Conference Agenda

Errollyn Wallen, the Belize-born British composer and Master of the King’s Music, is developing a community opera, A Christmas Miracle (2026). This paper uses the project to rethink “Christmas opera” as more than a seasonal theme. I argue that Christmas operates as a ritual calendar-frame that shapes dramaturgy, creates recurring public occasions for opera, and makes intergenerational participation practicable across church, school, theatre, and broadcast settings. Wallen’s project makes this tangible: in workshops, her team has used handbells from Benjamin Britten’s original Noye’s Fludde, and the work is designed to travel, opening at Snape Maltings under conductor John Andrews and director Freddie Wake-Walker before going on to Orkney, where Wallen lives.

The paper reads Wallen’s opera in counterpoint to Britten’s unfinished children’s Nativity work, known from libretto drafts as “A Christmas Sequence” and preserved in musical fragments labelled “Xmas Piece” in his short-score Phaedra notebook. Conceived for Pimlico School in the early 1970s and imagined as a Christmastime Noye’s Fludde, Britten’s plan returned to medieval drama as a living performance resource: like the Fludde, it drew on the Chester Mystery Plays, distributing sacred narrative through processional scenes and communal carols. In the Britten–Pears Archive, a Gresham’s School “English Note-Book” preserves cast and scene planning (GB-ALb 2-1000784), including a structure organized by multiple “nights,” punctuated by carols and discrete scenes (Annunciation, Magnificat, Joseph and Angel, Journey, Midwives). This evidence challenges the assumption that Britten’s “children’s operas”—so vital to his output—are necessarily compact, single-evening works: here, “Christmas” becomes not only subject matter but performance design rooted in ritual sequence.

I then place Britten and Wallen alongside two post-war case studies that clarify Christmas opera’s public channels across the Commonwealth: Australian composer John Antill’s The First Christmas (ABC broadcast, Christmas Day 1969), which makes the season itself a distribution mechanism, and Scottish composer Thea Musgrave’s A Christmas Carol (1979), which translates the moral reckoning of the Christmas story into modern operatic dramaturgy. Methodologically, the paper combines archival documents, contemporary commissioning evidence, and interviews with Wallen to show how A Christmas Miracle revises and tests the seasonal framework Britten sketched but could not complete.

Leonard Bernstein, an avowed tonalist, frequently characterized atonality as a “crisis” in twentieth-century music due to its tendency to alienate public concert audiences. Bernstein nonetheless incorporated atonal elements alongside tonal ones into his own works in a wide variety of genres throughout his career. Just as tension and resolution are conveyed in tonal language through the juxtaposition of dissonance and consonance, Bernstein employed atonality as an expressive foil to tonality in communicating textual or programmatic narratives through his music. Although this is frequently acknowledged in existing scholarship, less widely recognized is the association in Bernstein’s songs between atonality and childhood, which seems to have held both narratological and strategic implications for Bernstein.

This talk provides close analyses of three Bernstein songs with troubled child protagonists. “I Hate Music!” (from the cycle of that title) expresses a child’s petulant distaste for classical music and its culture while conveying her own unabashed unmusicality through the atonal melodies she enthusiastically sings instead. In “Little Smary” from Arias & Barcarolles, Bernstein used atonality to express a girl’s traumatized response to the loss of her favorite toy. And in “The Pennycandystore Beyond the El” from Songfest, a young boy experiences the earliest glimmers of sexual awakening, a disorienting experience conveyed musically through tonal disorientation. In addition to conveying the darker elements of each child’s experience, atonality evokes aspects of childhood more generally, such as rebelliousness, impetuousness, and a tendency to wander freely and daydream.

Bernstein’s employment of atonal elements served not only narrative but strategic purposes. Gravely concerned about the future of music and its institutions, Bernstein recognized the necessity of attempting to engage public audiences with contemporary music. In these songs, he infused atonal, sometimes serial, procedures with narrative and musical elements that would be relatable to the public: childhood, tonality, jazz. For Bernstein, the tension between tonality and atonality represented something deeper: a tension between accessibility and elitism. His engagement with atonality here speaks to his mission to bridge gaps: not only between tonality and atonality, but between the vernacular and highbrow—ultimately, between people.

The 1953 children’s musical film The 5,000 Finger of Dr. T, with story, lyrics, and concept by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel, his only live-action film), is a complex nexus of art, politics, and cultural commentary, as well as a largely forgotten full-fledged Golden Age integrated musical. The score is by German composer Friedrich Hollaender, who fled to the USA in 1933 to escape the Nazis, and who is today best remembered for his work with Marlene Dietrich. In addition to ballets and incidental music, the original work contained fifteen original songs—including two solfege songs predating The Sound of Music’s famous “Do-Re-Mi”—that explore such topics as capitalism, noninterventionism/protectionism, drag(!), childhood, and the work’s own metatheatrical dream device (à la The Wizard of Oz). Eugene Loring (Billy the Kid) choreographed the central ballet sequence, and Hollaender received an Oscar nomination for his music.

This study seeks to revive and re-examine the film as a work of political propaganda and cultural commentary in the guise of a forgotten Golden Age musical with a Seussian twist. Music itself, and music pedagogy, are both implicated in an overarching ideological conflict between the very order of society, exemplified by the mid-century American heteronormative nuclear family, and the dangers—social, political, and musical—of the absent father.

Unlike other Cold-war-era musicals in which music serves in resisting fascism (Sound of Music, Cabaret), Dr. T uses music and music pedagogy as vehicles of a zany boarding-school authoritarianism ultimately defeated by sonic chaos and the “atomic” annihilation of sound itself. An outlandish 5,000-finger keyboard serves as the site of many of the “cross-cutting ambivalences and tensions” Gary C. Thomas associates with the post-war piano on film: fascism vs. freedom, masculine vs. feminine, control vs. chaos—to which is added the especially Seussian tensions between children and adults, and between bullies and the bullied.