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Peter Rothstein
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Transcription of the interview:
Erick Lichte and Peter Rothstein - 11.07

E: Hello, and welcome to the latest installment of the Cantus Podcast. My name is Erick Lichte. I’m the artistic director of Cantus. Sitting across from me is Theater Latté Da impresario and director, Peter Rothstein. Hello, Peter.

P: Hey, Erick.

E: How are you today?

P: Good. Good. Good.

E: Good. I would love to chat with you so much about your life and your work and all of those sorts of things and let people know about all of that, but we have a limited amount of time and I really want to talk more about what All Is Calm is. You were the impetus for this idea. Tell us about how you came up with this idea and how Cantus got involved.

P: I first heard about the Christmas Truce through John McCutcheon – do you know him? - great folk singer. So, I’d known about it for a number of years. And then, probably about four or five years ago, a book was published called Silent Night about the Christmas Truce.

E: Stanley Weintraub, right?

P: Exactly. It was the second book published about the Truce. The Imperial War Museum in London also published a book a number of years ago. So, I began to do more research. I knew I wanted to do something theatrical with that story, just because it’s a remarkable story. I just wasn’t sure what form that would take. I knew it needed music, and that music was the primary instigation device of the Truce I guess. And it was the common language among these men who spoke several languages. So, music was going to be key, but I didn’t know what form it would take. I knew it was theatrical. I knew it was a powerful story.

E: Sure. So, you have this story where it’s definitely all guys. There is that sort of thing. How did you figure out to get Cantus involved with this. Was that a natural choice? I don’t know…

P: I’m still not sure there couldn’t be some piece of traditional music theater where the story would work, but the story in some ways is about the lack of conflict. It’s about putting down their arms, and that tends to make not a great piece of theater where conflict is inherent. It was incredibly dramatic, so I knew it couldn’t take on a sort of traditional theatrical storytelling structure. I was actually at your concert, your Christmas concert with SPCO (Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra). Halfway through the concert I thought, Aha! This is it. Cantus is the answer.

E: You’re not the only one that’s thought that.

P: Just because – obviously the musicianship is extraordinary, but because the story is all men, and the program was incredibly diverse. There was clearly a new way to look at a concert format, which is one of the reasons I have so much respect for Cantus. You’re constantly trying to break out and kind of challenge that form of a concert form. I thought this might be the answer.

E: So, we got together and we talked about this – what is it – maybe two years ago or something like that?

P: Yeah.

E: It just seemed like a natural fit for us. We really jumped at the chance. Tell us a little bit about your process in writing this. You really wrote this piece, but you also didn’t write this piece in some respects. Tell us a little bit about how this came to be, and what it actually turned out to be in the end as far as the writing and the theatrical element of the show…

P: Right. And, I wasn’t sure what form that would take. We’ve done two workshops of the piece now, which is incredibly helpful. Both of those we’ve put in front of an audience which I often feel as a director, that you just don’t hear a piece until you hear it in it’s communal environment. So, the workshop process has been really helpful.

Yeah, there’s part of me that cringes every time I see that it’s by Peter Rothstein, because I have about twenty words in this thing. I went to Belgium and to England this past summer. So, I’d done a lot of the ground research in general, but I knew that I wanted to go to Ypres, Belgium, which has a museum called the In Flanders Field Museum which is a new way to look at curating a museum around war. I visited three major war museums: the Royal War Museum in Brussels and the Imperial War Museum in London, which are much more traditional museums. For me at some level there’s a glorification of war in those museums. It’s about the weaponry, it’s about the battle plans, it’s about miniature battlefields and there’s at some level the romanticization of war. The museum in Ypres tries to take a more humanistic look at war. So, I wanted to go to this new museum. Also, that museum holds the largest set of archives around the Christmas Truce.

E: Sure.

P: So, I spent about a week in Ypres, Belgium, which is the closest city to the western front. That city was destroyed several times during WWI, and it’s been beautifully restored. The war is still very much alive there. There are daily tours of the battlefields; there’s the war museum; there’s a document center. So, I was able to spend a week there touring the battlefields and really delving into the documentation center. So, that research led to what became the text for this piece. So, I’ve been able to tell the story using about 95% found text. In some ways it would have been easier to just write the story than to try to find a way to tell it with all these different voices.

E: Right. You can control the dramatic arc and all of those sorts of things.

P: Exactly, and to do it efficiently. It’s an hour-long piece, and there’s I think over fifty pieces of text in the piece, over twenty-five songs, so it needs to be economical. But, I thought there was power in hearing the voices who were there tell the story.

E: Sure.

P: So, right now the found text is everything from war diaries, personal journals, letters home, postcards – we actually found an old radio broadcast that’s part of the piece - I transcribed pieces of text off gravestones, there’s WWI poets. The WWI poets are such an amazing collection of writers. As well as historical leaders like Winston Churchill, Pope Benedict XV. So there’s a wide range of voices and the show now is told again probably 95% through that found text.

E: This was, you’ve stressed this the whole way through the process of creating the piece in that this is an event, especially in the mythology around Silent Night and singing that around the trenches that tends to be more mythological and romanticized than it has been real. I think one of the strengths of this show – what you’re saying – is that almost all of these texts are real living human being that went through this. It takes a little bit of that mystery out in the process, yeah?

P: Yeah, and I think there’s also something fascinating about how we know and what we don’t know about this Christmas Truce. I was in a conversation yesterday with someone who’d kind of maybe heard something about it, but for such an extraordinary event it’s amazing that most people don’t really know about it. The answer I think is that there was an enormous propoganda machine with WWI. News coming home about fraternization with the enemy took the war off course. So, the powers that be really tried to prevent any news of the Christmas Truce happening and, the second year of the war, from both sides, threatened execution with there being any attempt at fraternization. So, soldiers themselves tended to not brag much about their extraordinary night of peace.

Two old British guys who take folks on tours of the battlefield. Everyone had contradictory stories. Some would say, I don’t know if they really played football…of course they played football. But if they played football, they would have played it at this field. They’ve done that kind of amazing research – this is the only way that soccer could have happened would have been at this location. There are in some ways contradictory stories about the truce, or what they thought were contradictory stories. From more research what they found was actually there were about 300,000 men that took place in this truce.

E: All along a huge stretch of the line.

P: They can now begin to identify big separate truces along the front all the first year of the war. So they aren’t so much contradictory stories as different experiences along the front.

E: So, how are we taking this enormous battlefield 80 miles long all of these different truces and putting it together with nine singers and three actors? What does this look like on stage? What is this piece?

P: It is epic, and it is incredibly personal. All of the stories are told from one human being, one point of view. To me, that’s the power of live performance is that we take epic ideas and try to make it as intimate as possible. So, the piece is both epic and intimate, I think. It’s an audio experience versus a visual experience.

E: Absolutely.

P: I think that was part of the power of choosing to partner with Cantus. We’ve been using the title A Radio Music Drama partly because we are building it knowing that it’s going to be broadcast live on radio, but that there’s enormous power to people’s imagination. That’s why I love working in the theater actually is that in film everything tends to be there for you. The image is there, the sound is there, it’s a contained picture. To me the most successful theatrical event is that asks the audience to come half way. That you instigate the imagination and the audience completes that picture. So, we’ve created an extraordinary audio world. The sound is extraordinary. We’re using music in new and interesting ways, which is part of our mission with Latté Da and part of your mission. There are three actors, but there are about twenty different dialects. Everything from Irish to Scottish to class structures…

E: - Cockney -

P: …French, German. Music, we’re all over the map. We have this medieval Scottish ballad; we have Christmas songs from France, Germany, England, Wales.

E: We really like the funny trench songs – particularly a favorite among the guys.

P: So there’s a huge range of music, so the audio world is really sophisticated. Then what we’re asking the audience to do is bring the visual world. Partly because, again, we want a fairly intimate live performance situation, it’s impossible to recreate the Western Front. It’s impossible. And there’s more power in people imagining that. In one of the workshops, we had one of the audience members put her head back and kind of lied down upon a set of chairs and closed her eyes. She just was transported and wanted to see it. That’s what we’re asking the audience to do, to fill in that visual information by giving them an audio world that’s really quite extraordinary.

E: It’s also so interesting to me that in that audio world for our mission which has been about male singing and all of that stuff we have three male actors…this whole world we have no instruments aside from, well, one little surprise at the end. We’ve created this whole world through the voice. That is the instrument. And it’s all the male voice. What’s interesting to me, and I’ve listened to the recordings we’ve made and experienced it, it’s amazing the variety that you can have in the voice. It really shows the power of expression that it can have across the board from being incredibly violent in some respects to the most tender thing that you’ve ever had. The show kind of does that in one hour.

P: Yes, absolutely. There’s power in no instrumentation.

E: Yeah.

P: There’s power in that it’s not there in many ways. There’s no sound of gunfire. There’s no screams. There’s no kind of things we’ve come to associate with war films. Yet, there’s violence on stage. We’ve created that through text and through music and new ways to look at that. So, I think it’s quite unique in that way, again, that it’s trying to embrace the humanity of this remarkable experience.

E: Why is this an important story to tell now? Why are we going back and talking about something that happened in WWI? Why is that an important thing to tell people at Christmastime or even not at Christmastime? Why is the show important?

P: We’re living in such a divisive culture right now, and we tend to look at everything as what side of the fence you’re on. We need to stay in Iraq – we need to get out of Iraq. I’m left – I’m right. We live in this incredibly divisive culture. The beauty of this story is that it’s not about that discourse. The heroes of this story are the soldiers. The lowest ranks of the army are who instigated the truce. So, the heroes aren’t necessarily the people at home trying to put an end to the war, nor are they the leaders of the armies. The heroes of this story are the lowest common denominator of the ranks. They perform this amazing, heroic act of peace. So, to me it’s an amazing tribute to people in the armed forces who are acting out of an attempt at peace. It’s not a black and white; it’s not a left or right, in/out. It glorifies the heroes who are determined to have a moment of peace.

E: And that happens around Christmas, and I think that’s something that everyone remembers. You sit there and you watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Charlie Brown says, “What’s Christmas about?” and Linus tells the story of the angel saying peace on earth goodwill toward men. In some ways to me, this piece really reflects that message that I think we always need to hear. I think you’ve done a remarkable job with it. Thank you so much for talking with us today, Peter.

P: Thanks, Erick.