Composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell’s exceptional WW I-inspired Silent Night premiered at Minnesota Opera in 2011. Soon after, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music and has been performed in numerous houses throughout the United States and Europe. Why has it taken 16 years for Houston Grand Opera to produce this major work? Whatever the reasons for the delay, at least we are grateful that it has finally arrived in Houston in a co-production with NYC’s Metropolitan Opera. What a magnificent premiere!
In the years since its St. Paul opening, Puts has semi-revised his score, and this new version could be said to be flawless and nonpareil. This is the apex of contemporary opera – stirring, emotional, affecting, atmospheric. And musically invigorating. There’s a lot of soundtrack in it with harrowing depictions of trench warfare, aural painting of sunrises, overlapping vocal lines, booming orchestra outbursts, and silent reveries like snow falling on “no man’s land.” His musical palette is rich and deep: high strings for yearning, pounding percussion and screeching horns for war’s lethal progress, soft pinging harp for the onset of sleep, mighty choral work, even a swift pastiche of Mozart. His orchestral marvels sweep us into the riveting story.
So do the finely etched character studies of the grunts and their superiors. In successive sketches from the start, we meet two German opera singers, two ordinary Scots, their priest, and a French lieutenant whose lives will intersect on the deadly Belgium battlefield during the 1914 Christmas truce that’s the opera’s focus. Other characters are given equal due: the German and Scottish lieutenants, adamant generals, and particularly the French barber who lives an hour’s walk from the front and pines to visit his mother after six months of brutal conflict.
Adapted by prolific opera librettist Campbell from the 2005 French period film Joyeux Noël, the narrative moves like a movie, with quick cuts inside the German, Scottish, and French bunkers to a soiree at the German Crown Prince’s palace to the barren and scarred “no man’s land” above. Designer Mimi Lien uses bleak impressionistic tones of greys and browns for the wooden earthworks and drops in a piano and settee for the palace. The look is impressive, especially when the black curtain is raised to reveal the assemblage of troops marching gloriously off to war.
Although Finnish-American tenor Miles Mykkanen belts like he’s in a Puccini opera and isn’t quite the ardent lover we expect, his anti-war stance comes through loud and clear. Soprano Sylvia D’Eramo, as his lover Anna, performs her two arias with passion and distinction, but why she shows up at all in the trenches is beyond me. I’ll go out on a limb here, but there were no women anywhere near no man’s land. Maybe prostitutes far behind the lines, but some classy dame, no way. I suppose every opera has got to have a female voice somewhere (except Britten’s Billy Budd), but Anna’s shoehorned into the drama. It’s the work’s only flaw.
Ponchel the barber was stirringly performed by rising tenor Edward Nelson. His little reverie about life in a small town with his gossipy mother and the best cup of coffee in the world was haunting. As he sings about the beauty of silence, the orchestra stops for a moment. We catch our breath, too. He gets his wish to see his mother when he goes absent without leave, but his return is a grave mistake.
Tenor Jack Swanson, as Jonathan, binds the drama as the avenger of his brother’s battlefield death. Surly and driven close to madness, he vows to kill every enemy he sees. Swanson’s anguish was shockingly real. Bass/baritone Ryan McKinny, an HGO favorite, parlayed a subsidiary character into the major leagues with his stalwart Lieutenant Horstmayer, the German leader. He used his stage presence and sterling voice to most advantage. He gets the best line when he offhandedly says this is his first Christmas ever. His troops look at him quizzically. “I’m Jewish.” We laugh at first, then the fate of what may befall him in the future slaps us hard.
Ukranian baritone Iurii Samoilov as French Lieutenant Audebert almost stole the show with his terrific aria as he lists the daily dead contrasted with memories of his pregnant wife back home. Poignant and full of feeling, he drifts off to healing sleep. In one of Puts’ most magical moments, the entire chorus softly succumbs from the horrors of war in a tender lullaby. Under Richard Bado’s expert guidance, the HGO male chorus roars in patriotic fervor or purrs in dreams of what they left behind. Sometimes they all overlap in a polyphonic stew of English, German, and French as if Babel meets Charles Ives.
Other notable cast members include veteran tenor Chad Shelton as obsequious Kronprinz; bass-baritone Brandon Cedel as faithful Father Palmer slowly losing his faith; baritone Thomas Glass as proud and resourceful Scottish Lieutenant Gordon; bass Ziniu Zhao as ramrod French General; bass-baritone Sam Dhobhany as the British Major General; and baritone Charles H. Eaton as gung-ho William, Jonathan’s brother.
This is modern opera at its pinnacle. Superbly directed by James Robinson, one of HGO’s preemient stage wizards, and conducted with style and stark fury by maestro Kensho Watanabe, making his HGO debut, Silent Night packs power and fearful beauty in the horrors of war, its insidious effects on the fighting men, and the universal comaraderie of all armies if only they would meet each other as brothers.
Silent Night continues at 2 p.m. Sunday, January 5 and Sunday, January 8; 7:30 p.m. Saturday, January 31 and Wednesday, February 4 at Houston Grand Opera, Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas. For more information, call 713-228-6737 or visit houstongrandopera.org. $25-$295.50.
This article appears in Private: Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2026.