Why a 1914 Christmas truce resonates today
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.— It was a night like no other. The guns had fallen silent, stillness hung over the snowy Belgian battlefield and from distant trenches came the sounds of a Christmas carol.
History remembers that occasion in 1914 as perhaps the greatest irony of the greatest war the world had ever known.
Soldiers from both sides climbed out of their dugouts, carrying improvised white flags, stretching forth hands and offering gifts.
It became known as the Christmas truce, a spontaneous, completely unauthorized expression of their shared humanity by men who were about to kill each other.
A poignant story to be sure, but the basis for an opera?
Not only that but a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera titled Silent Night, successfully mounted on both sides of the Atlantic since its 2011 première by Minnesota Opera, with music by Kevin Puts and a libretto by Mark Campbell.
There were other reasons besides Silent Night for visiting Glimmerglass Festival, that unlikely operatic mecca for northern New York state and southern Quebec and Ontario, nestled in a field outside “a drinking town with a baseball problem,” as T-shirts in a local restaurant proclaimed.
Since its 1975 production of Puccini’s La bohème in a high school auditorium, Glimmerglass has made Cooperstown more than a place to see Babe Ruth’s bat and swim in Otsego, the lake novelist James Fenimore Cooper called Glimmerglass.
This summer, four mainstage productions shared the stage of the picturesque Alice M. Busch Opera Theatre — Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen and Bernstein’s West Side Story, in addition to Silent Night.
I know, I know. West Side Story is a musical, not an opera.
But since becoming artistic and general director in the fall of 2010, Francesca Zambello has made a classic musical one of the July-August festival’s regular features.
And what could have been more appropriate in this 100th anniversary year of Bernstein’s birth than to choose his greatest hit?
West Side Story was handsomely mounted, in a co-production with Houston Grand Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago, featuring Jerome Robbins’ original choreography and proving so popular that extra performances had to be added to its run.
And although my preference remains for a four-opera program in this opera-hungry region, Zambello’s musical-ayear strategy for broadening her audience is obviously working.
Co-producing makes such large-scale productions practical, as West Side Story and Silent Night (a partnership between Atlanta Opera and Ireland’s Wexford Festival Opera) both demonstrate.
High quality radiated from Erhard Rom’s two-tier set and Victoria (Vita) Taykun’s costumes for Belgian, Scottish and German troops in the warthemed opera.
Mark Campbell’s libretto effectively interweaves three stories, one involving a pair of opera singers on the German side, another a pair of brothers on the Scottish side and the third a French lieutenant expecting his first child.
And Puts’ tonal, gratifyingly vocal score serves it well. This is an opera capable of bringing tears to its audience’s eyes.
It is also an opera reflective of Zambello’s declared wish to deal with subjects of contemporary relevance, the Puerto Rican immigrant tale of West Side Story and the feminist touches in The Barber of Seville and The Cunning Little Vixen providing cases in point.
Deliberately simple, almost minimalist in its staging, Zambello’s production of Rossini’s opera bore a low-budget look, complemented by a less than stellar cast.
Janacek’s opera, a co-production with Boston University, performed in English, is never easy to stage, with a cast of mostly animal characters, but E. Loren Meeker’s production and Joseph Colaneri’s con- ducting combined to argue its case convincingly.
Aside from its mainstage productions, the Glimmerglass Festival once again this summer offered numerous ancillary events, ranging from a talk by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood to performances by its Young Artists Program of Ben Moore’s Odyssey (2015) and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti.
Next year? The mainstage schedule is to include the musical Show Boat, the operas La Traviata by Verdi, The Ghosts of Versailles by John Corigliano and the première of Blue by Jeanine Tesori to a libretto by Tazewell Thompson, focusing on the troubles of a Black family in Harlem.
Yesterday and today continue to keep company in Cooperstown.