This acoustic presence is what I term the marionette's 'highly strung vocality.' In this paper, I analyze contemporary German and Austrian productions of marionette opera, live performances, and verbal testimonies of Marionettenspieler in light of recent scholarship on audio-visual relations, organology, and performing bodies. Shaped by and for this network, expressive agency is productively diffuse, generating a manifestation of voice that confounds conventional binaries. In today's performances of marionette opera, the individual human singer is displaced by a multi-part performance network involving several distinct media and material objects: the marionette, a unique backstage architecture, an unseen puppeteer, a recorded singer, a sound system, and an audience. To consider it mute, however, is to misunderstand the nature of the marionette's vocality. As a consequence of this apparent muteness, scholars have rendered the marionette a vehicle of primarily visual expression. When marionettes sing opera, they of course sing nothing at all. This paper examines the phenomenological paradox engendered when two such identifiers collide: the voice's centrality in opera and the marionette's voicelessness. Yet, it is marionette opera's very cultural hybridity that questions the assumptions and expectations associated with its constituent genres. The aesthetic, socio-political, and technological traits that result from the fusion of a pervasively elitist entertainment and a popular commercial enterprise have left marionette-theater opera on the outskirts of conventional opera-historical enquiry. Composers since Haydn have deemed them worthy performers of original works, while Marionettenspieler-the name given in German-speaking lands to puppeteers of marionettes-have long considered these wooden homunculi to be ideal for performing canonic operas.

Marionettes have been singing opera for centuries.

Mind control theatre behind the mirror