PUNCH & JUDY

A tragical comedy or a comical tragedy in 1act music: Harrison BIRTWISTLE text: Stephen PRUSLIN conductor: Chris MOULDS stagedirector: Derek GIMPEL set and costumes: Christoph ERNST A production of the DEUTSCHE STAATSOPER BERLIN Punch – Richard SUART Judy/ Fortune Teller – Annika SCHLICHT Choregos/ Jack Ketch – Maximilan KRUMMEN Pretty Polly/ Witch – Hannah HERFURTNER Doctor – Jonathan WINELL Lawyer – Terry COOK Staatskapelle Berlin PUNCH AND JUDY production notes (abriged) In 1967 Hendrix set fire to his guitar live on stage for the first time and he was taken to hospital with burns to his hands, homosexuality and abortion were decriminalised and sandy Shaw won the Eurovision Song Contest for great Britain with “A Puppet on a string”. It was a rebellious time but in the UK a wholesale rejection of traditional forms was fuelled rather by a veritable outpouring of creative optimism and an irrepressible desire to assimilate and express the kaleidoscopic diversity of experience human existence. The Beatles, at the height of their creative powers, made their surrealist romp of a film “The Magical Mystery Tour”. Tapping into the deeply anarchic, irreverent comic vein which runs through the best British Variete and pantomime traditions up to its present day form in television comedy series’ such as “Vic Reeves Big Night Out”, The Beatles were fully aware of the deeply human impulse to scour their every move for meaning and they playfully subverted it wherever they could. Inspired by the jump-­cutting techniques of Jean‐Luc Godard, they set about improvising a set of surreal, dreamlike sequences. … It is also confidently working class and northern. In the same year the playwright Joe Orton was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by his lover who then killed himself with an overdose in their London flat. The event inspired the Beatles to write the song “Maxwell’s silver hammer”, a jolly, upbeat little ditty which belied the gruesome deed it described in suitably surreal fashion. … The episodic nature of the traditional Punch and Judy show is already action reduced to its essentials. Both the violence and the humour are cathartic, facilitating access to a world of vivid, emotional experience. An English audience knows that in the very the first scene Punch always kills the baby in hilarious slapstick fashion. Children and adults alike enter into the spirit of the play with excited abandon, laughing and shouting back at the characters on stage. Birtwistle effectively taps into this living folklore refreshingly free of sentimentality. Virile, earthy, gritty, subversive and entertaining, it which was still alive and well, especially in the north of England. Not since Henry Purcell had an English composer drawn on crude, colloquial, bawdy local idioms as a source of inspiration. The opening musical language evoking the brisk percussive crack of Punch’s slapstick, his unmistakable swazzle sing­‐song speech and the combative laughter of the crowd … With almost encyclopaedic zeal, Pruslin and Birtwistle turned for inspiration to the origins of music drama itself addressing the cornerstones of ritual and play and set about packing into their work everything that had ever been said and was likely to be said about opera. … At the heart of the work lies a categorical rejection of traditional narrative and psychological principles. Instead, two distinct processes are at work: namely repetition, which is essentially static, and organic growth which is the antithesis of it in that it is progressive and also unique. In Birtwistle’s “Punch and Judy” these organizing principles are applied on both a micro and macro level to all the constituent elements with dazzling virtuosity. The theatrical application of the cyclic principle serves to intensify the aural processes which already dominate his musical composition. Prototypical forms such as melodrama, passion chorale, prayer, weather report, travel music,… Others events appear only once, such as Lament, Nightmare, Tarot, Black wedding, Resolve. This tension between narrative and ritual, action and reflection, lies at the heart of the work. On the face of it anarchic, it is a structural tour de force. By focusing on the murder theme Birtwistle liquidates it still further, concentrating our attention on the significant. This ritualistic repetition intensifies and enhances the event, reality is transformed and imparts to it another dimension. Punch’s acts of murder are essentially static, being repeated three times. … The assimilation of the predictable with the unpredictable within the action serves to invigorate us into a state of alert cognitive engagement. As the course of events unfold we find ourselves navigating through the semantics of multilayered … Deborah York