Puppets and Symbolism

Puppets are silent. Materially speaking, their wooden, leather and felt bodies make no intentional sounds, only accidental ones, caused by the rustle of fabrics or slap of lifeless limbs against one another. Yet puppet performance involves all sorts of sounds and sonic practices. Not only do puppets speak, sing and dance, but they inhabit soundscapes rich with intentional sound and ambient music. Moreover, puppeteers adopt a kind of musical sensibility: they focus in particular on breath and rhythm, and often describe playing with puppets as comparable to playing a musical instrument. This paper carves a space for puppetry within musicology by taking seriously this analogy between puppets and musical instruments. Drawing on discourses in organology (such as Dolan and Tresch, 2013) and performance (including Szendy, 2015; Moseley, 2016), this paper examines the symbolic and material dynamics between these two species of performance object as they are cast in the puppet theater of Viennese artist Richard Teschner (1879-1948). 
Teschner's unique brand of puppetry is governed by a distinctive sound parameter: his puppets are speechless. Rejecting the prevalent fusion of puppet bodies and human voices, Teschner deemed puppets fundamentally gestural creatures. Accordingly, he endowed his puppets with a highly nuanced physical vocabulary by combining the rods of Javanese _Wayang golek_with the strings of European marionettes in an innovative control mechanism. Underscoring the puppets' mime is Teschner's musical instrument of choice, the commercially manufactured Polyphon. This gramophone-cum-music box plays punched metal discs, with so-called Indian songs (minus voices) prominent amongst Teschner's collection. Crucially, the partiality of the discs' reproduction is compounded by Teschner's attempt to "thin out" their musical textures by arbitrarily scratching the metal tines. While his puppets are mute, the Polyphon is mutilated, and their contrapuntal dynamic, as my analysis illuminates, raises all sorts of questions concerning creativity, authenticity, and representation. The tension between Teschner's cross-cultural technological hybrids, which resonates across myriad puppet-musical encounters, might be productively described, I argue, as "polyphonic," capturing the vital oscillation between puppetry's material silence and its performative musicality, and analogously, music's ephemerality and its deep-seated, inescapable, heterogeneous materiality.

Following the immensely successful premiere of Maurice Bouchor and Paul Vidal's _Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité_ at Paris's Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette in 1890, numerous critics observed an increasing fondness for religiously-themed theatrical productions on the city's stages. But whereas both the text and music of Noël were hailed as exemplars of religious sincerity, the premiere of another such production on the same stage, Bouchor's _La Légende de Sainte-Cécile_, was an all-around disaster, due in large part to the perceived "secularity" of Ernest Chausson's incidental score.


Though these works have received scant musicological attention, scholars often credit the success of these works to the rise of Symbolism during the 1880s, citing the Symbolists' fondness for the realm of the metaphysical as a step toward a universally-spiritual world that could only be revealed through non-representational signs. Contemporaneous reception of these works, however, suggests that audiences understood them not as exemplars of a burgeoning aesthetic movement but rather as a nostalgic return to the Catholicism of their youth, regardless of-and likely despite of-their skepticism of the Church as an institution.


I propose a new reading of _Noël_ and _La Légende de Sainte-Cécile_ that reveals that Symbolism, as an interpretive framework, falls short of the musical and political complexities within these works. Through analyses of poetic texts, musical scores, and critical responses, I examine the roles that such puppet productions played in the heretofore overlooked enfolding of Catholicism into the "secular" Republican mindset. While successful works eschewed the intellectual aura of Symbolism in favor of a traditional and "sincere" engagement with Catholic heritage, failed productions embraced the complexities of modern music and drama-authorial decisions that, in the end, rendered them unable to be perceived as truly religious. In the end, the successes and failures of such productions reveal an unexpected insight into French Republicanism: while anticlerical critics and Republican audiences confronted the complex task of rendering Catholic subjects appropriately religious in decidedly avant-garde settings, they ultimately faced the vexing task of reconciling their desires for Catholic sincerity with their supposedly secular world views.