Breath, Gravity, Giants, and Death: Puppet-Musical Encounters from Die Zauberflöte to Today

Abstract

Puppets are silent. But they are never apart from sound. In fact, they are immersed in it, entwined with it, inextricable from it. Prevailing definitions of the puppet allow its sounds to go unheard, rendering puppetry a vehicle of primarily visual expression. In this dissertation, by contrast, I redefine puppets musically. For not only does puppet performance generate considerable accidental sound, but intentional sound—voice, sound effects, and music—is crucial to the perception of the puppet as such. While music is the primordial sound that brings the puppet to life, moreover, sensibilities of music-making structure the phenomenology of puppetry. This dissertation argues that puppets are made legible through intentional sound, and that by careful analysis of their entwinement with music—a process that necessarily encompasses both archival and ethnographic methodologies—something we might call the puppet’s “inherent musicality” is revealed. Focusing especially on the puppetry of German-speaking lands, I propose Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791) as an originary work in a shared history of puppetry and music. Accordingly, the first half of this dissertation examines the ways in which Die Zauberflöte conjures the specter of the puppet in three different settings: in musicological and philosophical discourse (Chapter One), in opera houses (Chapter Two), and in puppet theaters (Chapter Three). Together these chapters not only present the various ways in which puppets proliferate in and around Mozart’s last opera, but also lay the critical groundwork for analysing puppet-musical encounters. I introduce the concept of “the performance network” as both a model and methodology for taking account of the various performers, performing objects, performance histories and practices, and performance styles involved in puppet performance—including, most importantly, the puppets themselves and any musical provision. Negotiating the network produces characteristic aesthetics, which imbue a puppet with its own specific sensibility and a performance with a particular effect: a sense of performative freedom and aesthetic possibility that I describe using the phrase “the poetics of synchronization.” The second half of the dissertation consists of two case studies. In Chapter Four, the performance network(s) of Marionettentheater, or marionette opera, are analyzed through the lenses of puppetry’s most significant musical parameters: voice, movement, scale (i.e. miniaturization and gigantification), and silence. Chapter Five scrutinizes a single dyad within the broader performance network of the puppetry of the German polymath Richard Teschner (1879–1948): namely the relationship between his unique rod-and-string puppets, on the one hand, and the primary source of music for his plays, the Polyphon, a commercially manufactured quasi-gramophone, on the other. These performing objects embody various material and aesthetic oppositions, and as a pair, they make manifest the mutually constitutive nature of puppetry and music. In the Epilogue, I reflect on an artistic medium that reverberates throughout this dissertation: cinema. Puppets have long been an essential component of the cinematic toolkit, not least because through the mediating camera lens they can perform feats far beyond the capabilities of human actors. In the stop-motion silhouette animations of Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981), puppets are not only the actors, but the scenery too, navigating a one-of-a-kind performance network that makes concrete in compelling ways the phenomenon of audio-visual synchronization. Music, in my analysis, emerges as the answer to the question that has long dominated the scholarly literature: what makes a puppet? And my dissertation addresses a related question: why that matters. By revealing the “inherent musicality” of the puppet, I read puppetry back onto music and consider the puppet as an analytic lens for musical performance, musical technologies, and music history. Ultimately, by attending to the sonic capacities, expressions, and affordances of puppetry, I engage the age-old questions of music’s ineffability and its capacity to represent.