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New York Classical Review, Sep 23, 2023 |
By David Wright |
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Schubert: Der Doppelgänger, New York, Park Avenue Armory, ab 22.9.2023
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Kaufmann meets Schubert, dancers and electronics in a theatrical “Doppelganger” |
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In Romantic-era literature. the appearance of one’s doppelganger was a
portent of death. On a lonely road or in a crowded room, a man comes face to
face with his own exact double, a sign that his soul soon will leave his
body and go its own way.
In 1828 Franz Schubert, 31 years old and
terminally ill, composed the last dozen or so of his 600-plus songs in
death’s shadow. For later listeners, the knowledge of that can give even the
bounciest and most insouciant of these songs, such as “Abschied,” an ironic
twist.
Others, however, such as “Der Doppelgänger,” stare into the
void with naked horror and anguish.
A publisher issued these songs
posthumously, appending the title Schwanengesang (Swan Song), in the manner
of Schubert’s great song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. A
performance of this bundle of songsby tenor Jonas Kaufmann and pianist
Helmut Deutsch formed the core of the impressive theater piece Doppelganger,
conceived and directed by Claus Guth, which had its world premiere Friday
night at the Park Avenue Armory.
Here the disorder of a cycle that
was not a cycle matched the randomness of a young man’s thoughts as he faced
death. But instead of a composer at his piano, Friday’s young man was a
soldier in a World War I military hospital, tossing in his bed as he and
others relived their battle experiences and the joys and sorrows of their
civilian lives.
The vast expanse of the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill
Hall was filled with 62 white beds in neat rows, some occupied by restless
figures as the audience filtered in, with the search for seat numbers in the
dim light adding a feeling of disorientation before the show even began.
From time to time, six nurses walked in formation between the rows of beds.
Through all this, pianist Deutsch sat at his lidless piano in the center
of the room, until a bell (a traditional marker of death) rang and the
performance began. Tenor Kaufmann stole in amid a group of patients, and as
they took to their beds he emitted an anguished cry, then began the song
“Kriegers Ahnung” (Warrior’s Foreboding).
In notes in the printed
program, director Guth noted that a lieder recital is a more modern mode of
expression then Wagnerian opera, comparing it to the glimpses of emotion
offered in a pop album, with its “carefully designed dramatic meaning that
arose from the precise sequence of individual songs.”
Translating the
“meaning” suggested by Schwanengesang into stage action, Guth and movement
director Sommer Ulrickson had the agile troupe of nurses and soldiers
enacting both realistic hospital scenes (complete with medication carts and
IV bottles) and flights of fancy or fear, most memorably in an ecstatic
commotion of sliding beds and fluttering sheets during the animated song
“Frühlingssehnsucht” (Spring Longing).
Guth’s conception had a sound
component as well. Schubert’s songs moved in and out of electronic
connecting music by Mathis Nitschke, beginning with deep rumbles and distant
thunder as the audience assembled, and setting subsequent moods with queasy,
tinnitus-like whines or shocking explosions.
Whether moving through
the scene, lying on the floor (for the famous “Ständchen”), or carried
cortège-style on a bed by the dancers, Kaufmann was in splendid, albeit
amplified voice, from gossamer pianissimo to full-bodied fortissimo, as he
probed the poetic subtext of every phrase. Sound designer Mark Grey created
the illusion of intimate discourse in the vast space, the singer’s voice
even seeming to follow him around the room. As expected, the celebrated
tenor’s star power not only packed the house, but carried the performance.
Pianist Deutsch’s always fluent and characterful playing of Schubert
seemed more manipulated electronically, by turns vividly present, watery, or
distant. He also participated in Nitschke’s linking music, extending a
Schubert riff here, adding a tone cluster or inside-the-piano glissando
there, always to strong dramatic effect.
While the cast sat on their
beds and listened, Deutsch supplied a mesmerizing piano interlude, the
Andante sostenuto from Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960, at the
turning point of Schwanengesang, where texts by the Romantic poet Ludwig
Rellstab give way to the more ironic Heinrich Heine. This gentle funeral
march, with bells tolling in the piano’s lower and upper registers, seemed a
little overlong, an intrusion of Schubert’s “heavenly length” on an evening
of concise gems, and yet to shorten it would have been unthinkable.
Urs Schönebaum’s lighting participated actively in the drama, making each
individual bed glow in the darkness, throwing rectangles of white light
around the room, creating dark spaces for terrified soldiers to cower in,
and much more.
Video designer rocafilm projected storms of
hallucinatory visual confetti that bathed the scene at moments of high
emotion.
The realistic yet abstract white metal-frame beds and
soldiers’ and nurses’ uniforms, courtesy of set designer Michael Levine and
costume designer Constance Hoffman, were just right for this piece of
psychological theater.
As Guth recognized, the arc of Schwanengesang
came to rest on “Der Doppelgänger.” (An additional song, “Die Taubenpost,”
not connected to the others and thrown in by the original publisher for good
measure, was omitted from this production.) As Kaufmann walked slowly into a
harsh horizontal light, he was joined by his silent, shadowy double as he
closed the performance on that stark note of self-recognition, possibly from
beyond the grave.
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