“The Great Mill-Wheel” of Time: Thornton Wilder and Paul Hindemith’s Collaboration on The Long Christmas Dinner as Opera

Abstract After describing Thornton Wilder’s interest in music from boyhood, this article summarizes the collaboration of Wilder and German composer Paul Hindemith in creating the opera adaptation of Wilder’s 1931 one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner. Wilder wrote the libretto in versified and prose English, which Hindemith set to music. For the German premiere of the opera, at Mannheim’s National Theater in December 1961, Hindemith made his own German-language translation of the libretto. The American premiere of the opera was at the Julliard School in March 1963. Hindemith had hoped Wilder would provide a companion piece for The Long Christmas Dinner, but the composer died before Wilder could complete the project. The Long Christmas Dinner opera had fewer than fifty productions in the remainder of the twentieth century, but there has been renewed interest in it in the twenty-first century. This article was originally published in Thornton Wilder: New Perspectives, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Lincoln Konkle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2013), 269–96. It is reprinted by permission of Northwestern University Press. Copyright © 2013 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2013. All rights reserved.