Music/Theater Review: Wild abstract puppetry and Berlioz

Symphonie Fantastique

Music by Hector Berlioz

Christopher O’Reilly pianist

Puppetry by Basil Twist

HERE Theater, Manhattan

August 31, 2018

Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique (Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts) was composed in 1830, and is one of those iconic pieces that defines an era. Romanticism in music has certain harmonic and musicological characteristics, but also some extra-musical ones that also present themselves the visual arts: exotica, dreams, terror, overt (often over-the-top) emotion. This was the first symphony that exhibited all of those things. In addition, it was one of the first explicitly programmatic symphonic works, where there were not just multiple movements, but each had program or literary description attached. Berlioz insisted that the piece was not wedded to this program to succeed, but I cannot think of a piece which more evokes specific images. The symphony tells the story of a frustrated love—the hero meets his love (movement 1), sees her dancing at a ball (waltz, movement 2), then out in the country (shepherds pipes, movement 3), then in an opium-induced dream where he has killed her and is marched to the scaffold (movement 4), finally the dream climaxes with his love as a hideous witch dancing in a witch’s sabbath (the Dies Irae chant mixed with a wicked tarantella, movement 5). The piece is known for its large hyper-colorful orchestra (including ophicleides, large trombones) of 90+ players, exceeding past requirements. In short, this was an over-the-top, hyper-manic symphony that took music in a whole new direction. Its wildness was perhaps due to his composing much it while on opium himself—very romantic era!

The concept of this puppetry version of the Symphonie Fantastique was fascinating, in that in such an explicitly programmatic piece, the puppetry was all abstract, with minimal “episodes” to clearly tie to the symphony program. Instead, creator Basil Twist (from San Francisco, schooled in France) has devised abstract puppets cavorting in an underwater tank (about 10 x 6 x 5 feet), manipulated by five wetsuit-clad puppeteers.

This is presented to the audience in a small theater with a curtained puppet stage poised above and behind a full-length concert grand piano.  Here, the fine pianist Christopher O’Reilly played the full score in one of those huge virtuosic romantic piano transcriptions (I think by Liszt) characteristic of an era without recordings, where people learned about orchestra music and opera by playing piano arrangements in their parlors. O’Reilly’s playing was musically sensitive and consistently evoked Berlioz’ vision. It was often virtuosic and spectacular in the fast movements like the last one, where the score moves into multiple voice counterpoint with lots of octaves. While there were moments when I really missed the orchestra colors (e.g. the opening of the movement in the country, where the English horn/oboe duets evoke shepherds, some of the wild string special effects in the witches sabbath dance),  overall O’Reilly delivered a colorful, musical performance that fully captured Berlioz’ quirky genius. He even did a bit of seated choreography before each piece to set the upcoming mood.

The puppetry was fascinating, if not always successful in evoking the visual core of the music. The lighting and technology used in the water tank were so good that I at first thought I was viewing a computer-generated film. But it was all live (we could tour the backstage afterwards to see the harnesses, trapezes, and puppets used by the very wet performers).

Many of the puppets looked like primordial fungi or squid, but the March to the Scaffold was largely a ballet of multicolored elongated Styrofoam tubes in parallel arrays.

There were flashlights darting about, lots of colorful effects, and some amazing tricks that made the tank appear like a lava lamp at times. About as close to a narrative “program” as the puppetry came was a sinuous puppet that usually appeared when Berlioz portrays his love with the distinctive chromatic musical “idée fixe” theme, a progenitor of Wagner’s leitmotivs. While the Witches’ Sabbath was dark and menacing (red lights through black creepy figures), most other movements resisted a conventional narrative vision. Quaintly, each movement ended with an old-fashioned puppet theater stage curtain dropping in front. Overall, Mr. Twists’s puppets provided a great visual metaphor for Berlioz’ wacky opium fantasy.

Mr. Twist did not list Berlioz’ program (story) or even his movement titles in the theater program, so those unfamiliar with the orchestral piece would not have known the background plot. They would be asked to just use their imaginations listening to the music and watching the puppets, an option not available to me, since I knew the piece’s story from past listenings. The overall experience brought to the foreground the dilemma of program music (or any art depicting a specific event)—how much does our enjoyment depend on specific knowledge of the story or event? In visual art, knowing the back story of Picasso’s Guernica or Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa perhaps adds a certain kind of immediacy or direct connection to the art, but is not essential for experiencing the emotions portrayed.  

Yet, especially in the more abstract experience of listening to music, audiences traditionally enjoy knowing the story or “what it’s supposed to mean”. This used to lead to the thematic naming of many  string quartets and symphonies by publishers eager to win a larger audience (e.g. Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Moonlight Sonata and Spring Sonata). But perhaps after a century of abstract art, we are ready to be un-wedded from these explicit programs and just soak in the affect and ambiance of a composition without being led through it by a story. This seems to have been one goal of this abstract puppet production. To choose what is perhaps the most explicitly programmatic of orchestral pieces to illustrate this was a brave choice, and led to a musically and visually fascinating experience in SOHO.