Music Monday with Mary

Stories surrounding the opera, Silent Night.

Part One

“Will ye go tae Flanders” is a traditional Scottish folksong from the beginning of the 18^th century. In the version below, photos of the unspeakable horror of the WW I battlefields in and around Ypres (“Ieper” in Flemish) and Passchendale are shown so quickly that one can barely keep up with the details. The sadness, the waste, the unspeakable horror of what happened in Belgium…a country that has such a long history of being invaded and devastated.

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Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative production of Silent Night by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell is set mainly in “the bunkers of a battlefield near the French-Belgian border around Christmas, 1914.” The libretto, an adaptation of the French film Joyeux Noël, is a compilation of true stories, all of which occurred wholly or in part, during the various Christmas truces of 1914. In December of 2010, I traveled to northern France and Belgium in order to find out more about the locations of the truces, hoping to see some of them with my own eyes. As luck would have it, I was able to contact a battlefield tour guide who is a specialist on the Christmas truce, and was one of the consultants for the BBC documentary The Christmas Truce.

I was in Texas, rather desperately sending emails to all of the battlefield guides for that area, knowing that I would arrive in France in a few days, and wanted to make sure I found the right person. Sending as many emails as possible was a bit of a “Hail Mary” pass into cyberspace. Two days before my flight, I awoke in the middle of the night and went online. “Dear Mary, I am Annette Linthout. I am the person you need for your battlefield tour.” She went on to explain that she and her husband, Christian Delplace, had a B & B near Ypres, Belgium, the site of some of the Christmas truces, and that she was an expert in the subject. Not knowing much more than that, I told my trusty friend and travel companion Margaret P. to get ready for an adventure. We met in Normandy and a few days later were on the train for Lille, France, where Christian had arranged to pick us up.

Christian, Margaret and Annette in the archives of In Flanders’ Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium

To be honest, I did not even know where Ypres was . . . just that it was somewhere north of the French border. I was not aware of its proud and sad history. My eyes were opened by this two day trip and I found the key to unlock many of the questions I had about the Christmas truce as it related to Silent Night. When Annette told me in her next emails that she would outline a battlefield tour that included the sites of the Bruce Bairnsfather truce, Hill 60, the museum of Ypres and sites in France near Fromelles and Frelinghen, I had to take her word that this was what I was looking for. And it was!

There followed two intense days of visits to truce sites, discussion with archivists in the museums in Ypres and Messen, an amazing moment in the Menin Gate memorial while three buglers played The Last Post, a visit to the Irish Peace Project, a chance meeting with archeologist Martin Brown as he led the team to excavate trenches in frozen fields, and hours of discussions about the Christmas truces. Where did they take place, what do they mean for us today?

I will explore several of these themes in subsequent posts. Below is a very important scene from the film Joyeux Noël. This is a key scene in our opera, Silent Night. It is December 24, 1914. The weary and wounded soldiers from Scotland, France and Germany are in their cold, wet trenches, trying not to think too much about Christmas celebrations taking place in their respective homes all over Europe. Suddenly, music is heard across No Man’s Land. A German opera singer, now a soldier, starts to sing along with the bagpipes of Father Palmer, a Scottish pastor. Barely daring to believe that they are making music together, they eventually crawl to the edges of the trenches. The Scots and French see the small Christmas trees (Flammenschwert) that Germans have sent to their soldiers and that are now posed on top of the trench walls. These trees, with lit candles, frighten the opposing soldiers at first. They did not know what a Christmas tree was, this was a German tradition. Some soldiers thought it was a new kind of weapon, or some kind of trick. However, the German opera singer, Nicholas Sprink, who will be played by American tenor William Burden, takes his courage in his heart and crawls out of the trench, walking into No Man’s Land with the tree held high, singing a Christmas song. Gradually the other soldiers venture out of their trenches to meet him, and the Christmas Truce of 1914 has begun.

There are two real stories of opera singers in the trenches during Christmas 1914. Our character, Sprink, is based upon the German heldentenor, Walther Kirschhoff, who was not enlisted, but was sent by the Crown Prince to the German trenches to entertain the troops for Christmas Eve. A soldier on the opposing side recognized the famous tenor’s voice, and started to applaud. This began an exchange which resulted in Kirschhoff climbing up to the top of the trench to see who was applauding him, and a truce began.

Another operatic tenor who was an enlisted soldier started a Christmas truce on his part of the front. This was Victor Granier of the Paris Opera. German soldiers, the Wurttembergers of the 246th Reserve Regiment of Infantry filed their official report as follows:  “Was it possible? Were the French really going to leave us in peace today, Christmas Eve?  Then from across the way came the sound of a festive song – a Frenchman was singing a Christmas carol with a marvelous tenor voice. Everyone lay still, listening in the quiet of the night. Was it our imagination or is it maybe meant to lull us into a false sense of security? Or was it in fact the victory of God’s love over all human conflict?”

In my next blog post, I will show you my photos of the Christmas truce site near Ypres, the famous “Bruce Bairnsfather” site, and tell you his story. For now, I leave you with one more clip from a dramatization of the Christmas truce. This is a version without music from the film Oh, What a Lovely War.

Minnesota Opera’s Silent Night premieres November 12, 2011, and runs through November 20.  For tickets please call the box office at 612-333-6669 or go online to mnopera.org.

Music Monday with Mary

There is a heightened sense of excitement here at Minnesota Opera as we finish up our lauded performances of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. In just one week, we will start rehearsals for our long-awaited world premiere of Silent Night, Minnesota Opera’s newly commissioned opera by American composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell.

This opera captured my imagination as soon as Dale Johnson told me about it. I have been reading as much as I can find about the Christmas truces of 1914. And please note that I do mean “truces”. I was astonished to find out just how large this pacifistic movement was on the Western Front in Europe…stretching from the coast of Belgium to Switzerland. As luck would have it, I was also able to visit authentic locations of the truces that inspired the French film producer Christian Carion to create his movie, Joyeux Noël, whose screenplay was the basis for Mark Campbell’s libretto. Carion is from northern France and, although the battle scenes of his film were shot in Romania, he was astonished at how his crew was able to recreate the visage of his “pays”….his region of France. In the next blogs, I will post some of my photos of the locations of the Christmas truces in Belgium and northern France. I will also tell you some of the true background stories that inspired our opera’s libretto.

However, this week, I would like to continue my little series of book reviews! I have found a wealth of material about World War I, and specifically about the Christmas truces. No doubt many of you will want to do some background reading, either before or after you see our production of Silent Night. So here are just a few selected volumes concerning this vast subject.

First of all, a book to explain the Christmas truce to children.

The Best Christmas Present in the World by Michael Morpurgo, published by Egmont for ages 4-8. Echoes of Christmas 1914 in the trenches call to the present day when a letter found by chance in an antique desk brings one soldier’s experience hauntingly to life. Heart-warming and spine-tingling, this is a perfect story to curl up with on a winter’s night.  It is beautifully illustrated by Michael Foreman. British author Michael Morpurgo has written more than forty books and won the Whitbread Award, the Smarties Award, the Circle of Gold Award, the Children’s Book Award and has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal four times.

Silent Night: The Story of the WW I Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub, a Plume book published by Penguin Putnam, Inc.  This book is being read in the Twin Cities by several groups who are also coming to our production of “Silent Night”, and I will be presenting lectures of background information about the opera, including many photographs of the truces and the truce sites. Weintraub’s book also discusses what might have happened if the fighting had stopped in December 1914 in the Chapter 7 “What If -?”. The following phrase from page 174 resonates in our opera’s theme.  “Although the unchanged reality of war is that the shots ordered by increasingly remote presences are absorbed by ordinary humans, Christmas 1914 reopened imaginations to the unsettling truth that at each end of the rifle, men were indeed the same.”

Another marvelous book is Christmas Truce: The Western Front, December 1914 by Malcom Brown & Shirley Seaton, Pan Grand Strategy Series. This was one of the earliest books on this subject, first published in 1984. It is written from the British point of view, and contains some excellent illustrations. The miracle of the truce and the shameful facts of the remainder of the war years, when men were ordered to kill each other while encased in thousands of miles of trenches in Western Europe, are also well told by these historians.  On page xxv, Brown writes: “Conan Doyle’s phrase, indeed, sums up the attraction of the truce: it is the human dimension which means that this relatively obscure event in the fifth month of a fifty-two-month war is still remembered and will continue to catch the imagination.”

The next book on my list, by Alan Wakefield, is about various truces during the whole of World War I, lest we think that 1914 was the only year when the soldiers stopped fighting at the end of December. This book is Christmas in the Trenches, from Sutton Publishing.  It contains many fascinating illustrations and talks about Christmas truces and celebrations from 1914 through 1918. The book is fascinating because it also talks about Christmas celebrations on other fronts, for instance in East Africa, Salonika, Macedonia, etc.

I will end with another book which I find particularly touching. Meet at Dawn, Unarmed: Captain Robert Hamilton’s account of Trench Warfare and the Christmas Truce in 1914 by Andrew Hamilton and Alan Reed, published by Dene House Publishing in the UK.  In 1980, Andrew Hamilton found his grandfather’s marvelously detailed leather-bound diaries, kept from 1913-1950. The diary from August 5, 1914, to January 12, 1915, had been typed out and bound. Andrew Hamilton was a history teacher and was excited to find material he could use for his lessons on the Great War. One of the highlights of the diary was Robert Hamilton’s account of the Christmas truce.

Although there seem to be a number of books specifically devoted to the Christmas truce, there are even more than on this list, including some in French and one in German. And accounts of these truces are found in many of the books and documents on WW I. There are also a number of blog sites specifically for the Christmas truce and reenactments of the truce.

Read and come to see our opera! The opening night is November 12, 2011!