Program notes for Winterreise:
Winterreise was composed in two separate chunks: Part One in February 1827, and Part Two in October of the same year. It is one of the very first song cycles that exists in the classical canon. Simply put, a song cycle is a series of songs that is intended to be performed together as a whole. Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) is often considered to be the first song cycle, but Schubert’s own Die schöne Müllerin (1823) follows not too far behind, and is significantly longer. For Winterreise Schubert once again turned to the poet Wilhelm Müller who had also provided the text for his former song cycle. Müller (1794-1827), known in his day as “The German Byron,” was a near exact contemporary of Schubert (1797-1828), though it’s not certain that the poet knew about the work of the composer who was to give him lasting fame. Müller was good friends with Schubert’s compositional rival, Carl Maria von Weber, even naming his son Max after the main character in Weber’s opera Der Freischütz. As an interesting side note Max Müller moved to the United States and is generally credited with having invented the current day branch of study known as comparative religion (which I considered majoring in) and became the compiler and editor of Sacred Books of the East, which was the first major collection of translations of eastern religious texts in English, and a series that I loved to pour over during my years at the University of Washington.
Wilhelm Müller was a controversial figure and in some regards remains so. Politically speaking he was a revolutionary who was constantly being censored. Schubert found the first set of the poems for Winterreise in a banned magazine called Urania. At a precursory glance Winterreise seems like it’s nothing more than the dark musings of a man who has been harshly rejected in love, but at the heart of it there is deep political discontent.
This is a work about constantly questioning one’s place in society, about exile and wandering, about a refusal or inability to fit in with the status quo. In song number 10, Rast, reference is made to a coal burner’s hut, a thinly veiled reference to The Carbonari, a network of revolutionary societies active in Italy in the early 19th century which had a great influence on similar societies in contemporary German lands. The political environment occupied by Müller and Schubert was bleak indeed. Marriage was only allowed to those who could prove a sufficient income, political protest was unthinkable, and even dancing during Lent was a crime worthy of arrest. It seems unfathomable to imagine that what we now know of today as Romanticism was born in an environment where poetry, prose, and drama were heavily censored. Several of Schubert’s operas were never performed because the censors found them to be too provocative, sometimes only because of the title. One of his best friends, Johann Mayrhofer, led a strange double life as a poet and lackey for the official censors, a painful contradiction that eventually led to his suicide. Another of Schubert’s friends, Johann Senn, was arrested and exiled for revolutionary activity. Schubert too was arrested in the same raid but was set free despite being listed on the roster of several closely monitored revolutionary societies.
Müller is nowadays far more controversial because of the quality of his poetry. For almost two centuries he was considered a second rate poet because of the simplicity of his style. I myself have noticed that early translations tend to fluff up his original verse with pretentious words and phrasing in some misguided attempt to make these poems sound far more lofty and erudite than they were intended. Müller spoke often in letters and essays about how he felt poetry should be kept humble, how great care should be made in the composition to give the illusion of simplicity. He had immense disdain for language tricks that seemed to be openly about showing off. Above all Müller considered his poetry to be “Lieder,” songs awaiting music, simple folk poems that begged for a simple folk music type of setting. While Schubert gave him some long enduring folk melodies for his poems, such as Der Lindenbaum, he simultaneously created new molds that probably would have confused his contemporary.
Some of these songs are truly bizarre for 1827, and some remain strange even today. One of my favorites, Letzte Hoffnung, starts out throwing both time and tonality to the wind, leaving one to wonder where they are and why. There’s an overall sparseness and majesty to the music of Winterreise that creates in the listener both a sense of hollowness and a sense of heroism. In this song cycle we get the feeling that the failed romance that spurs the journey is really only a pretext. This journey is about far more than romantic rejection, it is about the inability to fit into society as we know it. When one is so strange and individual that they cannot be accepted by any government, any community, or any lover where are they supposed to go? Is there any other choice but to wander endlessly through the winter of our endless loneliness?
We know very little about why Müller wrote these poems or how he felt about them. We do know that Müller was newly married when he wrote Die Winterreise, as he called this collection, and that he had a couple of passionate love affairs in his past that ended quite badly, but it seems odd that he created these incredibly morose poems of romantic rejection at a time in his life when he seemed to be so far removed from those troubles. However, we do know that these “horrifying poems,” in Schubert’s words, held a special resonance for the composer. Deeply depressed by the advancement of his syphilis, he was at a time in his life when he had no hope of recovery or of ever being able to experience the joys of requited love. When Schubert first played these songs for his friends they didn’t know what to think and found them altogether too gloomy. Schubert’s response to their confusion was, “I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.” He claimed to have worked harder on them than on any of his previous songs, and this shows in the many corrections and cross-outs in the original manuscript. Even on Schubert’s deathbed the last task he was actively engaged in was in correcting the publisher’s proofs of Part Two of Winterreise. His best friend, Joseph Spaun, said that he felt certain that the exertion involved with the composition of Winterreise led to Schubert’s early death, but I have a much different view. When pain is held inside unable to be expressed is when it festers and destroys you. I feel that Schubert may have died even sooner had he not been able to dive deeply into his private agony through these “horrifying poems.” The only way out is through, and Schubert was desperately trying to make it through, even though the clock was ticking against him.
ABOUT THIS PRODUCTION
I started out having a vastly different vision for this production than what you will see here. Originally I envisioned wide ranging watercolor winter landscapes with a very limited color palette in olive green, navy blue, and opalescent ice. It turns out that sets made of watercolor on tracing paper are extremely noisy, so I had to change my strategy. There are still landscapes in this production consisting mainly of cut paper simulating sumi ink brushwork, but I found the interior world of the wanderer to be a psychological landscape of abstraction that overshadowed the natural world much of the time. Human beings make an appearance very rarely throughout, and mostly we are confronted with images from nature that have been twisted through despair. Sometimes the wanderer finds himself in an actual town, and these scenes stand in stark contrast to the main world of abstract isolation and madness that is continually reflected back at him through the intense brightness of the snow.
I see Winterreise as a “poem opera,” which is rather devoid of dramatic action and narrative, but it plays out in the heart and in the subconscious. This is usually not seen as a good thing and is often a critique leveled toward German Romantic dramas in particular, which is one reason that so few early 19th century German operas are in the standard repertoire today. The lack of narrative action was therefore an issue that plagued many of the libretti that Schubert used to compose his own operas, yet this Romantic tendency toward the fantastic, the dreamy, the psychological, and poetry for poetry’s sake greatly inspired his talents in the realm of art song, which audiences tend to see as a more acceptable province for such “excess.”
You will see some recurring visual motifs throughout this piece. Keep your eyes peeled for tear drops (especially “hot tears”), the beloved’s house with her emblematic window, her profile, and lots of crows. Crows here are all about the hopeless prayer for fidelity, even in the most horrifying way possible. Where the music becomes especially hollow and spare I created sets and characters that consist only of empty lines. Nonetheless there are still moments of silliness within this piece. As we all know, it is almost impossible to get through a difficult time without developing a dark sense of humor.
Susan Youens says in her book Retracing a Winter’s Journey that Winterreise is a song cycle in black and white: “black depression and endless stretches of white snow.” Is this not perfect for shadow puppets? Still, I can’t resist using color symbolically. The linden tree rustles in a nostalgic haze of yellow and green; snow melts and flows through the town in streams of red like nerves frayed to their breaking point; light blue represents apathy; and opalescence reveals itself frozen not only in ice, but in tears, diamonds, and bourgeois windowpanes. My concept behind Winterreise is that this is YOUR journey. Have we not all been there at some point, lost in a lonely world wondering what’s wrong with us and if we would ever find our way out? Hence, you will not see the main “character,” the singer, of the cycle portrayed on the screen aside from his footprints and his hat. I want this to be as visceral an experience for the viewer/listener as possible.
As you may imagine, coming up with ideas for all 24 of these songs was not easy, but I found a bizarre method of finding inspiration. I somehow got into the habit of meditating and simply “asking Franz” what he thought about these songs. What the heck, I was only playing, right? Well, of course it all became a little bit too real and took on a life of its own…and it keeps going! Some of these meditations made their way onto the puppet screen, some into the interpretation of the music, and some were not as visually or audibly translatable. Eventually I realized that the results of this practice were interesting in their own right, full of surprising philosophical and spiritual insight as well as stunning and heartbreaking imagery, so I compiled and self-published them into a little book, along with translations of these poems, entitled Winter From Above: Meditations on Winterreise with Franz Schubert. This book will hopefully be expanded upon in the future into a larger work of spiritual historical fiction.
Throughout the process of creating this puppet show I discovered for myself what so many performers of this cycle have already known. It’s easy to get obsessed. I feel like I’ve been traveling through psychological winter for the past five years and have been doing a lot of “shadow work” to find my way out. Working on this show has made the shadow work literal. Last year it was the themes of rejection and nomadism that resonated with me the most, and this year it is the theme of shame, which I now feel is the underpinning of the whole work. The symbolism and philosophy of this piece is endless and I look forward to continuing to plumb its depths. Hopefully this will become a new local winter tradition.
Winterreise was composed in two separate chunks: Part One in February 1827, and Part Two in October of the same year. It is one of the very first song cycles that exists in the classical canon. Simply put, a song cycle is a series of songs that is intended to be performed together as a whole. Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) is often considered to be the first song cycle, but Schubert’s own Die schöne Müllerin (1823) follows not too far behind, and is significantly longer. For Winterreise Schubert once again turned to the poet Wilhelm Müller who had also provided the text for his former song cycle. Müller (1794-1827), known in his day as “The German Byron,” was a near exact contemporary of Schubert (1797-1828), though it’s not certain that the poet knew about the work of the composer who was to give him lasting fame. Müller was good friends with Schubert’s compositional rival, Carl Maria von Weber, even naming his son Max after the main character in Weber’s opera Der Freischütz. As an interesting side note Max Müller moved to the United States and is generally credited with having invented the current day branch of study known as comparative religion (which I considered majoring in) and became the compiler and editor of Sacred Books of the East, which was the first major collection of translations of eastern religious texts in English, and a series that I loved to pour over during my years at the University of Washington.
Wilhelm Müller was a controversial figure and in some regards remains so. Politically speaking he was a revolutionary who was constantly being censored. Schubert found the first set of the poems for Winterreise in a banned magazine called Urania. At a precursory glance Winterreise seems like it’s nothing more than the dark musings of a man who has been harshly rejected in love, but at the heart of it there is deep political discontent.
This is a work about constantly questioning one’s place in society, about exile and wandering, about a refusal or inability to fit in with the status quo. In song number 10, Rast, reference is made to a coal burner’s hut, a thinly veiled reference to The Carbonari, a network of revolutionary societies active in Italy in the early 19th century which had a great influence on similar societies in contemporary German lands. The political environment occupied by Müller and Schubert was bleak indeed. Marriage was only allowed to those who could prove a sufficient income, political protest was unthinkable, and even dancing during Lent was a crime worthy of arrest. It seems unfathomable to imagine that what we now know of today as Romanticism was born in an environment where poetry, prose, and drama were heavily censored. Several of Schubert’s operas were never performed because the censors found them to be too provocative, sometimes only because of the title. One of his best friends, Johann Mayrhofer, led a strange double life as a poet and lackey for the official censors, a painful contradiction that eventually led to his suicide. Another of Schubert’s friends, Johann Senn, was arrested and exiled for revolutionary activity. Schubert too was arrested in the same raid but was set free despite being listed on the roster of several closely monitored revolutionary societies.
Müller is nowadays far more controversial because of the quality of his poetry. For almost two centuries he was considered a second rate poet because of the simplicity of his style. I myself have noticed that early translations tend to fluff up his original verse with pretentious words and phrasing in some misguided attempt to make these poems sound far more lofty and erudite than they were intended. Müller spoke often in letters and essays about how he felt poetry should be kept humble, how great care should be made in the composition to give the illusion of simplicity. He had immense disdain for language tricks that seemed to be openly about showing off. Above all Müller considered his poetry to be “Lieder,” songs awaiting music, simple folk poems that begged for a simple folk music type of setting. While Schubert gave him some long enduring folk melodies for his poems, such as Der Lindenbaum, he simultaneously created new molds that probably would have confused his contemporary.
Some of these songs are truly bizarre for 1827, and some remain strange even today. One of my favorites, Letzte Hoffnung, starts out throwing both time and tonality to the wind, leaving one to wonder where they are and why. There’s an overall sparseness and majesty to the music of Winterreise that creates in the listener both a sense of hollowness and a sense of heroism. In this song cycle we get the feeling that the failed romance that spurs the journey is really only a pretext. This journey is about far more than romantic rejection, it is about the inability to fit into society as we know it. When one is so strange and individual that they cannot be accepted by any government, any community, or any lover where are they supposed to go? Is there any other choice but to wander endlessly through the winter of our endless loneliness?
We know very little about why Müller wrote these poems or how he felt about them. We do know that Müller was newly married when he wrote Die Winterreise, as he called this collection, and that he had a couple of passionate love affairs in his past that ended quite badly, but it seems odd that he created these incredibly morose poems of romantic rejection at a time in his life when he seemed to be so far removed from those troubles. However, we do know that these “horrifying poems,” in Schubert’s words, held a special resonance for the composer. Deeply depressed by the advancement of his syphilis, he was at a time in his life when he had no hope of recovery or of ever being able to experience the joys of requited love. When Schubert first played these songs for his friends they didn’t know what to think and found them altogether too gloomy. Schubert’s response to their confusion was, “I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.” He claimed to have worked harder on them than on any of his previous songs, and this shows in the many corrections and cross-outs in the original manuscript. Even on Schubert’s deathbed the last task he was actively engaged in was in correcting the publisher’s proofs of Part Two of Winterreise. His best friend, Joseph Spaun, said that he felt certain that the exertion involved with the composition of Winterreise led to Schubert’s early death, but I have a much different view. When pain is held inside unable to be expressed is when it festers and destroys you. I feel that Schubert may have died even sooner had he not been able to dive deeply into his private agony through these “horrifying poems.” The only way out is through, and Schubert was desperately trying to make it through, even though the clock was ticking against him.
ABOUT THIS PRODUCTION
I started out having a vastly different vision for this production than what you will see here. Originally I envisioned wide ranging watercolor winter landscapes with a very limited color palette in olive green, navy blue, and opalescent ice. It turns out that sets made of watercolor on tracing paper are extremely noisy, so I had to change my strategy. There are still landscapes in this production consisting mainly of cut paper simulating sumi ink brushwork, but I found the interior world of the wanderer to be a psychological landscape of abstraction that overshadowed the natural world much of the time. Human beings make an appearance very rarely throughout, and mostly we are confronted with images from nature that have been twisted through despair. Sometimes the wanderer finds himself in an actual town, and these scenes stand in stark contrast to the main world of abstract isolation and madness that is continually reflected back at him through the intense brightness of the snow.
I see Winterreise as a “poem opera,” which is rather devoid of dramatic action and narrative, but it plays out in the heart and in the subconscious. This is usually not seen as a good thing and is often a critique leveled toward German Romantic dramas in particular, which is one reason that so few early 19th century German operas are in the standard repertoire today. The lack of narrative action was therefore an issue that plagued many of the libretti that Schubert used to compose his own operas, yet this Romantic tendency toward the fantastic, the dreamy, the psychological, and poetry for poetry’s sake greatly inspired his talents in the realm of art song, which audiences tend to see as a more acceptable province for such “excess.”
You will see some recurring visual motifs throughout this piece. Keep your eyes peeled for tear drops (especially “hot tears”), the beloved’s house with her emblematic window, her profile, and lots of crows. Crows here are all about the hopeless prayer for fidelity, even in the most horrifying way possible. Where the music becomes especially hollow and spare I created sets and characters that consist only of empty lines. Nonetheless there are still moments of silliness within this piece. As we all know, it is almost impossible to get through a difficult time without developing a dark sense of humor.
Susan Youens says in her book Retracing a Winter’s Journey that Winterreise is a song cycle in black and white: “black depression and endless stretches of white snow.” Is this not perfect for shadow puppets? Still, I can’t resist using color symbolically. The linden tree rustles in a nostalgic haze of yellow and green; snow melts and flows through the town in streams of red like nerves frayed to their breaking point; light blue represents apathy; and opalescence reveals itself frozen not only in ice, but in tears, diamonds, and bourgeois windowpanes. My concept behind Winterreise is that this is YOUR journey. Have we not all been there at some point, lost in a lonely world wondering what’s wrong with us and if we would ever find our way out? Hence, you will not see the main “character,” the singer, of the cycle portrayed on the screen aside from his footprints and his hat. I want this to be as visceral an experience for the viewer/listener as possible.
As you may imagine, coming up with ideas for all 24 of these songs was not easy, but I found a bizarre method of finding inspiration. I somehow got into the habit of meditating and simply “asking Franz” what he thought about these songs. What the heck, I was only playing, right? Well, of course it all became a little bit too real and took on a life of its own…and it keeps going! Some of these meditations made their way onto the puppet screen, some into the interpretation of the music, and some were not as visually or audibly translatable. Eventually I realized that the results of this practice were interesting in their own right, full of surprising philosophical and spiritual insight as well as stunning and heartbreaking imagery, so I compiled and self-published them into a little book, along with translations of these poems, entitled Winter From Above: Meditations on Winterreise with Franz Schubert. This book will hopefully be expanded upon in the future into a larger work of spiritual historical fiction.
Throughout the process of creating this puppet show I discovered for myself what so many performers of this cycle have already known. It’s easy to get obsessed. I feel like I’ve been traveling through psychological winter for the past five years and have been doing a lot of “shadow work” to find my way out. Working on this show has made the shadow work literal. Last year it was the themes of rejection and nomadism that resonated with me the most, and this year it is the theme of shame, which I now feel is the underpinning of the whole work. The symbolism and philosophy of this piece is endless and I look forward to continuing to plumb its depths. Hopefully this will become a new local winter tradition.
Program notes for The Isle of Merlin by Christoph Willibald Gluck:
I discovered this rare opera we’re going to hear tonight in The Piano Music Shop in Ballard, which is owned by Keith Johnson, a fellow Seattle Bach Choir member. He has a vast collection of 18th century opera piano/vocal scores, which made me drool. I looked them over hoping to find something that would make the perfect puppet opera. This one jumped out at me first of all because it is short, and second because it’s about Merlin, so the magical opportunities are endless.
Once I got it home I noticed that all the parts that looked like spoken dialog actually said “sung to the tune of blank” above the lines. This was very intriguing, and led to a long goose chase because I’m a stickler for completeness. I had to find every one of these songs! In the score these sections are called vaudevilles, which according to its archaic definition means a light popular song, often of a satirical nature. These vaudeville sections strung together as many as six or more different tunes one after the other like pearls on a necklace, with different words replacing the original according to the script of the play. I was lucky enough to be able to find most of these songs all on one website dedicated to preserving old French vaudevilles, but some I had to write myself. I honestly can’t tell anymore which songs I wrote and which are original. I also had to wonder how these would have been originally performed. Because these songs are new to us, I opted to flesh them out with banjo and ukulele with myself playing tambourine to keep us together. I even made sure the key was in a good key for each singer and followed logically from the preceding aria to the next. This all proved to be rather difficult to put together, which makes me think that originally perhaps the singers chose whatever key and whatever tempo they felt like and sang these songs unaccompanied. They are very interesting tunes too. Many are very catchy, and many have unusual rhythms and shifts in harmony. It was these shifts in harmony that made me think they might sound better accompanied to ears unfamiliar with them. At the time the audience would have known these tunes because they were essentially pop songs, now long since forgotten.
To see how these songs were originally used I need to tell you a little bit of back story. Somewhere in the 17th century the Italian commedia dell’arte wound its way into France and became extremely popular there. Their plays were produced frequently at two local fairs in Paris, and within these plays were always these vaudeville songs, some of which go back to the 15th century, with the new words. The practice of putting new words to old songs was so widespread that whole volumes of these songs were published with this express purpose in mind. One of these is called Le Cle du Caveau, which was published in 1810. The songs are organized according to rhyme scheme and how many syllables are in each verse to make this process easier. I used it myself, but didn’t find it very useful for Merlin because the number of syllables in the songs I needed didn’t match anything found there, but I did find some songs in this book that I couldn’t find anywhere else. These popular songs were published with their original words as well in 8-12 volume sets. Dmitri Carter brought one to one of his puppet shows for me to look through. They are very tiny and delicate books, really beautiful treasures if you can find them. This practice of writing new words to old popular songs was also a phenomenon to be found in England in comic plays and light operas there. It would appear that many of Shakespeare’s “songs” were sung in this fashion with old tunes set with Shakespeare’s words.
So, what are these goofy little vaudevilles doing in an opera? In the 18th century there was an attempt to marry the fair theaters producing their low comedic plays with the legitimate theater producing opera and highbrow stuff. This became known as opera comique. The genre of opera comique is now defined as a French opera that includes spoken dialog along with original music, but it does not necessarily denote a comedy. Carmen is an opera comique even though it is a tragedy. In the early days of opera comique these satirical plays would be partially set to new music but would also contained the original vaudeville songs, so as you can see many of these operas originated from plays. The Isle of Merlin is no exception. The text comes nearly verbatim from a play by the same name that came out in Paris in 1718. In the script the same tune titles are even given to be sung with these same words.
For a brief while opera comique was very much in vogue in Vienna, which is where we find Gluck in 1758. Gluck seemed to find popularity rather late in his career. He was born in 1714 and didn’t compose what we know of as his hit, Orfeo ed Euridice, until 1762. Before that he wrote a slough of these opera comiques in Vienna, about seven or eight of them. They follow an interesting continuum. Each opera contains fewer of these vaudevilles and more original Gluck music until the vaudevilles are completely gone. The Isle of Merlin is one of the earlier ones in the string.
Gluck is actually a very important opera composer, even though he is not exactly a household name today. He didn’t like the practice of his time of composing operas consisting of aria-recitative-aria-recitative, with arias that were written for stock characters in precise mannerisms that defined those characters. As he got older he revolutionized opera by bringing real human drama to it, authentic acting, and music that flowed more naturally, so that one could barely tell where an aria ends and a recitative begins, if there is even a difference at all. This style greatly influenced Salieri, which may not seem like a big deal, except that he was THE music and opera teacher in Vienna and taught many important composers the craft. Wagner as well, owes his style to Gluck.
You will notice that this opera has a subtitle: The World Reversed. The concept of the world reversed was very popular among the aforementioned satirical plays. It is a world where everything is backwards from how it is here. Lawyers are honest, love lasts forever, women can be doctors, politicians don’t lie, etc. This popular genre of play also became a popular genre of 18th century opera where satire is made easy by dint of comparison. It is also a great vehicle for fantasy. Many of these operas take place in a made up world like Merlin’s Island, or on the moon. Paper Puppet Opera would love to do one of these “world on the moon” operas one day.
In creating the puppets for this opera I allowed myself to be inspired by the notion of the world reversed. You will see lots of backwards things. A reverse mermaid, reverse centaur, backwards rainbows, fast snails, fishing fish, even a clock running backwards. Because it’s also Merlin’s island I threw in a lot of purely magical stuff like dragons, unicorns, leprechauns, and fairy disco lights.
The two main characters come from the French commedia tradition. Pierrot could be found in Italian comedy, but the French really made him their own and made him a popular character. Scapin is completely invented by Moliere based on the Italian character of Scapino. To emphasize the magical qualities of the opera I made Pierrot and Scapin regular dudes from here and now. This contrasts with the pseudo-18th century flavor of the world in which they find themselves. The other characters were made up somewhat on the fly, with some help from how they’re described in the score, as I got up to start making them each morning at 6 am. This has been a long labor of love for me, and I hope you enjoy the show!
I discovered this rare opera we’re going to hear tonight in The Piano Music Shop in Ballard, which is owned by Keith Johnson, a fellow Seattle Bach Choir member. He has a vast collection of 18th century opera piano/vocal scores, which made me drool. I looked them over hoping to find something that would make the perfect puppet opera. This one jumped out at me first of all because it is short, and second because it’s about Merlin, so the magical opportunities are endless.
Once I got it home I noticed that all the parts that looked like spoken dialog actually said “sung to the tune of blank” above the lines. This was very intriguing, and led to a long goose chase because I’m a stickler for completeness. I had to find every one of these songs! In the score these sections are called vaudevilles, which according to its archaic definition means a light popular song, often of a satirical nature. These vaudeville sections strung together as many as six or more different tunes one after the other like pearls on a necklace, with different words replacing the original according to the script of the play. I was lucky enough to be able to find most of these songs all on one website dedicated to preserving old French vaudevilles, but some I had to write myself. I honestly can’t tell anymore which songs I wrote and which are original. I also had to wonder how these would have been originally performed. Because these songs are new to us, I opted to flesh them out with banjo and ukulele with myself playing tambourine to keep us together. I even made sure the key was in a good key for each singer and followed logically from the preceding aria to the next. This all proved to be rather difficult to put together, which makes me think that originally perhaps the singers chose whatever key and whatever tempo they felt like and sang these songs unaccompanied. They are very interesting tunes too. Many are very catchy, and many have unusual rhythms and shifts in harmony. It was these shifts in harmony that made me think they might sound better accompanied to ears unfamiliar with them. At the time the audience would have known these tunes because they were essentially pop songs, now long since forgotten.
To see how these songs were originally used I need to tell you a little bit of back story. Somewhere in the 17th century the Italian commedia dell’arte wound its way into France and became extremely popular there. Their plays were produced frequently at two local fairs in Paris, and within these plays were always these vaudeville songs, some of which go back to the 15th century, with the new words. The practice of putting new words to old songs was so widespread that whole volumes of these songs were published with this express purpose in mind. One of these is called Le Cle du Caveau, which was published in 1810. The songs are organized according to rhyme scheme and how many syllables are in each verse to make this process easier. I used it myself, but didn’t find it very useful for Merlin because the number of syllables in the songs I needed didn’t match anything found there, but I did find some songs in this book that I couldn’t find anywhere else. These popular songs were published with their original words as well in 8-12 volume sets. Dmitri Carter brought one to one of his puppet shows for me to look through. They are very tiny and delicate books, really beautiful treasures if you can find them. This practice of writing new words to old popular songs was also a phenomenon to be found in England in comic plays and light operas there. It would appear that many of Shakespeare’s “songs” were sung in this fashion with old tunes set with Shakespeare’s words.
So, what are these goofy little vaudevilles doing in an opera? In the 18th century there was an attempt to marry the fair theaters producing their low comedic plays with the legitimate theater producing opera and highbrow stuff. This became known as opera comique. The genre of opera comique is now defined as a French opera that includes spoken dialog along with original music, but it does not necessarily denote a comedy. Carmen is an opera comique even though it is a tragedy. In the early days of opera comique these satirical plays would be partially set to new music but would also contained the original vaudeville songs, so as you can see many of these operas originated from plays. The Isle of Merlin is no exception. The text comes nearly verbatim from a play by the same name that came out in Paris in 1718. In the script the same tune titles are even given to be sung with these same words.
For a brief while opera comique was very much in vogue in Vienna, which is where we find Gluck in 1758. Gluck seemed to find popularity rather late in his career. He was born in 1714 and didn’t compose what we know of as his hit, Orfeo ed Euridice, until 1762. Before that he wrote a slough of these opera comiques in Vienna, about seven or eight of them. They follow an interesting continuum. Each opera contains fewer of these vaudevilles and more original Gluck music until the vaudevilles are completely gone. The Isle of Merlin is one of the earlier ones in the string.
Gluck is actually a very important opera composer, even though he is not exactly a household name today. He didn’t like the practice of his time of composing operas consisting of aria-recitative-aria-recitative, with arias that were written for stock characters in precise mannerisms that defined those characters. As he got older he revolutionized opera by bringing real human drama to it, authentic acting, and music that flowed more naturally, so that one could barely tell where an aria ends and a recitative begins, if there is even a difference at all. This style greatly influenced Salieri, which may not seem like a big deal, except that he was THE music and opera teacher in Vienna and taught many important composers the craft. Wagner as well, owes his style to Gluck.
You will notice that this opera has a subtitle: The World Reversed. The concept of the world reversed was very popular among the aforementioned satirical plays. It is a world where everything is backwards from how it is here. Lawyers are honest, love lasts forever, women can be doctors, politicians don’t lie, etc. This popular genre of play also became a popular genre of 18th century opera where satire is made easy by dint of comparison. It is also a great vehicle for fantasy. Many of these operas take place in a made up world like Merlin’s Island, or on the moon. Paper Puppet Opera would love to do one of these “world on the moon” operas one day.
In creating the puppets for this opera I allowed myself to be inspired by the notion of the world reversed. You will see lots of backwards things. A reverse mermaid, reverse centaur, backwards rainbows, fast snails, fishing fish, even a clock running backwards. Because it’s also Merlin’s island I threw in a lot of purely magical stuff like dragons, unicorns, leprechauns, and fairy disco lights.
The two main characters come from the French commedia tradition. Pierrot could be found in Italian comedy, but the French really made him their own and made him a popular character. Scapin is completely invented by Moliere based on the Italian character of Scapino. To emphasize the magical qualities of the opera I made Pierrot and Scapin regular dudes from here and now. This contrasts with the pseudo-18th century flavor of the world in which they find themselves. The other characters were made up somewhat on the fly, with some help from how they’re described in the score, as I got up to start making them each morning at 6 am. This has been a long labor of love for me, and I hope you enjoy the show!