"Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god."—Heinrich von Kleist

Perhaps the history of theater is the history of making gods and puppets. On the one hand, certain theaters—like those of Shakespeare and Chehkov—constantly strive for the "infinite consciousness," creating characters and situations of gigantic breadth and densest detail. But then there is another kind of theater which wants nothing more than to empty out consciousness, to harden and hollow Hamlet and Vanya into wooden dolls and frozen masks. The Japanese Noh dramas of Zeami, the über-marionette dreams of Heinrich von Kleist and Gordon Craig, the behaviorism of Brecht—all puppet theaters of a sort, obsessed with drying up and evacuating content, and leaving us with brazen, gleaming frames. A theater of people becomes a theater of forms.

People knew Harrison Birtwistle liked puppets in 1968, when his first opera Punch and Judy (after the old British marionette routine) was completed and performed. But the scope and nature of the composer's theatrical passion truly revealed itself only the following year, in one of Birtwistle's most outrageous scores, Verses for Ensembles; even Birtwistle himself thinks of the work as "the most extreme piece I've written." But "extreme" how? Certainly in its violence and volume, Verses is sonic grenade: its ensembles of wind quintet, brass quintet, and three percussionists are often pushed to extremes of register and technique, and frequently blister into a veritable ruckus of noise.

But Verses for Ensembles throws a more sophisticated extremism into the audience's lap: it is an extreme theater, stretching beyond the stage of characters with lines, beyond even the stage of über-marionettes. Here Birtwistle formalizes theater past the puppets, into the region of air-bound forces, the bursts and blows of trumpets, flutes, drums. But Verses is definitely not merely a loose "instrumental theater" in the sense of Richard Strauss' tone poems. Rather, Birtwistle's score proceeds as an archaic, masked ritual. The performers are not identities, not temperaments: to paraphrase Brecht, these people have no character. Neither are they symbols, concealing secret personalities; like Oscar Wilde's puppets, "they have no private lives."

Instead, the instrumentalists in Verses enact a drama of forms and regions, based on the structural precepts of ancient Greek drama. The sequence unfolds with cold, "absolutely composed" precision: an opening Prologue leads to a "Parodos," a "Stasimon" flanked by two "Episodions," and a closing "Exodos." It's as if someone scraped the marrow, muscle, and flesh from a Greek satyr play, and kept only the bones, now animated into a radiant supernatural skeleton-dance.

But of course, Birtwistle's score ends up achieving what the greatest puppet theaters (Pinocchio included) achieve: not eradication of soul, but just the opposite—an utterly soulful experience, "a fiery and unforeseen entertainment" glowing with the uncanny light of living beings. Here harsh mechanics breed a soft magic, and dolls and masks possess dissonant grace.

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