Opera de Montreal are ending their season with Kevin Puts’s Silent Night, a cinematically efficient opera about the Christmas truce of 1914. It’s easy to listen to and easy to like—like a fairy tale.
The opera points at horrors but doesn’t dwell on them; there are too many subplots to tie up, and anyway operatic stagecraft limits the reality of what we see. When it takes the audience a few seconds to find an online video of a man being beheaded or murdered by lethal injection, horror on an opera stage must be psychological to be effective—a dread made of music and completed in the mind. I’m thinking of Bluebeard’s Castle this fall at the Met. So despite it being about the stupidity of war, Silent Night is not an anti-war opera. That’s why it can be funded by Veteran’s Affairs and the American Embassy.
Silent Night is like the Norman Rockwell version of war, when we need George Grosz.