apart,” says Robinson. “Our world is so fractured right now,” Puts reflects. “This opera shares a beautiful message of unity, that we’re all pretty much the same, we all want the same things.” For just a few hours, Silent Night invites us to wonder what might become possible when we recognize ourselves in those we have been taught to see as enemies.