Silent Night is an opera by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell.
As Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts the work had its world premiere at the Ordway Theater, Saint Paul, Minnesota, on November 12, 2011 under the directorship and dramaturgy of Eric Simonson.
As Silent Night, the opera had its East Coast premiere at the Philadelphia Academy of Music on February 8, 2013.
[2] The European premiere took place on October 24, 2014, in a new production by Tomer Zvulun, at the Wexford Festival Opera in Ireland.
[4] The libretto is based on the multilingual screenplay by Christian Carion for the 2005 film Joyeux Noël that tells a story during the historical short-lived spontaneous 1914 Christmas truce between enemy combatants in World War I.
When you see that the person you might be shooting has a child or a wife or has this life at home and they’re just not the enemy, then it becomes very difficult if not impossible to sustain war.
December 24, 1914: In the morning, little Christmas trees are delivered to the German soldiers, a gift of the Kronprinz who is camping in a chalet nearby.
In the evening Horstmayer wants to arrest Nikolaus for insubordination, but Anna takes his hand and leads him across the no-man's land toward the French side.
The soldier is actually the Frenchman, Ponchel, in a German uniform who was disguised to cross the lines and visit his mother.
[5] Larry Fuchsberg opined that "one senses that (Puts) has found his métier," admiring his ability to manage heterogeneous musical materials.
[5] In 2012 Kevin Puts was named the Pulitzer Prize Winner in Music for Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts.