- Tragical comedy or comical tragedy in 1 act
- Composer: Sir Harrison Birtwistle
- Libretto: Stephen Pruslin
- First performed: Aldeburgh Festival, UK, 8th June 1968
Characters
| PRETTY POLLY / WITCH | Soprano | |
| JUDY / FORTUNE TELLER | Mezzo | |
| LAWYER | Tenor | |
| PUNCH | Baritone | |
| CHOREGOS / JACK KETCH | Baritone | |
| DOCTOR | Bass |
SUTEKH: Evil? Your evil is my good. I am Sutekh the Destroyer. Where I tread I leave nothing but dust and darkness. I find that good.
DOCTOR: Then I curse you, Sutekh, in the name of all nature. You are a twisted abhorrence.Doctor Who: Pyramids of Mars
When Birtwistle died in 2022, obituaries praised him as “a very singular figure, one of the greatest in the history of British music” (Andrew Clements, The Guardian)1 and as “the most prominent British composer since Benjamin Britten” (David Allen, New York Times)2. His “uncompromising modernism” was described as difficult (a polite euphemism): Alex Ross3 said his “grim, raw, amorphous soundscapes make few concessions to narrow ears… He is a master of grinding, groaning sonorities, submerged pulses, spasms of frenzied gesturing, extra dimensions of electric tone.”
But Birtwistle was reviled as much as he was praised. Other composers called his music “sonic sewage”, and thousands of people complained when a Birtwistle composition — Panic (1995) — was performed at the Proms (Birtwistle said he was “having fun”).
His operas include The Mask of Orpheus (1986), Gawain (1991), and The Minotaur (2008). It will be a cold day in hell before this blog reviews any of them.
Because, speaking of things from hell: this nightmare puppet show.
Punch and Judy could well be the most frightening and disturbing opera I have ever encountered. Mediaeval musicians shunned the tritone, the diabolus in musica, whose dissonance was believed to summon the devil; Punch and Judy is all devil and no music. Birtwistle’s score is, ironically, not very whistleable; if you tried to do so backstage, a weight would instantly fall on your head. The score stabs, shrieks, and pierces; Mr Punch snickers and cackles; and the chorus sound like Sixties Cybermen.
But it’s not just that it’s ugly to listen to; so are many late 20th-century operas. It is utterly amoral, violently sadistic, nihilistic; it revels in cruelty and killing, and in the destruction of every civilised and humane value. It is anti-art, anti-human, anti-life.
Birtwistle’s music has been called ritualistic; this has all the hallmarks of a black magic ritual. The whopping great Altar of Murder — a focal point for dark energy, a shrine to slaughter — that dominates the stage is a dead give-away. Punch slaughters almost every character, who end up hanging from the Chorus Gibbet. The opera is suffused with images of pain, suffering and death; the moral order is subverted, and destruction and chaos triumph. It begins with an incantation, an invocation of despair:
Let the tragedy begin.
Let’s trumpets sound.
Let song of paean here abound.
Singsong of hope, ye who enter here.
(Hope only for abandon, terror, fear.)
What follows is theatre of cruelty at its worst. From the start, the audience is forced to watch Punch gleefully murdering everyone in sight. At the start of the opera, he burns his baby in the fire, then stabs his wife, Judy, to death. (“No sorrow, no pain do I feel for this,” she sings. “To die for Punch is unending bliss.”) He murders the Doctor and the Lawyer with a hypodermic syringe and an acid-tipped quill pen. In a sequence called Gebrauchsmusik (music for utility, for purpose, for practical ends), Punch finds a use for music: as a weapon. He bashes up the Choregos with musical instruments — producing not music but brutal, meaningless noise — and saws him in half in a bass-viol case. He tricks the hangman, Jack Ketch, into hanging himself.
The opera has no sympathy or compassion for any of his victims; they become jokes, butts of pseudo-Joycean wordplay and riddle games. But it feels sorry for their murderer, “poor pathetic Punch”, rejected by Pretty Polly.
But Punch does not just kill people; he kills concepts: the family unit, innocence, and parental love; healing, the preservation of life, law and order, structured morality; theatre, art, storytelling, human expression; justice, punishment, retribution — all necessary parts of civilisation. All that is left are the anarchy and savagery of Punch.
Evil destroys everything, and it flourishes. Punch has a nightmare in which he marries Judy in a Black Wedding, and the characters reproach him for their injuries: “fractured skull, bleeding face, severed limb, oozing eye”. But Punch wakes up from the nightmare. And he is not punished. Instead, in a dissonant ensemble, Punch is called a “champion brave”, and his acts of violence “this day’s ennobling deeds”. The opera ends with Punch dancing with Pretty Polly around the gallows, turned into a maypole. It is an inversion of a fertility symbol; an image of execution and death is turned into a site of celebration.
“An amoral fable ending with the triumph of evil” is a plausible and possible interpretation, librettist Stephen Pruslin acknowledges, but one he says tends towards overinterpretation.4 Perhaps, he suggests, it could also be read as viciousness and tenderness co-existing in one character; or the relationship between means and ends; or the turning of potential gold into dross. Punch and Judy is “a stylised and ritualised drama”, similar to Greek tragedy and to myth; “the function of a myth is to be transparent, so that each individual can project onto it his own interpretation”. While the librettist’s refusal to provide a definite interpretation of his own work might suit the post-modern age, his failure to explain what this myth means seems irresponsible, if not cowardly. Pruslin and Birtwistle want to provoke a reaction, to depict violence, to shock — and to evade responsibility for what they have created: corruption, degradation, defilement; the rejection of humanity and compassion, of morality and meaning.
Their ultimate act of black magic — a deliberate act of unmaking, of seeking power through negation — is to attempt to write Punch and Judy into the foundations of opera itself, to make it the fons et origo of the artform. “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.”5 They sought to warp, distort, destroy opera’s history, to replace the spirit of Peri with the diabolical Punch. If Euridice is about the power of music to move gods in the name of love, Punch and Judy makes music into a weapon and destroys meaning and love.
This must be rejected. Opera is a humanist artform: born in the Renaissance as an attempt to revive Greek tragedy, it insists that individual lives, whether comic or tragic, matter; it seeks meaning in myth and history; and it celebrates the beauty of music and the talent of the singer. At its best, it is life-enhancing, transformative, sublime. To make Punch and Judy — nihilistic, violent, and lacking in humanity and compassion — the source of all opera is an abomination. Punch and Judy is an act of destruction, a ritualised descent into malignancy. If it is the source of opera, then all that follows — Vivaldi, Gluck, Mozart, Fidelio, Meyerbeer, Verdi — is based on chaos, violence and meaninglessness; the entire artform is stripped of its humanity.
“There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things, things which act against everything that we believe in. They must be fought.”
Punch and Judy belongs in a horror story, but has somehow slipped into this dimension; it is malevolent, unholy, evil – a musical equivalent of the Necronomicon, an accursed rite performed to summon eldritch abominations. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears fled from Punch and Judy halfway through, appalled by the unrelenting horror and violence of the music and the action.
Rumour says that at other performances, those who saw the entire work were found stark staring mad, while at others, the theatre collapsed or mysteriously caught fire; all that was heard from the ruins was a sinister cackling… When Punch and Judy became the source opera of all opera, Altars of Murder began manifesting in other operas – in everything from tragedies like Boris Godunov and Elektra to former comedies like Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Seville and The Massacre of Figaro. It was only when a coven of white witches invoked the spirit of music itself that this menace was banished into the outer dimensions. But it lurks there, biding its time, watchful, ever hungry and ever malevolent…
I for one would not willingly see it live; the only safe way to do so might be to festoon oneself with so many protective sigils, magical wards, amulets and talismans that one clanks, and to draw a circle of salt around oneself. Even if that means irritating the ushers.
Recordings
Do not listen to: Stephen Roberts (Punch), David Wilson-Johnson (Choregos), Phyllis Bryn-Julson (Pretty Polly), Jan Degaetani (Judy), Philip Langridge (Lawyer), and John Tomlinson (Doctor), with the London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Atherton, London, 1979.
- Andrew Clements, “Harrison Birtwistle: an utterly distinctive composer who wrote music of delicate beauty”, The Guardian, 19 April 2022. ↩︎
- David Allen, “Harrison Birtwistle, Fiercely Modernist Composer, Dies at 87”, New York Times, 18 April 2022. ↩︎
- Alex Ross, “The Opera in England: Vigorous But Spiky”, New York Times, 24 June 1995. ↩︎
- Stephen Pruslin, “Punch and Judy: Note”, Etcetera Records, 1989. ↩︎
- Pruslin. ↩︎
The Opera Scribe 
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