The long Christmas Dinner – Das lange Weihnachtsmahl

CONTENT
In a fast-forward sequence, ninety Christmas dinners at the home of the American merchant family Bayard between the years 1840 and 1930 are condensed and presented in a single continuous Christmas meal which provides the background to the progression of kaleidoscopic plot sequences and emotional states involving various members of the family. The plot location remains unchanged during this entire period of time and the time sequences blend almost imperceptibly into one another. 
The newly born of the family are brought in through the ‘door of life’ and those dying exit through the ‘door of death’. A series of stereotype behavioural patterns and conversations revolving around the same topics run like threads through the entire plot and provide a background for the rare dramatically motivated reactions of individual family members which begin to erupt towards the end of the opera.
The son Roderick II rebels against the emptiness and boredom of life in a small town and the merchant trade and leaves the family and his home in disgust and also under the reprimands of his father. His aunt Genevieve pledges as a child to remain her whole life with her mother ‘just as on an infinitely pleasurable Christmas Day’. After the death of her mother, she searches in desperation for the purpose of her own life. In frustration, she also leaves home at an advanced age to die in a strange place. The house which has remained in family possession for so long is ultimately passed on to a distant relative, as the last living member of the Bayard family has abandoned the ancestral home.

COMMENTARY
The libretto of the opera is based on a theatre play by Thornton Wilder which was first performed in 1932. Hindemith who was on permanent search for new opera plots probably only made acquaintance with the play during the 1950s and was apparently particularly taken with the temporal problem presented in the drama. He commented in an interview: ‘I found this play in an S. Fischer edition “Einakter und Dreiminutenspiele” [Oneact plays and three-minute dramas] by Thornton Wilder and was already greatly taken by it on the first reading. Wilder’s play in its original form was however unsuitable for a musical composition due to the time-related allusions and the realistically meticulous dialogue, so I wrote to Wilder asking him whether he would perhaps be able to produce a revised version of the work which would be suitable for an opera libretto.’ In a close cooperation between the author and the composer, individual passages were cut from the drama which lent it a more compact and strict form. The methods utilised to compress the plot were the elimination of time- and place-related characteristics and the stylisation of individual figures who were barely authentic. Hindemith divided the work into nine musical sections which were distinguished through their thematic treatment and differentiated motion models. 
The first two scenes are mainly characterised by a parlando style with a kind of secco accompaniment. Hindemith’s orchestration is generally highly economical, thereby giving the work a chamber music style. 
The occasional reiteration of themes function as ‘reminiscence motifs’ at points in which past times are recalled. At the end of the fifth scene for example at Charles‘ words: ‘I was trying to remember this morning’, the orchestra recaps the theme in the Arioso of Mother Bayard in the first scene: ‘I was remembering this morning’. The beginning and end of the opera are framed by the English Christmas carol ‘God rest you merry, Gentlemen’: in the introduction with pastoral rhythms ornamenting the theme and at the conclusion by the orchestra in alternation with the singing voice. (H.-J. W.)