Puntila (Opera)
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| Title: | Puntila |
| Shape: | Opera in thirteen pictures with prologue and epilogue |
| Original language: | German |
| Music: | Paul Dessau |
| Libretto : | Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth |
| Literary source: | Bertolt Brecht : Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti |
| Premiere: | November 15, 1966 |
| Place of premiere: | German State Opera Berlin |
| Playing time: | approx. 2 ¾ hours |
| Place and time of the action: | Finland, first half of the 20th century |
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Puntila is an opera in thirteen pictures with a prologue and epilogue by Paul Dessau (music) with a libretto by Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth based on the folk play Herr Puntila and his servant Matti by Bertolt Brecht . It was premiered on November 15, 1966 at the German State Opera Berlin .
action
The opera is set in Finland in the first half of the 20th century. The normally tyrannical landowner Puntila becomes a philanthropist while drunk and treats his chauffeur Matti with special confidentiality. His daughter Eva is engaged to the attaché Eino, but needs a dowry for the wedding. In order to raise the money, Puntila either has to sell his forest or get involved in a marriage with the rich woman Klinkmann. He can't make up his mind. There are also problems with his daughter's engagement: As soon as Puntila is drunk, he despises her fiancé and instead wants to marry her off to Matti, with whom she has already flirted occasionally. But in the end she also turns her back on Matti. When Puntila, severely hungover, decides to destroy his alcohol, he first tastes every single bottle and raves to Matti about his property. Matti knows, however, that this confidentiality is only due to the alcohol. He gives up his position and leaves the estate.
Prolog. Before the curtain. Before the opera begins, a text can optionally be spoken: “[…] the time is dreary. Smart who are worried and stupid who are carefree! But it is not over the mountain that no longer laughs. ”The cow girl Lisu insults the landowner Puntila as“ useless, devouring animal ”and“ land nuisance ”.
1st picture: "Mr. Puntila finds a person" - side room in the Parkhotel zu Tavasthus. Puntila gets drunk with the lawyer Fredrick and other people who have already sunk under the table. Disappointed about their weakness, he is dancing alone on the table when Matti enters and introduces himself as his chauffeur. Although Puntila does not recognize him, he finds him "completely human" and asks him for help with a decision: In order to obtain a dowry for his only daughter Eva, he must either sell his forest or himself, following the advances of the rich woman Klinkmann enters. Puntila opts for the forest.
2nd image: "The forest" - commercial forest with piled up felled wood. At the sight of the beautiful forest with the valuable wood, Puntila changes his decision again.
3rd picture: "The Klinkmann" - hall in Gut Klinkmanns with many doors. Together with Matti, Puntila penetrates the Klinkmann's apartment in the middle of the night, chases the house servant away and tries all the doors until he finds the sleeping woman. After her shrill outcry, he decides to sell the forest.
4th picture: "Mr. Puntila is engaged to the early risers" - village square with pharmacy and post office, early in the morning. Still drunk and looking for alcohol, Puntila drives his car against a telegraph pole. He meets four women: the smuggler Emma, the pharmacist, the cow girl Lisu and the operator Sandra. They tell him about their hard life. He receives a bottle of schnapps from the pharmacist, which he supposedly needs for his ninety cows suffering from scarlet fever. Of course he drinks it up immediately. The operator informs him that his daughter has been looking for him half the night because he has now moved the prospective buyer for his forest, Mr. Bibelius, twice. In the intoxication, Puntila promises marriage to all women one after the other and invites them to his estate for Sunday.
5th image: "The servants' market" - Lammi village square. Puntila accuses Matti of giving him the wrong idea about Klinkmann - otherwise the forest would have long since been sold. First of all, Puntila goes to a café to “call”. In the market, Bibelius and other landowners haggle with potential workers. While Puntila waits, he looks at the workers. He of all people likes the one with whom Bibelius is negotiating, and he woos him away. He pulls away angrily. Putila now hires all other workers, including the poorly fit for work, and treats them to a round in the café. He is not ready for written contracts. Nevertheless, everyone enthusiastically follows him to his estate, the “Schlaraffia”, and sings about the nine-hour day.
6th picture. In the car. On the drive home, Matti warns the workers of Puntila's empty promises, who will chase them away as soon as he is sober again.
7th picture: "Scandal on Puntila" - part of the courtyard of Puntila with bathing hut. When Puntila and the new workers arrive at the farm, the servants are in a deep sleep. Eva scolds her father because he still hasn't got her a dowry. Puntila advises her to marry Matti instead of the attaché Eino, who is “not a man”. Angry, Eva sends the forest workers just hired back home. They leave disappointed. Eva now seeks advice from Matti, whom she actually prefers to the attaché. The two think about how to break the engagement. In front of Eino, they go to the sauna together, play cards and giggle in confidence. Angry, Puntila Matti resigns from the position. Eino, however, is not deterred. He thinks everything is a misunderstanding and gives Eva a bouquet of roses. Matti comments that his debts are probably bigger than they thought.
8th picture: “A conversation about crabs” - Gutsküche, evening. In the company of the housemaid Fina, Matti reads the newspaper. He suggests going to the river together, but Fina is disinterested and leaves. There is a silent duel with Eva, who has just entered, who Matti invites to catch crabs for the engagement dinner on the island. While Eva is changing, the cook informs Laina Matti that Fina and the feed manager are already waiting for him at the river. Matti would rather talk to Eva on the island than hunt for crabs. Since she hesitates, he decides to stay indoors.
9th picture: "The union of the brides of Mr. Puntila" - yard on Puntila, Sunday morning. Puntila tries to sell the forest to the clinic over the phone. At the same time he makes it clear to Eva that the engagement must now take place. The four early risers he invited appear at the gate. Matti warns her that his master is sober now and may not treat her well. He shows them how he will stand up for their cause at the judge in Viborg. As feared, Puntila does not recognize any of his four brides. Matti tries to explain to him that they just wanted to add to the cheerfulness at the engagement party - but Puntila roughly throws her out.
10th image: “The long way home” - District Street, evening. On the way home, the four women learn their lesson from Puntila's behavior: Because people like him don't look dangerous, special care must be taken with them.
11th image: "Puntila betrothed his daughter to a person" - dining room with buffet. Drunk again, Puntila kicked his daughter's fiancé out. He doesn't want to betroth her to a “grasshopper”, but to a person - his chauffeur and friend Matti. The engagement should be celebrated immediately. Although Eva agrees, Matti has reservations: She is not a woman for a chauffeur and his mother will examine her hard. Eva suggests playing this “exam” through. She has to fetch a herring, and Matti symbolically describes the miserable life of the poor parts of the population - in his family there is herring five or even eight times a week. When he pretends to be called to work in the middle of the night, she reacts with a loud rant. This would mean that Matti's mother could be won over, but he would lose his job. He pats her bum jokingly, and Fredrick explains that she failed the exam. Eva renounces this marriage. Puntila is disappointed. In his intoxication he disinherits her and throws her out of the house.
12th picture: “Interlude. Nocturno “- In front of the curtain. While Puntila and Matti relieve themselves outside, a voice sings of the love between the fox and the rooster, which in the end did not end well for the rooster. Matti confirms to Puntila that the same applies to her.
13th picture: “Ascent of Hatelmaberges” - library room on Puntila. Laina supplies the sober but badly hungover Puntila with ice compresses. Fredrick and the Probst reproach him for the fact that his servants were loudly singing about the nine-hour day. Thereupon he signs a declaration that he will fire all revolutionary employees. Besides, he never wants to drink again and destroy all alcohol in the house. Laina and Fina bring the bottles. But to celebrate his decision, Puntila tries each one before he smashes them. Drunk again, he increases Matti's salary and wants to climb Hatelmaberg with him "in spirit". Matti puts it together from the broken furniture of the library. Puntila climbs up and describes Matti enthusiastically his empire in Tavastland. Matti cautiously agrees.
Epilogue: District Street, early morning. Matti leaves his master and the court. Although Puntila was not "the worst", he could not exist the "friendship bond" because "the intoxication evaporated".
layout
Apart from the prologue, nocturne and epilogue, the opera consists of two separate parts with six images each. The first part deals with the three-day trip Puntilas and Mattis in the manner of a sequence of images in which the conflicts only weakly develop. These only break out in the second part on the estate.
music
Dessau divided the prose text of the libretto into separate musical numbers and used various traditional forms such as recapitulations , rondos or sets of variations . He was based on the model of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck . On the other hand, he used the same dialectical methods here as in his other stage works, with which he gave the music the opportunity to comment on the action independently. The two spheres of the privileged and the lower-ranking population are musically characterized differently: While the music of the higher classes is shaped by the twelve-tone technique , the common people have popular melodies. Both levels, however, interpenetrate in a variety of ways, especially in the figure of Puntila. Even when he shows himself to be human in a drunk state, his music is broken by series structures and thus reveals doubts about his behavior. On the other hand, the music of the sober Puntila lacks any popular character. With the other people, too, twelve-tone rows repeatedly "disturb", indicating that they cannot fully develop due to their difficult living conditions. Fritz Hennenberg described the function of the two techniques as follows: “With Puntila the twelve-tone row denotes the social gesture, with the women of Kurgela and the servants an environmental flaw; With the women of Kurgela and the servants, the popular intonations denote the social gesture, with Puntila an alcohol-related disguise. "
The vocal lines are characterized by the stilted, clear declamation with a concise rhythm, which is also typical for other works by Dessau. Dessau also used orchestration to characterize its characters. In this context, he himself spoke of "leading instrumentation". The pleasure-addicted Puntila makes use of musical set pieces, natural sounds and "mutilated quotes" (Suitner), for example from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde , Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia , Sibelius ' Valse triste or Strauss' Heldenleben .
The folk pieces adopted from the older stage music include “Puntilas Lied” (instrumental only), the “Plum song” and the “Song of the fox and the rooster”.
While Matti clearly recognizes the dangers of social fraternization, the divided Puntila has comedic traits. Dessau's wish was "to make the seriousness of the class struggle clear to the listener through a cheerful work". The “grotesque climax” is the ascent of the virtual Hatelmaberg at the end of the opera, for which Dessau countered elegiac and almost sentimental music with satirical elements.
Ulrich Schreiber criticized the opera's lack of an “epic theater method” and the “one-dimensional sound” text. The proletarian Matti seems “less class-fighting than game-ruining” and the “Finnish local color” reifies itself into a “slightly kitsch-suspect intrinsic value”. He also found the mixture of the folk material of the original stage music and the twelve-tone technique problematic, since the basic series made up of thirds and small seconds enables “tonal sounds”. With this, Dessau has come closer to the ideological regulation of the GDR, according to which tonal music must be assigned to positive and atonal sounds to negative characters. Sigrid Neef , however, pointed out that Dessau opposed this officially announced theory of socialist realism by not assigning any class exclusively tonal or atonal music. His opera is "like Brecht's play a challenge to the discussion on the topic of folkness."
orchestra
The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:
- Woodwinds : three flutes (all also piccolo ), three oboes (3rd also English horn ), three clarinets (3rd also bass clarinet ), Eb clarinet , tenor saxophone in Bb, three bassoons (3rd also contrabassoon )
- Brass : three horns , two trumpets , three trombones , tuba
- four timpani (two players), percussion (eight players): two marimbaphones , xylophone , bass xylophone ad libitum, two large cymbals , two small cymbals, small drum , large drum with cymbals strapped on, large drum solo, stirring drum, wooden drum, four small and four major temple blocks , small, medium and large tom , tambourine , castanets , wood, whip , rattle-box, metal rattle, rod , ratchet, ratchet , three car horns, three more car horns on tape, large and medium fanfare , medium and small gong , different tuned Gongs, tubular bells , herd bells , sirens, cymbals , bells , two Indian bells ad libitum
- Vibraphone
- guitar
- Celesta
- accordion
- Piano , marked with "P" and "N". The "P" designates a lever through which the piano sounds like a "robust harpsichord" with the help of a metal carpet.
- harp
- Strings
- Incidental music : flute piccolo, two E flat clarinets, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, snare drum, bass drum (with cymbals), accordion
Work history
The model for Paul Dessau's opera is the popular play Herr Puntila und seine Knecht Matti , which Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1940 in exile. For the Berlin premiere in 1949 Dessau composed music for the stage. He gave the music of the “Puntila song” in it “something of the character of Slavic folk songs, since it should be dance-like and our eastern neighbors have always cultivated the dance far more than we do and their dances are more accessible to harmonic and rhythmic subtleties than ours” ( Dessau 1974). Dessau still discussed the subsequent idea of composing a complete opera with Brecht himself. He also proposed that the two newly created scenes (“The Forest” and “Frau Klinkmann”) from Alberto Cavalcanti's 1955 film adaptation of the play (→ Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti (1960) ) to take over. These scenes became the second and third pictures in the opera. This gave the title character and her fluctuating character a greater weight, while the role of his companion Matti is devalued compared to the acting. The conflict between the servant and his master still plays a role, but the focus is now on “Puntila's world and people moving striving for enjoyment” (Neef). This is also reflected in the title of the opera, which renounces the name of the servant. The balance between the two figures that still existed in Brecht was thus consciously abandoned. Above all, cuts affected Matti's role and especially his conversations with Eva. Unlike in the drama, Matti here seems to be quite receptive to Eva's charms.
In 1956, Brecht's assistants Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth arranged the text as a libretto by tightening it up and concentrating it dramatically. Dessau did not compose the music until after Brecht's death between November 1956 and March 1959, whereby he also used the older stage music.
Originally, the work was to be premiered in 1959 at the Komische Oper Berlin . However, its director Walter Felsenstein was unable to find artistic access to the work despite several reviews. It was only in 1966 that he allowed production at another house.
The premiere finally took place on November 15, 1966 at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin as part of the week “Brecht and the music drama”, during which Brecht settings by various composers were shown. The production was done by Dessau's wife Ruth Berghaus , set design and costumes by Andreas Reinhardt . Otmar Suitner was the musical director . Reiner Süß sang the title role , his chauffeur Matti Kurt Rehm and Eva Irmgard Arnold . In its staging, Berghaus used the work motto of "increasing enjoyment" as an opportunity to challenge the stage technology to perform well. A moving car was brought onto the rotating turntable as a symbol of speed and independence, and the rapid transformations of the sets took place on the open scene. The production was well received by the public and critics and "welcomed as the entry of modern theater into the opera business" (Neef). The following year there were successful guest appearances at the Wiener Festwochen in the Theater an der Wien and at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino .
On September 10, 1967, the work was played as a West German premiere in Wuppertal (conductor: János Kulka , director: Kurt Horres ; Puntila: Kurt Moll , Matti: Willi Nett). There were further productions in 1969 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz), 1977 in Freiburg im Breisgau, 1980 in Lübeck, 1985 in Oldenburg and 1989 in Radebeul.
Dessau also used the twelve-tone row of the Puntila in the choral work Hymne to the Beginning of a New History of Humanity from 1959 and in the epilogue of the Jewish Chronicle from 1960.
Recordings
- May 1968 - Paul Dessau (conductor), Staatskapelle Berlin , choir of the German State Opera Berlin .
Reiner Süß (Johannes Puntila), Kurt Rehm (Matti Altonen), Erich Witte (Fredrick), Horst Lunow (tired waiter), Joachim Arndt (servant and miserable), Gertrud Stilo (smuggler Emma), Hannerose Katterfeld (pharmacist), Sylvia Pawlik (Lisu), Erna Roscher (Sandra operator), Erich Siebenschuh (1st landowner), Peter Bindszus (dealer), Martin Ritzmann (Bibelius), Horst Hiestermann (photographer and provost ), Peter Olesch (2nd landowner), Henno Garduhn (3rd landowner and attaché Eino), Christine Gloger (housemaid Fina), Annelies Burmeister (Laina), Irmgard Arnold (Eva), Elisabeth Rose (provost), Günther Burgmann, Hasso Siek, Helmut Jungs, Horst Lunow and Heinz Walter Rosner ( Arbeiter), Heinz Reeh (voice behind the scene).
Studio shot; Cast for the premiere, but with Dessau himself at the podium; Record setup by Ruth Berghaus and Paul Dessau; without the 6th and 10th picture and the beginning of the 13th picture.
Nova LP: 8 85 127-128 (2 LPs), DG 139 280-1 (2 LPs), Berlin Classics 0021842 (2 CDs).
Web links
- Booklet of the Dessau edition by Brilliant Classics with the libretto (PDF, without the 6th and 10th image and the beginning of the 13th image).
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Sigrid Neef : German Opera in the 20th Century - GDR 1949–1989. Lang, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-86032-011-4 , pp. 79-90.
- ↑ a b c Peter Czerny : Opera book. Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1981, pp. 425–428.
- ↑ a b c d e f g Eberhard Schmidt: Puntila. In: Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater . Volume 1: Works. Abbatini - Donizetti. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-492-02411-4 , pp. 716-717.
- ↑ Amanda Holden (Ed.): The Viking Opera Guide. Viking, London / New York 1993, ISBN 0-670-81292-7 , p. 260.
- ↑ a b c d Gerhard Müller, Bernd Zöllner (transl.): Puntila. In: Booklet of the Dessau edition by Brilliant Classics (PDF), pp. 5–6.
- ^ Klaus Langrock: Puntila. In: Marc Honegger, Günther Massenkeil (ed.): The great lexicon of music. Volume 6: Nabakov - Rampal. Updated special edition. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau a. a. 1987, ISBN 3-451-20948-9 , p. 366.
- ^ Ulrich Schreiber : Opera guide for advanced learners. 20th Century II. German and Italian Opera after 1945, France, Great Britain. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-7618-1437-2 , pp. 62–63.
- ^ Daniela Reinhold: Paul Dessau 1894-1979. Documents on life and work. Henschel, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-89487-225-X , p. 110.
- ^ Paul Dessau. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all complete opera recordings (= Zeno.org . Volume 20). Directmedia, Berlin 2005, p. 3473.