In this review-cum-historical-account from the Summer 2015 edition of Studies, Tom Mooney discusses the background to the European premier of Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night at the Wexford Festival Opera, alongside a history of Wexford’s involvement in the events of World War I.
Editor of The Echo group of newspapers, Mooney’s great-uncle Edward Greer served with the 19th London Regiment and was killed on September 29th 1916. His great-grandfather, Private John Murry, a stretcher-bearer with the Royal Army Service Corps, lost his life on July 13th 1918.
Tom Mooney, ‘”Silent Night” at Wexford: How Opera Woke Up to the Great War’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 104, No. 414 (Summer, 2015), 185 – 193. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24347762
‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now… ‘
(Wilfred Owen, Strange Meeting)
Striking the right note, as in contextualising a story, has become a forte of Wexford Festival Opera, once it decided to extend the boundaries of its traditional repertoire by hiring artistic directors from beyond the comfort zone of Britain and Ireland.
If you accept that no two composers confront reality in the same way or are tethered to the same vernacular, it follows that Wexford’s varied programme with a multitude of operas, recitals and concerts, attests to the diverse imaginations of its two artistic directors this century, Luigi Ferrari from Pesaro and his successor David Agler from Vancouver, and their refusal to be curtailed or trammelled by the mediocre. Too often the reputation of the Wexford Festival was defined by well-intentioned reviewers from abroad as merely about reinstating and rescuing neglected operas, blindly and stubbornly searching for nineteenth century seams, as it were, for the odd hitherto overlooked nugget. Ferrari, and especially Agler, changed that. They chose to be bold and ambitious, to give the Festival a rattle.
Wexford’s legendary remit, before the mid-1990s, reminds me of the late Peter Whitehead of the Natural History Museum in London who, by accident, discovered a lost manuscript by Mozart, while looking for a 16th century illustration of the Brazilian herring in Krakow. The thrill to be had from sieving the detritus of the hidden is occasionally coming on the unexpected gem.
The Festival’s ability to extract a narrative from the weft of the implausible and the incredible – the original source of the chosen opera’s terminal decline – is still its raison d’etre. However, the developments specifically associated with Ferrari and Agler are twofold: operas conceived under the most trying of political circumstances and the endorsement of contemporary work. That said, this has not been to the exclusion of what Wexford audiences have never tired of: bel canto, Italian frivolity or forbidden love.
(…)
The opera Silent Night is set on a battlefield in Belgium near the French border on the first Christmas Eve of the fledgling Great War. While this new work, inspired wholly by Christian Carion’s 2005 French film, Joyeux Noël (the name was changed to Silent Night for the benefit of American audiences), was in gestation in Minnesota in 2011 and Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell were sparring with the music and lyrics, David Agler had one eye on 2014. In that year Ireland would be commemorating the centenary of a conflict in which almost a thousand Wexford men lost their lives. On October 19th 1914 forty of them from throughout the county died on a single day and the anniversary of this tragedy would fall in the middle of the Opera Festival.
Agler must have pondered how local audiences would respond to the closing scene of the opera, when the stage is covered by what is the universal symbol of the sacrifices of the Great War – the poppy. For historical reasons, the poppy’s otherwise universal acceptance has never extended to Ireland and especially not to Wexford, where the war had remained a kind of historical footnote.
Wexford was unlike any other Irish county in 1914. It was the fiefdom of John Redmond. Born in Ballytrent, he had become leader of the anti-Parnellite faction of the Irish Parliamentary Party after Parnell’s death in 1891. He spent a decade gradually edging Ireland inch by inch towards Home Rule. Almost half of the Wexford men who heeded Redmond’s call to enlist in the first dozen months of the Great War were members of the 200,000 strong National Volunteers. This was double the percentage for other counties throughout Leinster. John Redmond’s backing of the British war effort did not split the Volunteers, but his call for them to enlist ‘in defence of the highest principle of religion and morality and right’ with the British forces did have this effect, and 13,000 decamped.
Though loyalty to Redmond in Wexford never wavered, especially among the better-off, recruitment was strongest amongst those sidelined by parliamentary politics: the poor. Farmers in Wexford, in letters to the press as war rolled on, denied that they were shirkers, but available figures suggest otherwise: 86% of Enniscorthy veterans of the First World War compiled by the British Legion in 1932 were labourers. Farmers with food in their bellies stayed put, with the notable exception of some land-owning Protestants who, despite belonging to a group which accounted for less than 10% of the male population in Wexford, were over represented amongst recruits (9.4% of the total). They included Second Lieutenant Edward Albert Buttle from Templeshannon in Enniscorthy, ‘one of the first of his class to join the army’, according to his obituary, who was invalided home from the Battle of the Somme: he petitioned vigorously to be returned to the front despite being declared medically unfit, and subsequently succumbed to fresh injuries in France. He was 23.
Labourers in smaller towns like Enniscorthy enlisted as a panacea for long-term unemployment. Throughout Wexford, young men, Catholic and Protestant, living in the county’s four main urban centres, heeded Redmond’s call to defend the rights of small nations, but their primary motivation was to escape poverty. The expectation among recruits in the summer of 1914 was that ‘the Hun’ would be booted out of Catholic Belgium and they would be back home for Christmas. It was not to be.
Whether Protestant or Catholic, well off or poor, the slashing scythe of the first industrialised war didn’t discriminate, and soon enlisted men who had landed optimistically in France were either stretchered from the killing fields, or buried. Captain Gerald Fitzgerald of Johnstown Castle was killed in action in September 1914, six weeks after his departure with the Royal Irish Dragoon Guards. Maurice Cullen, a private with the Royal Irish Regiment, was killed in April 1915 and was buried where he fell by his brother, Myles, a casualty himself a year later, and a month after the death of another brother, Thomas. Six Cullen brothers from Irish Street in Enniscorthy served with the Royal Irish: three returned.
Wexford men who enlisted together, often fell together, and early dispatches from the front, in the form of letters and post cards, escaped the censor and captured vividly the barbarity of the conflict. Writing from Loos to Simon Hore at South Main Street in 1915, Private Tom Roche describes ‘the sickening sight of the bodies of Germans heaped up in hundreds and mangled in every shape and form’. He witnessed the deaths of Wexford friends: in a four-week period that autumn, James Ennis from King Street, John Kirwan from John’s Street and James Rossiter from Castlebridge, who played for Wexford at right wing forward in two All Ireland hurling finals, were all killed in action.
Correspondence to friends back home covered the good, the bad and the ugly of war, with a brave face that belied the horror. Captain Frank Staples of the Royal Veterinary Corps, writing on the reverse of post cards showing the destruction of Arras, said there was no point in grousing: ‘We have definitely not heard where we are going to. However, we have a fairly good idea of where it will be and I dare say you can guess. We hear pretty bad stories of it but hope it won’t be as bad as it is painted’. But it was: he was the only ranking officer to survive a savage bombardment on the Aisne River.
Four Monaghan brothers from Taghmon enlisted and one of them, Adam, sent home a long poem from the front, Tommy in the Trenches, which, while jovial in tone, nonetheless depicts the scene which awaited new recruits arriving daily.
When I came here to France,
the truth I tell
The bullets were flying and the shrapnel as well
And as for the trenches, they were a fine sight
We stood to our waists in cold water all night.
(…)
With no prospect of the war ending before Christmas 1914, Wexford’s maritime location was put to good use by the British War Office: Pierce’s farm machinery factory was commissioned to manufacture thousands of shell cases; Royal Flying Corps Zeppelins were moored in a forest beside the lake at Johnstown Castle; decoy vessels, armed with 12-pounders and Lewis guns, operated out of Wexford harbour in the hunt for U-boats lurking in the English Channel (the SS Anthony was torpedoed off Hook Lighthouse in 1915, with the loss of fifty lives); the Royal Navy deployed a sonar submarine detection base at St Helen’s, and out of a total of 950 naval reservists in the county, 400 enlisted from Wexford town.
(…)
Memorials to the First World War in Wexford, prior to 2014, were notable for their scarcity, but the sacrifice of almost 900 local soldiers, including those thirty to forty men killed in action on a single day, was brought into sharp focus in 2013 when two politicians sought symbolically to suture a wound as old as the State.
Enda Kenny and David Cameron helped bridge a century of division when they became the first Taoiseach and British Prime Minister to lay wreaths together at a British and Commonwealth grave: they chose the final resting place of Major Redmond, a solitary grave outside Locre Hospice Cemetery. It seems fitting that a five-year-old war, which cast a century-old shadow in Ireland should be bookended by a Wexford name synonymous with both its early glory and its protracted tragedy.
Silent Night was never going to be simply the palimpsest of a French screenplay: for a start, the story behind the short-lived truce between opposite sides is universally well known, and has been treated diversely…The Christmas Eve truce of 1914, which occurred sporadically along the lines, was covered in some detail by The War Illustrated, particularly the suspension of hostilities on the Messines Front, under a headline, ‘The Quaint Fraternity of Enmity’. The reporter, FA McKenzie, who interviewed some of the soldiers, noted: ‘They had discovered that their enemies, who for weeks had been trying to kill them, were much like themselves’. The British had heard the Germans call out: ‘Christmas coming. No more shoot’…
…It was essential to avoid a trapdoor to the maudlin with Silent Night, which more or less transferred to Wexford intact from Minnesota, where it had first been performed two years earlier. Erhard Rom’s set is unsparing in its depiction of hand-to-hand fighting and No Man’s Land, though Rom eschews the easy option of bomb craters. His stage, with three separate tiers for the French, British and German combatants respectively, is at once a place of refuge, a battlefield, a burial site and, finally and most powerfully, a memorial to all victims of the war, commanding a sepulchral hush from the audience. The stage at the National Opera House in Wexford was also sufficiently capacious to accommodate Rom’s desire to allow the vertical nature of the set, almost an entangled nightmare, to facilitate the fluidity that the Silent Night plot requires.
Composer Kevin Puts, who had little or no experience of writing for opera prior to Silent Night, sought to tap into the emotion of Joyeux Noël, emotion which he described as very immediate and on the surface. Librettist Mark Campbell was determined not to ennoble war, but to capture the horror of the front. Adapting a screenplay for a libretto, the primary challenge for Campbell was to make the story subservient to the music. ‘We go to the opera for the music, and not for the words’, as he remarked at the annual Dr Tom Walsh lecture in Wexford after the European premiere…
…He took several liberties with the screenplay, with nodding acquiescence from the Joyeux Noël team, such as adding more humour but declining to aggrandise the role of the two German opera singers in the plot, played by Chad Johnson and Sinead Mulhern. ‘I brought them down a notch. I made them more human and I made them more difficult’.
When Puts received the libretto, he wrote all the music of Act One ‘on scraps of paper – it was a mess’ – because it came to him so quickly and so easily:
One of the difficult things about composing is determining what the architecture of the piece is. Say you write a string quartet, you have an idea. Well where does that idea go? Where does that idea cease and another idea take over? With an opera you know exactly where it is going. Scene One needs to lead to Scene Two. I like to be seamless and to find ways that create that seamlessness in a clever way, so the audience is caught up in the flow of it. The libretto told me what to do. There was an intuitive understanding of where the music would go.
To preserve the integrity of both the music and the libretto, the hymn Silent Night, from which the opera takes its name, is never sung. Hamlet without the prince? Not at all. Puts and Campbell were concerned that if the carol was sung or alluded to on stage, the audience might join in, an emotional surplus an opera already on a knife edge could do without.
As an Israeli, director Tomer Zvulun knew war very intimately, having served in the army for three years as a medic in a combat infantry unit, and his experience contributed to the production’s veracity. ‘That’s why I found the story of Silent Night to be so moving: personal and yet universal at the same time. In the midst of this unimaginable time of terror there emerges music, friendship and humanity to provide a momentary solace from the horrors of that futile war’.
Opera has the facility to embrace diverse theatrical genres, and Silent Night succeeds magnificently with the tools at its disposal: an opera in English translated by Americans from a French screenplay, about a short-lived truce during a five-year conflict which tore a continent apart, which received its European premiere in an Irish town which had sacrificed so many of its own sons to the war to end all wars and whose audiences, from near and far, were silenced by what they had experienced in an opera house, night after night.
How ironic, and yet in some ways how appropriate, that the most critically acclaimed opera in the first season of the recently renamed National Opera House, should be about an event which, until then, had been treated with studied indifference by Irish society.