I saw *Doppelganger* at the Park Avenue Armory on September 26, 2023. It’s a staging of songs from Schubert’s *Schwanengesang* collection of songs, performed by tenor Jonas Kaufmann and pianist Helmut Deutsch and staged by Claus Guth. This run was the world premiere, it’s a commission by the Armory.
Here's set designer Michael Levine talking about the show:
*Schwanengesang* is a collection of the last songs that Schubert wrote, a “swan song.” He knew he was dying at the time and the poems he chose have that extra layer of meaning. I’ve heard Jonas many times at the Met, in *Die Walküre,* *Faust,* *Parsifal,* *Werther,* *Tosca,* and *La Fanciulla del West.* I also saw him in a concert performance of the second act of *Tristan und Isolde* at Carnegie Hall and saw him and Helmut Deutsch in recital on the stage of the Met. Kaufmann is an extraordinary singer - - he has a rich, colorful voice, a rock-solid technique, and is a musician of the highest order.
Schubert had written over 500 songs before he got to these final songs - - I had the feeling that we were hearing his expressive abilities refined to the nth degree. Plus in these songs he seems unafraid to ask a lot of the singer: they often have a broad vocal range (quite high and quite low, often in the same song), they require a fair amount of stamina, and there’s no point in doing them unless you have a bone-deep understanding of how the poems and the music interact with each other. Kaufmann is now 54 years old and is superbly qualified, both from a vocal and intellectual standpoint, to conquer this precipice.
And we had the added bonus of hearing a singer doing songs in his own native language. Kaufmann was wonderful in the French and Italian operas I heard him do, but it’s extra special to hear him sing in German.
The Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory is maybe my favorite performance space in the world! It’s unbelievably huge - - the building takes up an entire city block, from 66th to 67th Street and from Park Avenue to Lexington Avenue. The Drill Hall takes up most of that space. I’ve been to probably about ten cultural events there and it’s always a thrill to see what the director does with it.
Claus Guth conceived of this piece with the Armory in mind, it was tailor-made for the space. He set the show in a military hospital during World War I. There were 63 beds set up in the performance space, 22 of them occupied with male actors playing soldiers in the hospital, all of them dressed in Henleys, khakis, and suspenders. There were also six female actors playing nurses in the hospital.
We heard pre-recorded music before the performance started, a minor chord mechanical thrum. The original music was written by Mathis Nitschke. There was an occasional thudding and grinding and an occasional tolling of a bell (I felt like the bell was being tolled live in the space, rather than pre-recorded). Each individual bed was lit by a spotlight, four or five stories above.
Deutsch and his piano were set up in the center of the space. Kaufmann was one of the random soldiers and started singing from his bed. At one point during the first few songs the nurses went around changing bed linens and some of them were bloody. That was an effective theatrical moment. The interludes between songs were almost always filled with somber electronic music by Nitschke. Sometimes Deutsch was also playing the piano, or repeating a chord sequence from the previous song, or even strumming the strings on the interior of the piano. I wasn’t sold on the necessity of the electronic music but I chose not to be bothered by it. I had trust in Guth and his overall vision.
I want to talk briefly about the sound design. Kaufmann was amplified in an artful way - - we could hear him very clearly but it didn’t feel miked, you know what I mean? The amplification of the piano was a problem. The piano sounded muffled and tubby.
The high point of the first half was the best-known and most often performed song in the collection, “Ständchen.” The interlude before that song featured a lot of moving around by the supporting cast and without me being aware the beds had been reconfigured to form a circle in the middle of the space, with sheets on the floor. Kaufmann was lying on the floor and sang the song from there.
This song is usually sung as a straight up serenade, a romantic seduction. In this context it was a heartbreaking, end-of-life remembrance of a past love. Maybe that subtext was always there but the staging brought it out into the open.
Deutsch played a piano-only solo in the midpoint of the performance, the Andante sostenuto from Schubert’s last piano sonata, #21. It was a refreshing change in texture. This sequence was lit from the side, like a warm Teutonic amber dusk. Kaufmann and all of the other performers sat and listened in rapt attention.
The third-to-last song, “Am Meer,” was staged with Kaufmann held aloft on a bed, as if it were a funeral bier. Kaufmann sang with chilling quietness. He got out of the bed for the second-to-last song, “Die Stadt.” A door opened at the back end of the performance space, enveloping Kaufmann in a blazing white light. In a spooky touch, we could see people walking by on the sidewalk and traffic on Park Avenue. Kaufmann walked out through the door.
The last song was what we could call the title track of this performance, “Der Doppelgänger.” It’s a song about a man seeing his double in the street, reminding him of a lost love. The program notes said that the archetype of the doppelganger is usually an indication of the end one’s life. You see your double and it’s Game Over.
The prelude to the song had Kaufmann walking back into the hall, still enveloped in the white light. He got a few feet in and was followed by another man his same size, wearing the same clothes, with the same curly hair. Soon the SECOND man started singing - - Kaufmann was the second man, not the first man. The first man (the silent man) laid down in a bed and Kaufmann sang the song to him. They both had big bloody blotches on the front of their shirts. I wondered: is it the silent man who’s the protagonist of the story we’d been watching, and Kaufmann, the singer, was the doppelganger, the narrator of the other man’s story?
ORDER OF SONGS
“Kriegers Ahnung”
“Liebesbotschaft”
“In der Ferne”
“Frühlingssehnsucht”
“Ständchen”
“Aufenthalt”
“Abschied”
The Andante sostenuto from Schubert’s last piano sonata, #21
“Ihr Bild”
“Der Atlas”
“Das Fischermädchen”
“Am Meer”
“Die Stadt”
“Der Doppelgänger”
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