The Silent Night: A Musical Performance Inspired by the 1914 Christmas Truce

This entry is based on a conversation with Tony Hall on 29 Ocober 2013.

One of the First World War events that continue to generate visual, theatrical and musical responses is the spontaneous and ‘bottom up’ ceasefire in the British and German trenches of Flanders in December 1914. One such response is The Silent Night by ABH Hall, a 50-minute musical performance piece which combines new songs with narration based on historical accounts, letters and poetry. It will be performed for the first time by singers Julie Lloyd and Tony Hall, narrator Les Staves and musicians Steve Jones, Dave Bowie Jnr. and Charlie Burman in Leeds on 8 November 2013, in association with Headingley Literary Festival.

Although the production appears to be connected to the WWI Centenary, songwriter Hall had initially looked more generally for a ‘good story’ as the basis for a musical. Inspired by Carol Ann Duffy’s poem The Christmas Truce (2011), he spent nearly two years engaging with the factual and mythical sides of the Christmas Truce. While Hall’s interest in history and the First World War had been long-standing, the research nevertheless revealed more detail about the conditions of trench warfare and, most importantly, about the risk that soldiers had taken to expose themselves to enemy fire. He states: ‘Just the simple act of living in a trench would kill us … . But this thing itself is so remarkable because in the midst of that, if you stood up in a trench – one split second – you were dead.’ In our conversation, Hall criticised readings of the Truce which reduce it to sheer myth or to a casual encounter focused on a football match. The latter, Hall points out, does not acknowledge the physical realities of the trench- and shellscapes the men inhabited. Indeed, the ceasefire foremost enabled care for the dead and more comfort as well as affording a psychologically important moment of reconstructing a sense of common humanity.

Originally conceived as a musical with scenes and actors, The Silent Night eventually transformed into a more restrained performance with a single narrator. The piece constructs a dialogue between front and home front, but, as Hall states, it was ‘remarkably difficult’ to find letters written by people at home as they did not survive as well as those written by combatants, unless their addressee had died or was missing so that they were returned to the sender. What he did find was a lot of poetry written by women at home, a creative response to wartime ‘which you never hear of’. The music and songs are purposely written in a contemporary style. While they imagine relationships, love and longing in a historical setting, Hall stresses that ‘We are now looking back at them’ and that he intended to move the songs ‘out of from just the First World War because … that’s every war; there are people somewhere and people somewhere else’.

The performers usually play together in the band ifive and have a variety of backgrounds and experiences, ranging from engineering and set design to drama therapy, performance art and music. Hall used to work as a professional musician and is now Residences Development Manager at the University of Leeds. It is the band’s first theme-based production, and Hall relates that the subject matter has called for adjustments in performance style, outfit and an emphasis on words and lyrics rather than the stage show. The ‘gravity’ of the topic has also had an impact on musical composition, which Hall describes as an intuitive rather than planned effect of the engagement. Although the premiere will take place in a club bar, the band expects different audience responses than during their normal gigs. They also anticipate that certain expectations will not be met, for example that there will be a musical connection with the well known songs from the First World War, popularised, among others, by the musical and film Oh! What a Lovely War in the 1960s on the occasion of the War’s 50th anniversary.

After some debate, the band decided not to include any direct references to other wars, but musically the performance is more open and invites a broader view of the history of war. For Hall, an emotional experience lies at the heart of the project as well as a sense of doing something that is worth doing, since the performers do not operate in a professional context or are motivated by economic interests. Hall stresses the lack of surviving eyewitnesses and thus a (perceived) need for transgenerational memory construction. In our conversation, it became once again clear that war memory is not neutral; not only does it serve as a frame of reference for more recent wars, but official commemoration events, for instance those involving military ritual, ought to be, according to Hall, complemented with stories which show that the ‘First World War was not a glorious thing’.

For Hall, the main objectives of The Silent Night are to relate that the Christmas Truce was not an invention and more than a game of football and to draw attention to the courage it took to make it happen. His reading that it was a ‘small but poignant and important lesson’ is widely shared, but invites critical reflection. The ceasefires were not repeated, nor did they impact on the course of the war. Their symbolic value, however, has endured if not become central to the Great War narrative and imagination, even in historiography, despite the fact that the event has been described as anomalous and insignificant. Assumptions about human intervention and agency in scenarios of ‘nations at war’ are core to this – potentially presentist – approach. A further area of interest is the role of music in the memory of the First World War. Christmas carols and the ‘global’, German-language Christmas song Stille Nacht feature dominantly in stories about the Truce, and the latter serves as a short hand for the silencing of gunfire and the spirit of peace and goodwill. It is also chosen as the title for the musical performance introduced here, whose compositions are part of a wider Anglophone tradition of remembering World War One through songs, old and new.

If you are involved in a project on or have an interest in the musical memory of WWI, please contact c.sternberg@leeds.ac.uk

Performances of The Silent Night:
8 November 2013, New Headingley Club, 56 St Michael’s Rd, Leeds, LS6 3BG, 20:30 (GBP 5.00, buy at the door)
14 December 2013, St Mary’s Church, Bolton on Swale (near Richmond, North Yorkshire)
15 December 2013, Cow’s Hill (Upper Weardale, North Pennines)

For more information about The Silent Night contact: a.b.hall@adm.leeds.ac.uk