Silent Night, Kevin Puts’s poignant 2011 opera about a Christmas truce on the front line of World War I, will get a new production at the Metropolitan Opera this coming season. It's the piece that won him the Pulitzer and launched everything that followed.
Given that it will have its largest-ever audience — thanks to Live in HD screenings in cinemas — the composer decided the widely produced opera could use “a little facelift.” So, he pulled out his scalpel and went to work.
“I revised pretty much everything,” he said. “I looked at every line and asked, ‘Why did I do that? This note should be longer. This should be on the downbeat. That rhythm is awkward.’ I also did some work on the orchestration, and we added a chorus in a couple of places.”
That seems like a lot of revisions, especially considering the piece won — wait for it — the Pulitzer Prize!
“Yes, but it’s important for me to feel good about it,” he said, noting that Houston Grand Opera successfully produced the new version earlier this year. “I have learned more about the voice since then. I have learned how to set text better.”
“I’m not going to go to 12 performances at the Met with my family unless I’m happy with it!”
Puts has already had one big success at the Met, The Hours, which opened in 2022 and returned in 2024. More recently, the composer has received acclaim for Emily — No Prisoner Be, an unconventional setting of Emily Dickinson poems featuring mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and the string ensemble Time for Three. (A recording was released in January.)
A native of St. Louis who recently spent a season as composer-in-residence with that city’s symphony, Puts, 54, lives in Yonkers, New York, with his wife, a violinist with the New York Philharmonic, and their 16-year-old son, an aspiring cellist.
He is spending part of his summer at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West, which is staging his chamber opera Elizabeth Cree July 24 and 26. We chatted with him outdoors amid the foliage of the school’s beautiful campus.
When did you start making music?
I started playing the piano very young by ear. My parents were both teachers and amateur musicians, so I grew up around music. We had a lot of records. I was also very taken with movie soundtracks, such as Star Wars, Superman, and E.T. So John Williams was a very early influence.
I started piano lessons at age 8, but I didn’t take to it. I didn’t practice. It was more interesting for me to improvise. By the time I was 11, my piano teacher was fed up. She saw there was some ability there, but I just wasn’t working hard.
One day I was improvising before a lesson, and she came out and asked, ‘What was that you were playing?’ I said, “I was just making that up.” She said, “OK, why don’t you write a piece for next week titled …” and she gave me an adjective. That was when I started putting things down on the page.
What other encouragement did you get early on?
A pivotal experience occurred in eighth grade, when my middle-school band director asked me to write a piece to play with the band. That was really inspiring for me. This was in a small town, Alma, Michigan, where my dad taught math at the local college. Anywhere else, I don’t think I would have stood out.
I studied composition at Eastman as an undergrad, and I had some success, won some awards. I then went to grad school at Yale, where there were so many great composers: Chris Theofanidis, Aaron Jay Kernis, Michael Torke, plus David Lang and Julia Wolfe of Bang on a Can. All of them were interesting and different. I then went back to get my doctorate at the Eastman School.
How did your music start to get widely played?
I was very lucky early on. I won a residency with Young Concert Artists. Getting to write for their musicians was a huge thing, and it also led to a number of commissions. I got a lot of work in my mid- to late 20s, but not so much in my early 30s.
Then, out of the blue, when I was 35 or 36, the Minnesota Opera asked me to write Silent Night. That happened at just the right time. I really put a lot into it. I didn’t do a lot else for a couple of years. It really paid off.
What is the process of writing an opera for you? Do you start with a more or less completed libretto before you compose any music?
Yes. Usually, the libretto is first. I don’t find that limiting. It’s like a puzzle — a problem to be solved. I like doing that.
I look at a scene and I ask, “Harmonically, what is the atmosphere of this scene?” Once I have that, the singing starts flowing on top of the harmony. I’m driven by harmony. It’s everything for me.
Harmony comes before melody for you?
Yes. It’s the underpinning of everything. Think of almost any concerto by any composer. There’s some kind of figuration, and that flows from harmony. Melody is the horizontal line that moves through those harmonies. I tell my students you have to know where you are going harmonically before you can do anything else.
The Music Academy is staging your 2017 chamber opera Elizabeth Cree, which is set in Victorian England and deals with a series of Jack-the-Ripper-style murders. Is this your Sweeney Todd?
Yeah. That’s in it for sure. It’s just twisted! [One character) sings about committing a gruesome murder, while the music is passionate — almost like a love song. David Schweizer, the original director [at Opera Philadelphia, where it premiered) said, “Don’t think of it as a horror movie. Think of these murders as loving gestures, saving them from their mediocre lives.”
It’s a cold, hard-edged opera — a relentless 90 minutes that moves at a breakneck speed. I think it’s my best piece.
How do you get inside the emotional lives of characters — twisted or otherwise — and find the music that conveys what they are feeling at any given moment?
You have to draw on your own experience. It sounds like a cliché, but that’s the only way. You have to be feeling it while you are writing it — or at least remembering something that was painful, or joyful (or whatever emotion is needed).
I have to be in the right place emotionally to do that. That doesn’t mean I wait until I’m sad to write a sad scene. It’s hard to write when you’re down. You have to be in a place where you can access those emotions, but they won’t destroy you.
Pianist Conor Hanick recently related, “When I work with composers on new pieces, I’m always paying attention to the balance between head and heart.” Do you think in those terms?
I am conscious of that. I like simple, beautiful music that I am touched by. I also like the complexity of The Rite of Spring, or the music of Messiaen or Ligeti. I’m fascinated by intricacy and complexity. I like juxtaposing complex and simple harmonies.
I played a lot of Mozart piano concertos as a student. His slow movements are not just him gushing emotions. There’s a perfect balance of structure and harmonic direction. That’s my model for my own music. I like a sense of structure. You’re listening to something that is logically constructed, with heartbreakingly beautiful melodies and harmonies in the midst of it.
What do you have coming up?
I’ve got a new bassoon concerto I wrote for Judith LeClair. The New York Philharmonic will premiere that in November. I’m writing a violin concerto for Joshua Bell, and another violin concerto for Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider.
The most exciting thing I’m doing is completing an unfinished Mozart opera. It’s called Zaide. The Mozarteum in Salzburg commissioned it. Mozart wrote two acts but left it unfinished. The theory is he got the commission for Idomeneo and just dropped it. I’m writing a third act and an overture. It premieres in Salzburg in January 2028.
Are you doing it in a Mozartian style?
That’s the question! I dream of this piece, and what I will do with it. I haven’t gotten a libretto yet. I think it will be more free harmonically (than Mozart’s writing). But the sense of Mozart will be everywhere. At times I want it to be as indistinguishable as possible, moments when people ask, “Did he write that, or did Mozart?”
