Silent Night

On Christmas Eve 1914, soldiers from Britain, France, and Germany stopped fighting and met in the frozen no-man's-land between their trenches. They exchanged food and small gifts. They sang. By morning it was over — and participating in it could be punished by court martial. Kevin Puts's Pulitzer Prize-winning opera tells this story through three pairs of lovers: a Scottish soldier and a French soprano traveling with a military entertainment troupe, a German lieutenant and his new bride, a French tenor and his memories. Three languages, three love stories, one night that proved the war didn't have to be this way. Puts's score moves between warmth and dread with precision, and the opera's central question — what it costs to feel human inside a machine built to suppress that — is one that doesn't resolve.