Harrison Birtwistle: Punch and Judy - Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Jan DeGaetani, Philip Langridge, Stephen Roberts, David Wilson-Johnson, John Tomlinson, London Sinfonietta, David Atherton - 1989

Harrison Birtwistle (*1934) ‎– Punch and Judy

Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Jan DeGaetani, Philip Langridge, Stephen Roberts, David Wilson-Johnson, John Tomlinson, London Sinfonietta, David Atherton

Etcetera KTC 2014 - 1989

...a pure fury of gesture...

CD1

01. Prologue    [04:36]

02. Homage to Judy    [07:40]
03. Resolve I    [01:09]

04. Passion Chorale I    [02:14]

05. Toccata I b    [05:20]

06. Pretty Polly's Rhapsody I    [02:24]

07. Sinfonia    [08:13]

08. War-Cry    [04:58]

09. Toccata II b    [05:31]

10. Pretty Polly's Rhapsody II    [05:58]

CD2

01. Roundel, 1st movement    [06:32]

02. Recitative and Passion Aria II    [03:36]
03. Proclamation III    [07:47]

04. Nightmare    [02:19]

05. Tarot-Game 1st draw    [05:30]

06. Quartet    [12:36]

07. Toccata III a    [03:18]

08. Melodrama IV    [03:19]

09. Death March    [03:38]
10. Triumph    [06:47]

Pretty Polly / Witch: Phyllis Bryn-Julson
Judy / Fortune Teller: Jan DeGaetani
Lawyer: Philip Langridge
Punch: Stephen Roberts
Choregos / Jack Ketch: David Wilson-Johnson
Doctor: John Tomlinson
The London Sinfonietta
David Atherton 

 

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   [Peter Maxwell] Davies’s dependence on Schoenberg is parallelled by the relation to Stravinsky in the work of his colleague Birtwistle — to the clear-cut forms of such works as the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Agon, and to the rustic theatre of Renard and Histoire du soldat. (The composers continued their association after Manchester: the Pierrot Players were founded under their joint direction.) Birtwistle’s first major theatre work was the chamber opera Punch and Judy (1966), which is based on the old puppet shows, and which presents a gallery of characters who are part clown, part monster, all of them still puppetlike in their abrupt and grotesque behaviour, their appalling passions and their murderous savagery. Parody was part of Birtwistle’s arsenal too, but more important was a pure fury of gesture: for example, the high woodwind chords of screeching alarm that entered his music in Tragoedia for ensemble (1965).

   Punch and Judy is, like Stravinsky’s Renard, closed and cyclic: a rite of death and resurrection, night and day, winter and summer. Its highly symmetrical structure includes, for example, four ‘Melodrama’ sections in which Punch traps his victims in wordplay, each followed by a ‘Murder Ensemble’ which is the celebration of a ritual execution; and these larger sections are filled with tiny, compact forms, often strung together in patterns of verse and refrain. Though the work is nominally an opera, it relates to the music-theater tradition not only in its links with Renard but also in its reduced scale and its dramatic style. The action is to be presented as if from a puppet booth, in which the characters go through their motions and in which also a wind quintet is seated, the pit orchestra consisting of just ten further players. As for dramatic style, the cyclic ceremonial necessarily discards narrative continuity, and the characters are sharp-featured, bright-coloured figures in formal patterns of ferocious hate and consuming lust.

Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After (2010)

pp. 197-198

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   In Punch and Judy, Birtwistle and his librettist Stephen Pruslin, adapted a piece of modern folk theatre within the conventions of Greek tragedy to achieve 'ancient Greek tragedy in the guise of popular puppetry', as Gabriel Josopovici expressed it. This treatment of the subject was paralleled by Birtwistle's approach to the music as though it were the archetype for the entire genre of number opera itself, an opera about opera: 'The characters are stock characters raised to a principle. The set-pieces ('quartet', 'love-duet', etc.) are likewise formulas that recur with different meanings in many operas. Our aim was the collective generalisation of known operas into a 'source-opera' which, though written after them, would give the illusion of having been written before them'. A range of operatic allusions give credence to this notion of a 'source-opera', in addition to the presence of many non-operatic stylistic nudges and winks, and their frequently grotesque presentation makes them in turn seem the musical equivalent of a Punch and Judy knock about.

   Stravinsky's Oedipus rex had provided a notable precedent of an opera about opera, and there have been other, more contemporary, examples by Berio (Opera) and, famously, Ligeti's Le grand macabre which begins with its allusion (played on car hooters) to the 'Toccata' from Monteverdi's Orfeo to mark the 'beginning' of opera. But the music-theatrical extremes of Punch and Judy effect a masking of the operatic references in any strongly relatable sense, so reducing them to the formal shells of convention. By this, the idea of a 'source opera', as something that forms part of music's collective unconscious from which composers have drawn intuitively, becomes a musical conceit that is analogous to the idea of myth itself. And certainly, there is a neatness in the idea of a mythic opera giving substance to an opera about myth. In the event, Punch and Judy is concerned with the presentation and re-enactment of a cyclic ritual, and not the representational trajectory of an operatic narrative.

   The generation and varied repetition of large, structural-level cycles out of a smaller series of events is quintessential Birtwistle. His own description of this process was succinctly captured in the programme book to his later opera, The mask of Orpheus: 'Essentially, I am concerned with repetition... I move in concentric circles... [which] rotate at various speeds. Some move through bigger orbits than others and take longer to return'. In Punch and Judy there are four cycles whose last three feature some expansion or modification of the basic schema laid out in the first. As might be expected, such modification is inextricably bound up with the nature of the events contained within each cycle and their dramatic significance for the whole. The complete process illustrates the operation of a central Birtwistle dictum: 'The way the theatre speaks has to match the way the music speaks'. The priority that this gives to his established compositional processes is reinforced by his comment: 'I don't create linear music... to find a narrative to match this way of proceeding, I had to turn to myth, for only in myths do you find narratives which are not linear'.

   At the first performance of Punch and Judy at Aldeburgh in 1968, Britten walked out, reputedly much distressed by the manner of the work's musical and dramatic violence. The absorbtion of violence equally thoroughly into each dimension of the work underlines the music-theatre nature of Punch and Judy. And the work's indebtedness to the modernist aesthetic within the contemporary theatre is striking. For the problem which faced Birtwistle and Pruslin was the need to create a stylised form of presentation which suggested a world and an experience to which the audience could relate, while at the same time being distanced from it. The solution came from Antonin Artaud's formulation of a theatre of cruelty whose forms of representation (including masks and ritual costumes) were intended to: 'make the theatre a believable reality inflicting this kind of tangible laceration, contained in all true feeling, on the heart and senses'. This passage helps to suggest something of Artaud's influence on the action of Punch and Judy:

                                       Violent concentrated action is like lyricism; it calls forth supernatural
                                       imagery, a bloodshed of images, a bloody spurt of images inside the
                                       poet's head as well as in the audience's... Therefore I propose a
                                       theatre where violent physical images pulverise, mesmerise the audience's
                                       sensibilities, caught in the drama as if in a vortex of higher forces.

[A. Artaud, Le Theatre et son double (Paris, 1938), trans. Corti (London, 1970), pp.62-63]

   What Birtwistle realised by his choice of Punch and Judy (with all their associated symbolic baggage) was the possibility of achieving sympathy for Punch based on a dynamic of alienation and reconciliation. And this opportunity offered a way out of the traditional predicament which faces the composer who uses mythological subjects, namely that of making mythic characters seem genuinely tragic in their lack of free will. Here, Artaud's poetic plays a fundamental role in the success of the tricky dramatic operation of Punch and Judy. Its scheme is that of explosion, sustained tension and release; the opposite to the more usual strategy of tragic drama in which the gradual accumulation of tension explodes in a climax. The progress of Punch and Judy is essentially simple: Punch starts with his most heinous crime - the murder of his baby, an obvious figure of innocence - and continues with other murders. But each crime is followed by a journey in quest of an ideal (personified by Pretty Poll[y]) intimating a need for salvation, that ultimately makes credible Punch's rehabilitation within society, the act on which the opera purportedly ends. In fact, the ending seems provisional, Punch's rehabilitation merely temporary before (as in Pelléas and Wozzeck) a new cycle is likely to begin.

   On a smaller scale than either The mask of Orpheus and Gawain, Punch and Judy demonstrates the ability of Birtwistle to respond to a mythical subject in a way that, by profoundly disturbing us, conveys a contemporary significance. The instrumental work Tragoedia had been an important source work for Punch and Judy, and Birtwistle has described it as bridging the gap between absolute and theatre music. The work's structure, and the progress of its formal symmetries, are indicated in terms of ancient Greek tragedy. But after Punch and Judy Birtwistle began to focus on the Orpheus legend, culminating in the immense, three-act 'lyric tragedy', The mask of Orpheus, composed in two periods between 1973-75 and 1981-84. [...]

David Wright, "Clicks, Clocks & Claques"
The Musical Times, Vol. 135, No. 1817 (Jul., 1994), pp. 429-430

 

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