A Hard Edge

Silent Night is based on Christian Carion’s 2005 film Joyeux Noël. Did you consult the movie while you were developing your production?

I remember seeing the film a while ago, before this production was ever on the horizon for me. But I chose not to go back and watch it again. I do think that contemporary opera is increasingly being informed by film—that’s the vocabulary that a lot of composers and librettists use. New operas like Silent Night have multiple scenes. It’s unusual, actually, to do a new opera that exists in one environment for a long period of time.

How did you approach your staging?

There are some absolutely stunning images of World War I. But the unfortunate thing about these stunning images is that, often, there’s a patina of nostalgia. It’s sort of romanticized in a sense. But I don’t think of Silent Night as a heroic piece. It has a hard edge to it.

When you get right down to it, this was a very ugly war. I mean, all war is ugly. But WWI was particularly ugly because it introduced mechanized killing. It was very different than wars that were fought, say, in the 19th century. It’s not like earlier hand-to-hand combat. Also, the life in the trenches was pretty gruesome. They were infested with lice and rats. It was cold. It was muddy. The quarters were cramped, and there was virtually no privacy. Soldiers basically had one thing to wear. They were very exposed.

So set designer Mimi Lien and I wanted a more sculptural environment—a world that was less romantic. Our no man’s land is this whitish, slanted area that’s about 12 feet above everything. And then beneath it we have three distinct playing areas for the French, Scottish, and German bunkers. It suggests the subterranean world of trench warfare.

Something that really influenced Mimi and me were monuments to WWI. Frequently, they’re not beautiful, carved, romantic things. There is something about them that’s very bleak. We were also looking at the austerity of big works of sculptors Richard Serra, Anish Kapoor, and Donald Judd. So that’s how we approached the scenery—the environment is overwhelming and relentless.

You consciously chose not to use projections in your production. Why?

The photographic imagery of WWI is so seductive. But I also think that, as a director, one can get lazy by relying on projections. We felt very strongly that we didn’t want the scenery to tell the story. So there are no projections. We wanted to throw the focus on life down in the trenches and what our characters were subjected to. We think that the piece is strong enough—there’s definitely enough “meat.”

What do you think made the 1914 Christmas truces possible?

It wasn’t like war today, where it’s all done with drones and you have absolutely no connection to the people you’re killing. When you get right down to it, they could see each other across a field of 50 yards. They could see these were people.

And there were bodies. There were friends and relatives on the battlefield. You could see that. You could see that death. It wasn’t so much the soldiers’ differences that mattered as it was their similarities. At a certain point, a bedraggled soldier looks the same, no matter what his uniform is