American Christmas

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

--W. H. Auden

According to Auden's Law, most of the plays of Thornton Wilder are a poor source for operatic material: deliberately unsensational, they often deal with lives that are determinedly sensible. But last week audiences in Mannheim, Germany, saw Wilder's one-act play, The Long Christmas Dinner, successfully transformed into opera by that master craftsman of contemporary music--Composer Paul Hindemith.

Composer and playwright met more than a decade ago when Hindemith was teaching at Yale. They discussed the possibility of setting one of Wilder's plays to music, but not until last year did Wilder finally get around to preparing the libretto of Christmas Dinner. He rewrote extensively, stripped some bits of characterization, but maintained the basic outline of his play, which recounts in one scene the 90-year chronicle of an American family.

Through the Doors. On one side of the stark stage set in the Mannheim National Theater, a white door was hung with white lace curtains representing the "Door of Life"; on the other side a purple door, draped with a heavy purple mourning curtain, represented the "Door of Death." Moving between life and death, members of the Bayard family moved across the years between 1840 and 1930, their varied history remembered at a continuous Christmas dinner.

The opera opens with Roderick Bayard, his wife and his mother, in the dining room of their new home, eating a turkey dinner. A nurse enters through the Door of Life, cooing to an imaginary baby as Mother Bayard departs quietly through the Door of Death. The opera ends with Ermengarde, the last of the Bayards to occupy the old house, singing softly: "They're building a new house, fancy that"--and making her exit through the Door of Death. Hindemith translated the libretto into German, sacrificing some of the nostalgic quality of the original, as in the moving sextet by the entire family:

We talk of the weather, we talk of the snow

The day is cloudy, or the day is bright

We talk of the children and how they grow

A little more dark meat, a little more light.

Triumph of Belief. The mood is as American as a Grant Wood painting, but except for brief snatches of God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, Composer Hindemith, 66, who is an American citizen but a German by birth, refrained from using the familiar melodies of America's Christ mas. Instead, the music, played by a 33-man orchestra conducted by Hindemith himself, was elevated, sonorous, often daring in its rhythms and harmonies.

Hindemith's greatest triumph was in making Wilder more believable: musically, the composer was often able to achieve rapid shifts in stage tempo and mood following a death or a birth with far more convincing effect than Wilder was able to achieve in plain prose. Critics hailed Christmas Dinner as first-rate opera, and the audience was clearly moved. "It certainly fits our family," muttered one damp-eyed woman as she left the hall.

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