Bearing gifts, we traverse afar

Festive entertainment—music, ballet, pantomime— is easy to find at this time of year, but the Christmas opera is a rarer beast, suggests Henrietta Bredin

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YOU wouldn’t need to search for long before finding a perfect Christmas ballet: The Nutcracker is an obvious choice, with its opening scene of children decorating a Christmas tree, running about and opening presents, followed by dancing tin soldiers, mice and snowflakes and the Sugar Plum Fairy ruling over the Kingdom of Sweets. A Christmas opera is not quite so easy to find, at least not a family-friendly one. Taking an excited group of children or grandchildren to Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner could end in tears. Based on Thornton Wilder’s one-act play (in turn filched by Orson Welles for a scene in Citizen Kane), it traces the history of the Bayard family over 90 years, complete with births, deaths, alcoholism and depression.

An opera that was written specifically for children, and for television, is Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. As children in Italy, Menotti and his younger brother would try to stay awake on Christmas Eve, awaiting the arrival of the Three Kings bearing presents. They each had their favourite: Gian Carlo liked King Melchior, whereas his brother preferred King Kaspar, who he insisted was kind, eccentric and very deaf. In the fullness of time, this interpretation was to make its way into the opera.

It was first broadcast, live, on December 24, 1951, and went on to become traditional Christmas fare in America, almost as much of an institution as a festive-season viewing of Frank Capra’s