Puppet music

Igor Stravinsky; Petrushka; The Rite Of Spring; The Cleveland Orchestra; Pierre Boulez, conducting

When we were as young as six and seven years old, my sister D. and I would find any excuse to write, produce and perform a puppet show for K., Mom and Dad. We didn’t have a particularly large personnel in our ensemble, though. Harry the dog had star status most of the time. Bugs Bunny couldn’t receive many speaking roles because neither D. nor I could pull off a credible impression of the famous rabbit. I think we also had a beaver made out of foam that came from Avon. We manufactured stages made out of upside down cardboard boxes and invented ways to install workable curtains that actually opened from the center. And we drew back drops on paper that hung from the ceiling of our “theatre” through the magic of Scotch tape. The whole contraption would sit on top of the back of one of the big reclining chairs in the living room; and D. and I would hide behind the chair and mount our recklessly prepared, yet lovingly performed, rigamarole.

Grandma E. had sewn together an extremely classy looking clown out of left over material that she had used to make some cushions for her living room. Mr. Clown had received minimal stuffing, making him remarkably limber. He provided our jump from puppets to marionettes. The builders of our house had installed a register in the ceiling directly above the oil stove in the living room so that heat could reach the upstairs. D. and I would drop strings from the register in the floor upstairs in Mom and Dad’s room to attach to Mr. Clown’s head (hat), hands and feet. Then we would have Mr. Clown do a ballet, usually to “The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers” from our Winnie the Pooh record.

In July of 1994, I accompanied the St. John Lutheran Church choir from Orlando, FL, on their tour of Germany and Austria. We concluded our adventures in Salzburg, home of Mozart, the von Trapp family and the famous Salzburg Marionette Theatre. We had a night to ourselves in this beautiful Austrian city, so a friend and I obtained tickets to that evening’s Marionette Theatre presentation and saw a full-length “miniature” production of “The Tales of Hoffman”, an opera by Jacques Offenbach.

The theatre in which the marionette company performs is endowed with a distinguishing feature that works to the advantage of their craft: forced perspective. When the audience members take their seats, the stage appears further away than it actually is. This makes the marionettes seem more lifelike, as if they had veritable human size. The surprise comes at the end when they lift the upper curtain above the stage just a little bit so that the audience can see, for just a few seconds, the dimension displacement between the marionettes and their operators.

Igor Stravinsky composed “Petrushka” between 1910 and 1911 for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. The ballet gets its title from the name of the marionette; the central character in this spectacle. The story bears a resemblance to “Pinocchio” and to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. You can read about it here. A Petrushka is a stock character of Russian folk puppetry that has been around since the 17^th century.

Mr. Stravinsky wrote an exceptionally fiendish piano part in the score for the orchestra. In 1921, the composer penned a piano arrangement of the work for the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein entitled “Trois mouvements de Petroushka”. To this day the solo adaptation is a crowd pleaser at recitals.

In “Star Trek III: The Search For Spock”, Captain Kirk reviews the theoretical data on the Genesis Device, an apparatus that produces the Genesis Effect on a dead celestial body, making it capable of sustaining lifeforms on the surface of it. During the review, Captain Kirk defines “Genesis as life from lifelessness.” When I brought that great Harry the Dog puppet to my little hand more than thirty-five years ago, did I have the innocent intention of pretending? Or did I have the subconsciously maniacal deliberation to play the part of God by bringing seven-year-old life to a golden furry head with floppy ears and a giant muzzle? “Dog complex”? Or “God complex”?

Credits: To the Salzburg Marionette Theatre, for taking the spectacle of opera one step further by bringing the childlike wonder and magic of puppetry to “grown up” classical music.