The Long Christmas Dinner

Thornton Wilder’s one-act play (Yale Dramatic Association, 1931) is about ninety successive Christmas dinners in the home of the upper-middle-class Bayard family, somewhere in the midwest or west of America, fusing them into a single meal. Its mixture of tender engagement and a sort of magical detachment, as if we are watching a film of our own history, is typical Wilder. (Leonard Bernstein’s last musical, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with a book by Alan Jay Lerner, is about the White House and its occupants from 1800 to 1900.)

Most people who know about opera hadn’t heard of a late one-act piece by Paul Hindemith called Das lange Weihnachtsmahl until Wergo, the record label of the music publishers Schott, recently published a recording of it. Wilder collaborated with Hindemith in writing the English libretto. Hindemith made a German version and directed the first performances in German (Mannheim, Nationaltheater, December 17 1961) and English (New York, Juilliard School of Music, March 13 1963). I had a chance to hear a concert performance in German in a church in Berlin a few years ago. It struck me as a modern Bach secular cantata. Extract. Synopsis. It begins with a passage quoting God rest ye merry gentlemen.

From Nicholas Deutsch’s review of the recording on Amazon: “It’s been a long wait for a recording of Paul Hindemith’s last opera ‘The Long Christmas Dinner’ (1960-61) but it’s been worth it. It confirms what those of us who have pored over the piano-vocal score these many years suspected: it’s a masterpiece, and along with ‘Mathis der Maler’ Hindemith’s best dramatic work. The composer’s collaboration with American writer Thornton Wilder, who fashioned the libretto from his famous 1931 one-act play, was a happy one on both sides, and a successful match-up dramatically, theatrically and spiritually. Only Hindemith’s death in 1963 prevented the pair from collaborating on a projected companion piece based on Wilder’s ‘Pullman Car Hiawatha.’ [...] Themes familiar from Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ are much in evidence: the mysteries of passage of time and memory, the obliviousness of the living to the preciousness of each moment of life. The tone, with its combination of the comic (even satirical) and the compassionate, finds an ideal match in Hindemith’s music, which can accommodate both. And Wilder, following the composer’s detailed scenario, reshapes his play into a real libretto, with a good deal of new writing (especially in the ‘set pieces’) – worthy of study by would-be librettists.”

Aaron Copland wrote some of his most beautiful music for a film version of Our Town, but it is even better in its piano version. He considered making Our Town into an opera. So did Bernstein. Ned Rorem eventually did make an opera from it (premiere Lake George Opera, Saratoga, July 1 2006).

Arthur Honegger’s Une cantate de Noël (1953) would make a good concert pairing with the Hindemith. It was his last work and quotes both German and French carols. Hyperion have just issued a recording.