Christmas at the Opera: It’s More than Just the Manger

“Whaddya mean it’s not a Christmas opera? The first two acts happen on Christmas Eve!”

These fighting words poured out of the Peabody Conservatory’s opera studio in Baltimore one day, many moons ago, as I walked past an open door. It was John Lehmeyer, the high-spirited (and legendary) costume designer who Peabody had convinced to direct the staging of entire productions. He was jawing with a conducting student — a man who today has a sprawling international career.

The topic was La Bohème, of course. Mimi and Rodolpho meet on Christmas eve in Paris, and the night ends at Café Momus where a chorus of mothers scold their children for demanding toys. Some English-language productions turn the text into a bedtime “final warning” that “you won’t have any presents in the morning.” So is La Bohème a Christmas opera? I learned later that the verbal dueling I overheard began with a wager on whether or not Die Hard was a Christmas movie, a far deeper and more vexing question that people had started asking just six or seven years earlier.

U-turning and poking my head inside, I entered what would become a four-way gabfest between three of us young conductors and Lehmeyer. Talking right past the sale, he challenged us to come up with a better Christmas opera than Bohème. “And,” he cautioned, “I’m taking Menotti off the table! Too easy!” That reference was to Amahl and the Night Visitors, the one-act opera that premiered on Christmas Eve in a TV broadcast. Gian Carlo Menotti told the story of a crippled boy who’s healed when he tells three charismatic road-tripping kings that he will offer the Christ child the gift of his hand-made crutch. Menotti himself introduced it on NBC.

Amahl is the Nutcracker and Messiah of the opera world. It’s revived every December, hardly ever performed during the other 11 months, and ready-made for goosebumps every time. Were there others to rival it? We came up with about a half-dozen candidates that day, and did it without Wikipedia. (Smartphones weren’t a thing yet. Neither was the Internet.). Others have premiered in the years since.

My favorite at the time was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki, which means “The Slippers.” It’s about a Ukrainian blacksmith named Vakula who gets the girl by bringing her a pair of slippers on Christmas morning. These are not just any slippers, though. Oksana says she’ll marry him only if he can bring her Catherine the Great’s casual footwear. Vakula’s name means “clever,” and he is: He grabs Satan by the tail, jumps on his back, and forces him to fly all the way to St. Petersburg. Oddly, the czarina is amused by his request for her footwear, and she says yes. (The business of why Vakula is in a position to manhandle the devil takes you to a hilarious scene about a series of seductions, each more absurd than the last, that end with each suitor in a burlap sack.)

 

What I didn’t know at the time is that Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote an opera based on the same story, 10 years after Tchaikovsky made his professional conducting debut on Cherevichki’s opening night at the Bolshoi. Both got their material from Christmas Eve, a story by the Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol. Rimsky-Korsakov used the title, too. So did a lesser-known Ukrainian composer named Mykola Lysenko, who beat them both to the punch by many years. These operas are stylistically very different, but they all sound Russo-exotic to most American ears — especially Tchaikovsky’s. His father’s family were Ukrainian, and he used that country’s folk tunes in a lot of what he wrote. If you don’t want to dive into all of Cherevichki, The orchestral suite is worth a listen.

Christmas operas date back a lot further than the 1880s. The first confirmed stage-sighting of the nativity with vocal music came on Christmas Day in 1622. Il Gran Natale di Christo Salvator Nostro (The Great Nativity of Christ Our Savior) was the handiwork of Giovanni Battista da Gagliano and Jacopo Peri. They wrote for choruses of angels and shepherds, and stock characters played allegorical roles steeped in morality: human representations of sin, despair and death. Lucifer, the prince of darkness himself, sang the prologue.

Il Gran Natale played three times that December in a worship space run by the confraternity of the Archangel Raphael in Florence. It’s helpful to think of an organization like this as a proto-Knights of Columbus, an important church-adjacent organization that the Pope didn’t control directly. Staging a drama there — anywhere, really — was forbidden until December 27, after St. Stephen’s Day. In an era when Rome provided the faithful in modern-day Italy with both spiritual and political leadership, a ban on theatrical performances during the Advent season wasn’t something to toy with. But composers and playwrights would continue to exploit the genius-level loophole that Gagliano and Peri appeared to have opened, by scripting and performing theater pieces about Christmas for three or four weeks every year. 

There are other nativity operas in the 17th and 18th centuries, including one based on a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, whose poetry Mozart and Gluck used as the foundations of operas. Tchaikovsky’s and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Christmas scenes with high notes weren’t the only 19th century examples: There are even two zarzuelas on record, including one about a Christmas turkey (Francisco Barbieri’s El pavo de Navidad in 1847) and another about a honey-nougat dessert (Cristóbal Oudrid’s El Turrón de Nochebuena in 1866).

The 20th century saw a veritable explosion of Christmas stage-singing. One of my old music history teachers tells me there were at least 42 such operas, with Amahl and Bohème the most popular. (Wikipedians have snagged a lot of them.) Some of the others might be worth adding to the standard repertoire, if only audiences would buy tickets in March or August.

 

Thea Musgrave premiered an opera in 1979 based on the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. She wrote the libretto, too, adding a charming dance for the kindly Mr. Fezziwig and his wife, and an ending where Scrooge doesn’t just throw money out his bedroom window. He knocks on the door with presents for the Cratchits and joins them for carols at the spinet. There’s even a children’s choir at the end. (They usually enter from the rear of the theater to surprise the audience.) Musgrave’s opera was the third Christmas Carol in three years, and her music isn’t the most ear-friendly to opera-goers who haven’t already been exposed to the likes of Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. No one leaves the theater whistling her melodies. But the characters are warm and the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future can be scary as hell with the right costumes. 

Bernard Herrman, who wrote film scores for Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese, had his own Scrooge opera in 1954. It premiered on CBS television. Marilyn Horne sang off-camera while an actress mimed the words of Belle, Ebenezer’s first love, in a Christmas-past  flashback.

 

Paul Hindemith’s 1961 The Long Christmas Dinner is worth reviving. Thornton Wilder adapted the libretto from his own one-act play, which came 30 years earlier, keeping everything in English. It’s a speed-trip through 90 years of Christmas dinners in one household, complete with changes in everything from the skyscape to the wallpaper. The fast-forward technique inspired a scene in the film Citizen Kane where Kane’s marriage falls apart in five stages at the breakfast table. (Orson Welles copped to the theft in a phone call with Wilder.)

There’s only one English-language recording of this opera available, and it took 54 years for anyone to make it. It was the product of an unusual live performance at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, which included Wilder’s play, fully staged, followed by the 45-minute opera. A very cool idea executed by conductor Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra, but it could never work with Otello or The Marriage of Figaro unless the performances were staged on successive nights. (Hey! Big-city opera companies! Try this!) Hindemith’s music has touches of his Mathis der Maler in it. The brief overture provides just enough flavor for starters, with a grotesque treatment of God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen that sets up the drama to come. 

 

Our current century’s Christmas offerings include operas by John Adams, Thomas Pasatieri, Mark Adamo and Jake Heggie — this decade’s most visible American opera composer. Adams’s  El Niño is semi-staged and can also be performed as an oratorio: He tells the nativity story from Mary’s point of view — partly in Spanish — and spotlights King Herod for ordering the massacre of male infants and toddlers in Bethlehem. Heggie adapted It’s a Wonderful Life in 2016. Pasatieri’s is more interesting. His one-act God Bless Us, Every One! Begins in 1863, twenty years after A Christmas Carol ends. Scrooge is dead, Bob Cratchit is set to take over their joint business venture, and Tiny Tim is in New York. There’s a civil war going on, so he joins British mercenaries fighting alongside the Union Army.

If there’s a through-line in all of this, it’s the thematic spread of what qualifies as a “Christmas opera” — and how directly composers have hit audiences over the head with difficult subjects. Four hundred years ago, Christmas operas featured clear depictions of the nativity along with the vaguest suggestion of how the public might approach Christian redemption. By the 1880s, Jules Massenet was comfortable depicting a Christmas Eve suicide in Werther. A decade later, Puccini made Christmas a silent backdrop to a tragedy’s first steps. Today, anything goes — and we’re more likely to see history depicted with a holiday backdrop.

 

The last opera I want to mention is one of the youngest: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Silent Night by Kevin Puts. His music depicts one of many unauthorized and unofficial Christmas truces during World War I in 1914. French, German and Scottish troops laid down their arms, walked out of their trenches, met their enemies, and embraced them. Puts wrangles the chaos of a war that killed 10 million people, and wrings its pain alongside self-reflection. The characters are genuine people, the tension is real, and the music is often lyrical. It’s a story of war, but also of  the kind of unexpected peace we all deserve. And not just at Christmastime.