An opera company has an idea for an opera, and so it finds a composer to write it. This scenario presents opera as a hurdle to be conquered: It’s not about finding art that we want to stage as much as it is about making work that fits our specifications.
“Silent Night,” by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell, is such a work, commissioned in 2011 by the Minnesota Opera and based on the French film “Joyeux Noel,” about the Christmas truce of 1914 in which soldiers in the trenches laid down their arms for a few hours during World War I. The opera has, in material terms, succeeded; it won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012, and it has had multiple productions, including revivals that opened at the Washington National Opera and the Minnesota Opera on Saturday night. Yet in theatrical terms, and in musical ones, it simply isn’t very good.
