The performance is in most important respects a good one, particularly for a pickup studio recording (of good quality) with forces previously unacquainted with the opera or with any performance tradition it might be said to belong to. The LSO is a quality ensemble, and Manahan has the piece in hand. Livengood and Morris, with  voices of authentic operatic format, both “get” the flavor of the writing and take advantage of the emotionally expressive moments their music offers, which are more frequent for the mezzo than for the bass-baritone. As the more prominent of the brothers-in-law, Mel Ulrich shows a well-controlled medium-weight baritone, though not a very vivid sense of characterization. But (and it is painful to write this), the crucial part of Eben, too hysterically set in any case, is disfigured by the vocal condition of Jerry Hadley’s final years. Only in a few of his quieter low or midrange phrases do we hear the attractive tenor voice and interpretive sense that marked his prime singing years.

Kevin Puts: Silent Night (libretto by Mark Campbell, based on Christian Carion’s screenplay for the film Joyeux Noël). Minnesota Opera Orchestra and Chorus, Courtney Lewis, cond. Naxos American Opera Classics 8.669050-51.

Of the works under review here, Silent Night is the one with the best claim to repertory status, at least for the current generation. Premiered by the Minnesota Opera in 2011, it won a Pulitzer Prize, has been given multiple productions internationally, and is scheduled for a Metropolitan Opera production a couple of seasons hence. This recording was taken live from a 2018 MO revival. CD 1 in my set (Act 1 of the opera) played normally, but CD 2 (Act 2) would not load, after multiple attempts, in either of my players. I sought  a replacement, but neither a voicemail left at the given Naxos number nor a written inquiry to the company’s support team (response guaranteed within 24 hours) produced any response. So herewith, a brief report on Act 1 only of Silent Night.

The opera is set during the unofficial Christmas truce of 1914, when troops on both sides, dug into their trench systems after inconclusive fighting in the early months of World War 1, took it upon themselves to declare a ceasefire and to fraternize along broad sections of the front lines on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, before returning to the slaughter in the succeeding days, months, and years. The main story line concerns a romantically involved couple of opera singers on the German side, Nikolaus and Anna, whose careers and relationship are interrupted by the declaration of war and our tenor hero’s conscription. We catch glimpses of him, voicing proper sentiments, in the early scenes, until he is recalled by the Crown Prince to join Anna in a Christmas Eve command performance, after which she follows him back to his battle station. There, she joins in religious observances by singing a Dona nobis pacem—which brings us to the end of Act 1.

The cinematic origins of Silent Night are evident in the opera’s scenetic structure, which jump-cuts about in brief episodes. The four sequences that make up the Prologue, flitting from a German opera house to Scotland, then to a Paris apartment, then back to Glasgow, require a tad over seven minutes in total, and while things lengthen out a bit later on, it’s not musical structures and rhythms, apprehended by ear, or their visually received equivalents in scenes and acts, that set the pace of the opera. Instead, it is the roving eye of the camera, with its reluctance to hang with an object or an action, its nervous need to move on. I suspect that in the theatre it is this element, coupled with the fact that the personages and choruses of the combatant nationalities sing in their own languages, that seems inventive to at least some in the audience. But the creators cannot exploit the camera’s advantages and freedoms, because they’re stuck with the stodgy old stage. Reading ahead in the recording booklet synopsis, I see that Act 2 will involve burial of the dead; the outraged reactions of command-level officers to their troops’ insubordination; Nikolaus’ arrest for protesting his lieutenant’s patriotic loyalty, followed by a sequence in which Anna somehow springs Nikolaus and then leads him by the hand across no-man’s land, under fire, to the Right Side, where they demand asylum; and morning-after complications that include a fatal friendly-fire incident, the announced punishment of a French soldier by the French general (eased by the soldier’s news that a baby is on the way and the revelation that the general is the soldier’s father), and the dispatch of German soldiers infected by the holiday spirit via boxcar bound for Pomerania, humming a Scottish Christmas ballad en route.