Time and Reversal in Birtwistle's Punch and Judy

Abstract

We examine the occurrence of peripeteia in Harrison Birtwistle's 1967 opera Punch and Judy, as manifest in a reversal of cyclic time. Specifically, we extend a metaphorical association between the passage of cyclic time in the opera and discrete rotation in the complex plane generated by the imaginary unit i. Such a rotation moves alternately between the real and the imaginary axes, as scenes in the opera pass correspondingly through sacred and profane orientations. The instance of peripeteia results in a counter rotation, a dramaturgical inversion. To bring this reversal into the metaphor, we extend it from its situation in the complex plane to one in the space of Hamilton's quaternions, wherein such negation is obtained through the product of upper-level imaginary units. The scene that contains the reversal and that which consists of the opera's comic resolution epitomize the drama and occupy the highest level of dramatic structure.