Listen to Kevin Puts' "Silent Night" on NPR

Mike Nyby

We've covered composer Kevin Puts' Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night extensively in its performances in Minneapolis and Philadelphia. You can plan on more coverage as it heads to Fort Worth Opera and elsewhere in the opera world as this barihunk-laden opera quickly enters the standard repertory. Not since Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking have we seen a new opera take the music world by storm like this. 

The opera was originally commissioned by the Minnesota Opera and is based on the screenplay by Christian Carion for the Oscar-nominated 2005 French film Joyeux Nöel, which dramatized actual events during WWI during the days before Christmas 1914. The opera which deals with French, Scottish and German soldiers enjoying a truce during the bloody war is sung in German, French, English, Italian and Latin.


National Public Radio (NPR) has posted the audioof the orginal performance from the Minnesota Opera, which included a slew of barihunks. They include Craig Irvin as Lieutenant Horstmayer, Michael Nyby as William Dale, Troy Cook as Father Palmer, Gabriel Preisser as Lieutenant Gordon,
Joseph Beutel as the British Major, Liam Bonner as Lieutenant Audebert, Andrew Wilkowske as Ponchel and Ben Wager as the General.