Thornton Wilder’s Libretto for Paul Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner Opera

Abstract Over the course of three months in 1960, Thornton Wilder collaborated with German composer Paul Hindemith to create an opera version of Wilder’s 1931 one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner. In Wilder’s libretto, which Hindemith translated into German, as in his stage play, there is a single set: the dining room of the Bayard family. The table is laid out for the family’s Christmas meal with an upstage door for entrances and exits from the room into other parts of the house. Contrasting with this realistic setting are two symbolic doors: the birth door at stage right through which the family’s newborn children in a carriage are wheeled in by a nurse, and the death door at stage left through which family members exit when they die. The action of the libretto spans ninety years (from approximately 1840 to 1930) or three generations of the Bayard family. The same eleven characters from the play have been retained as singers; the only characters missing from the play are invisible maids or cooks whom family members addressed during the dinners. As a libretto, family members sing dialogue or refrains together or in smaller groups. The deaths of the elderly are balanced by the birth of children. Not only does time pass quickly, but it also shows the growth of the Bayard family in number, wealth, and community importance, and then the departure of family members through death or unhappiness until only one remains onstage, Cousin Ermengarde, heading for the death door as she reads a letter about the birth of a new generation of Bayards.