Dona Nobis Pacem - Opera Orlando's "Silent Night"

On February 8, 2026 I saw Opera Orlando's production of Silent Night, a Pulitzer Prize winning 2011 opera about the Christmas Truce of 1914.

I quite liked it.

Well, as much as one can "like" a story about the butchery of World War I, but in any case I found it interesting, unsettling, and moving.

And I will now subject you to my thoughts about it, partially because I liked it but also because these newer works that are not part of the standard repertoire often have very little online footprint.  So, like with Robert Xavier Rodriguez's opera Frida or Kenneth Tindall's ballet Casanova, I kind of feel a higher obligation to create a record of sorts and, in my own stupid little way, contribute to the literature for posterity.

Standard disclaimer:  This is from memory after one viewing so I may get some of the order of operations wrong and the quotes from the libretto are likely slightly paraphrased.

Background

The History

I first wrote about the Christmas Truce in my piece about my original song "Maybe Next Year (Christmas 1914)" but I'll briefly recap here using the same quote from Opera Orlando's All is Calm playbill:

In the week leading up to December 25, French, German, and British soldiers crossed trenches to exchange seasonal greetings and talk. In some areas, men from both sides ventured into “No Man’s Land” on Christmas Eve and Christmas day to mingle and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps, with several meetings ending in a round of carols. Men even played games of football with one another, creating one of the most memorable images of the truce.

Silent Night is a fictionalized version of the story.  Or "stories," a it were, as the Truce was actually series of local spontaneous truces along the front.

The Opera

Silent Night was written by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell.  It's a story in two acts, sung in English, German, and French and is an adaptation of the 2005 film Joyeux Noelle written and directed by the French writer-director Christian Carion.  The opera premiered with the Minnesota Opera in 2011 and won the Pulitzer in 2012.  It was Kevin Puts's first opera; Mark Campbell had written ten or so librettos previously.

Fun fact: Opera Orlando's Executive Director Gabriel Preisser was in the premier cast as Lieutenant Gordon.  And bonus fun fact: also in the premier cast was Ben Wager, who played Banquo in Opera Orlando's 2024 production of Macbeth.

Silent Night follows German, French, and Scottish soldiers on the Western Front with a focus on the Germans Nikolaus Sprink, Anna Sorensen, and Lieutenant Horstmayer, the Scots Jonathan Dale and Lieutenant Gordon, and the Frenchmen Lieutenant Audebert and his aide Ponchel.   

Each side has a pair of characters that serve as guiding emotional anchors to the story.  For the Germans it is Nikolaus and his lover Anna, both opera singers.  (This thread is loosely inspired by a real event where the German Crown Prince sent singer Walter Kirchoff to sing at the front lines and he ended up getting an ovation from the Scots in their trenches.)  For the Scots the anchor is the brothers William and Jonathan Dale and for the French it is Lieutenant Audebert and his pregnant wife Madeleine.  (William and Madeleine are only physically present at the very beginning but they looms large in the thoughts of their brother and husband, respectively.)

The opera starts by dropping in on the anchor pairs after the declaration of war in the summer of 1914.  Nikolaus is reluctant to leave Anna, Jonathan is persuaded by his older brother William to enlist for the glory of the Crown, and Madeleine is upset that her husband is abandoning her and their unborn child to go fight.   

Then, in December during a failed attack by the Scottish and French forces, William is killed.  Audebert loses his wallet which had his wife's photo in it and he laments having no news of her for months.  On Christmas Eve, Nikolaus is called to a chalet behind the lines to sing at a lavish party for the German Crown Prince, where he reunites with Anna who then comes back with him to the lines.

On Christmas Eve, Nikolaus enters No Man's Land waving a white handkerchief and sings a song.  The Scottish bagpiper joins in and then Lieutenants Audebert, Horstmayer, and Gordon negotiate a truce.  The soldiers all enter No Man's Land to talk, share provisions, and pray.  Anna sings Dona Nobis Pacem and Act 1 ends with everyone looking out at the horizon while bombs and explosions go off in the distance.

In Act 2, the commanders agree to extend the truce to 3pm on Christmas Day so they can gather their dead from No Man's Land.  Jonathan buries his brother.  Horstmayer gives Audebert his wallet back, which he found in the trenches after the failed attack.  Anna and Nikolaus decide to cross No Man's Land and surrender to the French.   The higher ups from all sides arrive to condemn the lieutenants for fraternization.  Gordon's unit is sent to the front lines for an offensive, Hostmayer's unit is sent to the Russian front, and Audebert is sent to Verdun.

The end.

Silent Night, All is Calm and Catharsis

In December of 2025, to sort of lay the groundwork for Silent Night, Opera Orlando put on the one act All is Calm, a 2007 opera also about the Christmas Truce.  (Coincidentally, All is Calm also premiered in Minneapolis.)  The 2025 production was my third time seeing it, as Opera Orlando also performed it in 2019 and 2022.  It's a very powerful show and I absolutely love it.

It is both hard not to and hard to compare Silent Night to All is Calm.  Obviously the shows being a treatment of the same subject matter almost begs for comparison but the structure, staging, music, and atmosphere of the works are so different that it almost feels weird to compare them but I think doing so may be instructive.

All is Calm is an a cappella work with 9 men singing songs and carols and reading real life letters from soldiers on the Western Front.  Everyone plays multiple parts and is on stage the entire time.  It, for extreme lack of a better term, is more like a communal revue.  There's an obvious trajectory to it, as it makes its way from optimistic "We'll be home before Christmas, boys" type songs to the Truce itself, but there aren't character arcs, plot events, or arias.   

Silent Night is a more traditional opera piece, with individual actors playing individual characters, an orchestral accompaniment, and three distinct plots navigating the drama.

All is Calm is a slow crescendo of emotion leading to the Truce itself and each time I saw it, without fail, I was fighting back tears because of the huge emotional catharsis of the opposing soldiers singing together, of weary men connecting with each other.  The resumption of the war happens like a minute before the show ends and the brevity of this falling action compared to the Truce itself, and the actors coming back after the end to lead the audience in  singing Auld Lang Syne in a final catharsis gives All is Calm a surprisingly hopeful ending.  Like you could almost believe that maybe it could end differently next time.  All is Calm then ultimately affirms an optimistic worldview where people can connect with each and overcome.

Not so with Silent Night.  Silent Night is not about catharsis.  It's a mournful show about the oppressive pall of war.  The truce is the climax of All is Calm but in Silent Night it happens at the midpoint and even just the meta-knowledge that there's an entire act left changes the effect of the Truce.  When at the end of act one, in near silence, the entire company turns their backs to the audience and looks upstage to see flashes of light and distant explosions it doesn't feel like they are hopefully defying the madness.  It feels like a temporary stay of execution.

The emotion hit me at this point because I knew this wouldn't last against the enormity of the war.  I mean intellectually I already knew it wouldn't last, but Silent Night really makes you feel the fragility and exceptionalism of it, the knife's edge it balanced on, and the price the participants all paid for it.  There's an uneasy and tentative peace in our characters' sector, sure, but there's bombs going off in the background all down the lines, and men are still dying.

Silent Night just operates on a different wavelength than All is Calm.  While it lacks, intentionally in my opinion, All is Calm's huge surge of emotion and its gut punch at the end when the British officer laments that his side broke the truce first before the artillery thunders back in, I was resonating very strongly with the low, persistent hum of Silent Night's tragedy.

I'll get into this more when I talk about the music and the libretto but Silent Night, despite being a traditional opera, is very understated and leans into realism.  It, like life I suppose, has very little resolution for any of the characters.  Jonathan doesn't get over his rage at the Germans who killed his brother.  Audebert doesn't reconnect with Madeline, though he does learn their son Henri has been born.  And Nikolaus and Anna's ultimate fate is unclear.   

This all gives the show a lingering, unsettling sense of uncertainty and perhaps futility.  The Truce was a brief candle that lit up for one night and then went out forever, and for taking part in it Gordon's men are to be sent to the meat grinder that is a front line offensive and Audebert is shipped off to Verdun, which will soon be the site of the longest battle of the war, where the French will suffer enormous casualties.

The Production

Music

As I mentioned earlier the music is kind of understated. It feels modern in its sensibilities in that it doesn't have these grand bombastic emotional beats and arias which is appropriate for the grounded, almost prosaic atmosphere.  Indeed the almost low key-ness of the music contributes mightily to that atmosphere.

In the pre-show talk conductor Robert Wood mentioned how the score sounds and functions a lot like a film score and I definitely got that from it.  And not like a John Williams film score that has these really iconic and soaring melodies but one that's a little more... ambient?  It felt to me like the score supported the drama on stage rather than the drama bending to the score the way it does in a lot of opera.  And that's not a criticism of either approach, it's just something that made it feel more modern.

Wood also pointed out this neat musical composition thing:

There are 3 nationalities depicted on the stage in this.  French, German, and British, specifically Scottish. And each one of them is musically evoked in the score. At the first entrance of the German lieutenant, you hear the orchestra play a fugue and it sounds very much like it was written by Bach or one of those contemporaries. Every time the French lieutenant comes on, it's as if he's got a little dust of Debussy in his wake, there's a lot of whole tone scale action, and it just sounds very French and sort of translucent and misty.  And then for the Scottish, instrumentation wise, we do have a surprise instrument, and that is a bagpipe.

A lot of the singing is in a sort of recitative, where dialog is sung in a speech like rhythm without a lot of melodic contour.  And most of the solos, like Audebert's "Blesses. Grabert, Pierre" are mostly pretty restrained.  "Blesses. Grabert, Pierre" begins with minimal instrumentation and starts with Audebert going back and forth between listing out the casualties from the failed attack and longing for Madeline.  It isn't overwrought and the quiet power and emotion comes from the stillness of it.  It's also a nice touch that the aria ends when Audebert gets to the list of the missing and the first name is a 10 year old boy and he can't make himself continue.  He stops midline and says he needs to sleep and that he'll finish tomorrow.

The most traditionally operatic singing comes in the prologue where Nikolaus and Anna are deigetically on stage singing at the Berlin Opera House or in the chalet when Nikolaus and Anna sing for the Crown Prince.  The former performance is interrupted by the declaration of war and the second's idyllic song yearning for spring is undercut by some unsettling drones in the orchestra which reflect Nikolaus's discomfort at being at a party in a warm chalet while the soldiers freeze outside.

In these moments, it's like Silent Night is straining against a more traditional operatic drama and the horror of the war keeps dragging us out of the opera house into the trenches.

The finale of act 1 is actually rather somber and not what I was expecting to get right before the intermission.  Anna, now among the soldiers in No Man's Land, sings an a cappella (or perhaps nearly so) "Dona Nobis Pacem," which means "Grant us peace" in Latin.  She walks among the soldiers and sings it to all sides.  This aria is pretty melodically dramatic, an effect heightened by the lack of orchestration and the simple lyrics.  (I believe she only sings the words "Dona Nobis Pacem")   The man listen with a rapt, weary attention and then they all turn to the horizon while the timpani suggests bombs in the distance.

It's a mournful and disquieting note to end the act on and I found it rather affecting.

Libretto

I was very impressed by the libretto.  There's a lot of good details, like how when Audebert is singing about losing Madeline's photo he mentions it's the one near the lilac bushes and later, when Nikolaus is singing about the coming spring in the chalet, the song mentions the returning lilacs.  It's just a nice small touch to have lilac as a symbol of better times threaded into two of the storylines.  Audebert and Nikolaus both long for the day they can stand in the green among the lilacs.

The dialog is very naturalistic and everyone is really well characterized.  The characters have distinct personalities and consistent narrative voices.

I really appreciated the two moments where Jonathan sings a letter to his mother and doesn't tell her William is dead, but makes up anecdotes about him, which I thought was really sad.  And I liked that in the second letter he says (paraphrased) "William got another German today.  If he keeps this up he's going to have the most in the unit."  Jonathan is likely projecting himself here as he's vowed to take revenge for his brothers death by killing every German he can get his hands on, and he has signaled the official ending of the truce by shooting a "German" in No Man's Land.  This is just really quality character writing.  (Jonathan actually shot Ponchel who had snuck through the lines in a German uniform to meet his mother and get news of Audebert's wife and child.)

The use of all three languages is really deft and well done.  I really liked the scene where the soldiers on all sides are singing their letters home, with the English, German, and French all weaving together.  There were a lot of people onstage and the difficulty of simultaneously parsing three different languages as three separate languages really the made them all feel like they weren't that different from each other which, you know, is kind of what the opera's about.

I also appreciated how the show handled the characters from the different sides talking to each other.  Nikolaus and Horstmayer both speak German, English, and French and they mediate between Audebert and Gordon, who can't understand each other.

Given everyone's strong characterization, watching them transition from suspicion to grudging respect to maybe even affection felt verisimilitudinous.  Their exchanges, especially Audebert and Hostmayer's are also often quite funny.  The show manages to blend a natural combativeness and competition with the sense that these two actually would get on really well together.

Their parting conversation was amusing and poignant.

Audebert

Maybe you can visit me on the Rue Vavin.  As a tourist

Horstmayer

Or after we take Paris.

Audebert

You don't need to invade my country to have a drink with me.

They part as close to friends as two people in their situations could ever get and I really liked their final words.

Audebert

Your French is very good.

Horstmayer

I can't take full credit.  My wife is from Marseille.

They shouldn't be fighting and they both know it.

Staging

The set was really cool.  There was a large bulwark / trench wall at the back of the stage which then angled into the wings and a screen at the back which showed some static landscape images and some explosions of light.

The most conspicuous part of the set was the No Man's Land turntable in the middle of the stage.  Unlike the original staging this turntable was not round but a canted rectangle, with one end about 2 feet off the stage and the back end closer to like 5.  The asymmetry allowed the production to give the stage a different look and imply a change in location just by rotating the turntable around.

No Man's Land was always on stage so even when the characters weren't on it, it was out there, looming.

I also really liked that the chalet party set, with some fine furniture and drapery descended from the ceiling, was also on the turntable.  It visually evoked how even when Nikolaus is not in the trenches, No Man's Land is always with him and metaphorically showed how fragile and empty the chalet's comforts are.   As he says to Anna "I'm not the man I was.  I've seen too much, I know too much."

I thought the screen was well used, too.  It was never distracting and allowed for some powerful imagery and visual storytelling, like the contrast between the soldiers all watching the sunrise from the trenches early in act 1 and the soldiers in No Man's Land looking out over the blasted earth after "Dona Nobis Pacem" with distant explosions lighting up the night.

Gallimaufry

• A few weeks before the performance, Opera Orlando gave a behind the scenes tour of the work shop where they build the sets, work out the costumes etc.  A production aspect that never occurred to me is that whatever set they build, they have to be able to disassemble it, fit it into a truck to take to the Dr Phillips Center.  They rent the theater space for a week from Sunday to Sunday so they realistically only have a few days to put it back together before (ideally) they do rehearsals on Wednesday.  Ty the carpenter showed us the CAD drawings and some of the carpentry drawings they create to be able to build, disassemble, and reassemble to set.  It was really cool and I always appreciate that Opera Orlando makes an effort to show some of these technical aspects that normies like me probably have no idea about.

• I liked the false start to Nikolaus's chalet song when he can't keep it together when he gets to the line about the spring lilacs and he has to start the tune over.

• Robert Wood mentioned in the pre-show talk that the music had been revised from the original production.  "Not in terms of the overall musical content... But the vocal lines have been simplified in many, not all, but many cases. And I think to really good effect.  Some of it was unnecessarily difficult at the beginning, and now it's easier."

• I liked the repeated thing about how good Ponchel's coffee is.  It is good characterization and it makes the characters feel like they know and have history with each other.  Later, after Horstmayer mentions how good the coffee is, Audebert's dry response "Ponchel is incapable of making a bad cup of coffee" was funny.

• I was worried someone was going to slip on the canted No Man's Land during the battle scene.  No one did.  Dona Nobis Balance.

• The audience chuckled when Gordon said to Horstmayer "This is going to be the most memorable Christmas of your life" and Horstmayer amusedly responded with "The only Christmas of my life.  I'm Jewish."

• As I say basically every time with an Opera Orlando production, I appreciated the obvious thoughtfulness that went into the stagecraft and I think it really reinforced what the opera was going for.

• I do like that not everyone was ok with the Truce.  Jonathan, still mourning, is absolutely not having it and an offended drunk German soldier reports it to his commanders.

• I really liked Nikolaus's first exchange with Gordon in No Man's Land when they talk about Nikolaus's singing.

Gordon

It would kill me to sing a song in German.

Nikolaus

It would probably kill me, too, to hear you sing in German.

The audience and the characters laughed.

• Nikolaus got a good zinger in when after his first song in No Man's Land, someone from the other side shouted "What, no encore?"  Nikolaus responded with "Isn't that what your girlfriend says?"

Conclusion

Silent Night was not quite what I was expecting.  It was a quiet, weary, and kind of bleak experience but I think a valuable one and it worked really well as part of the season's unofficial double bill with All is Calm.  Hats off to all involved.   

The past few years Opera Orlando has been good for at least one production a season that isn't a standard rep classic, like Silent Night in 2026. Treemonisha in 2025, Frida in 2024, and All is Calm in 2022).  I hope that's a trend that continues.  I would imagine for venerable art forms it would be easier (and safer) to just do the classics every year but I'm glad my local opera company is doing what they can to prevent the repertoire from calcifying.  People are still creating things and that should be celebrated.

The Houston Grand Opera also did a production of Silent Night around the same time Opera Orlando did and I hope that's a signal that the show is working its way into wider rotation.  Definitely check it out if you get the chance.

Dona Nobis Pacem

- m