Silent Night of unrelated music

I tried to watch Silent Night on PBS on Sunday, December 21. I was drawn in by the promise of one of my favorite stories. The story is the Christmas Eve truce of 1914. German and British troops began singing carols to each other on the front during World War I. It was a beautiful example of humanity temporarily acknowledging that nationalism is ultimately an empty concept.

Silent Night is an opera composed by Kevin Puts and the production was from Minnesota Opera, where the piece was originated in 2011. I wish I could say I enjoyed the PBS broadcast but I did not.

When is someone going to write an opera that sings? I am sick to death of this disjointed style of sing-speak intervallic balderdash. The best thing I can say about it is that it’s tedious.

Most of the music was neither dramatic nor beautiful in Silent Night. Let me say that again. Most of the music — some of the music was nice and only one segment struck me as beautiful.

Silent Night was tedious, tedious, tedious, tedious, nice, tedious, tedious, tedious — you get the point. It needs to be the other way around. For whatever reason, composers of operas don’t want to develop a theme or have any musical cohesion for the story. You are telling a story with music therefor the music needs to be intelligible.

Allow me to attempt to write a sentence in a style that reflects the music of most contemporary operas. Here we go: Jupiter mantra periwinkle phallic gesture have none than that the other and but however can infinitesimal jellybeans.

It makes no sense and has no discernible structure, logic, or meaning.

Music such as Silent Night makes me long for someone to roll a chord and start a recitative. Can I get a leitmotiv, perhaps, or would that not be groundbreaking?

Maybe that’s the problem. Does every new opera need to be groundbreaking? So far the ground most new operas have broken has been enough to bury them.

This dona nobis pacem from Silent Night was one of the “nice” parts. It starts out great and then gets silly. There is no way for any singer to get that high note out cleanly. That note would have had a stunning effect on a violin or even on the piano but it does not sing.