About the work
Opera by Paul Dessau based on Bertolt Brecht's play 'Mr Puntila and His Man Matti', for which Dessau had already written the incidental music for its 1949 Berlin premiere. Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth condensed the play into a libretto in 1956, and Dessau composed the score between 1956 and 1959; the opera premiered on 15 November 1966 at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, directed by Ruth Berghaus.
Plot
Sober, the Finnish landowner Puntila is a tyrant; drunk, he turns into an affable philanthropist who confides in his chauffeur Matti and wants to marry him to his daughter Eva. Matti recognises that this closeness is owed to the alcohol alone and leaves the estate at the end.
Cultural significance
Dessau assigns twelve-tone technique to the ruling class and folk-like melody to the ordinary characters, letting the two idioms interpenetrate; the premiere was hailed as modern theatre's arrival in East German opera and toured to, among others, the Vienna Festival and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.