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The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2023 |
By Joshua Barone |
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Schubert at the Vast Park Avenue Armory: Intimate, Lonely, Exposed
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The tenor Jonas Kaufmann stars in “Doppelganger,” a staging of
“Schwanengesang” by Claus Guth, making his New York debut.
In Schubert’s song “Der Doppelgänger,” a piano resounds with increasingly
tormented chords as the narrator recounts a realization: that a pained
stranger, wringing his hands in the night, is in fact himself.
“I
think there is something like a moment where your soul steps out, and your
body is there,” the director Claus Guth said about the song over coffee in
Munich. “It’s this shocking moment: You understand that you’re dying.”
That instant, he said, is the heart of “Schwanengesang,” the posthumous
collection of Schubert’s final songs, which is often performed as a cycle,
like the composer’s canonical “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise.” And
it’s that harrowing, transitional state that has inspired Guth’s staging of
“Schwanengesang,” called “Doppelganger,” which premieres at the Park Avenue
Armory in New York on Friday.
The production — featuring the star
tenor Jonas Kaufmann performing with his longtime collaborator, the pianist
Helmut Deutsch — will be the New York debut of Guth, one of the most
sought-after opera directors in Europe.
Schubert’s music is regularly
presented in the Armory’s intimate Board of Officers Room, the site of most
of the arts center’s recitals. But the composer’s songs, like those of
“Schwanengesang,” originally sung in parlors, are much less expected, and
seemingly ill-suited, for the vast drill hall. But “Doppelganger” will
unfold there amid an installation (designed by Michael Levine) of more than
60 hospital beds occupied by wounded soldiers. Kaufmann will rise from one
of them, to think back on his life at the moment of his death.
The
path to “Doppelganger” was long, and not just because the production,
originally planned for fall 2020, was delayed by pandemic closures. Years
ago, Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, approached Guth and
Kaufmann about a music theater project for the drill hall, inspired by
little more than their prestige and friendship, which goes back to their
education at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich.
“I gave them carte
blanche to propose something,” said Audi, one of the few dreamers in New
York who can still commission work on the monumental scale of the Armory.
Kaufmann said that he and Guth discussed music by Strauss, Mahler and
Wagner, as well as Janacek’s frequently staged cycle “The Diary of One Who
Disappeared.”
But the idea of mounting, say, Mahler’s
“Kindertotenlieder” didn’t appeal to Guth. “If you have this huge orchestra,
it will be the same structure you have at a normal concert,” he said. “So,
how to get this very specific situation of not being in the opera house or
concert hall? We thought it would be great to have in this huge hall just
this lonely singer exposed.”
They arrived at the idea of a song
recital. And from there, Guth said, “It must be Schubert.”
He
researched the history of the Armory, and was struck as much by its use as a
hospital and shelter as by its housing of a militia regiment. “It’s
interesting to think of this place not as a drill hall, but the opposite,”
he said.
Guth also thought about the “Schwanengesang” song “Kriegers
Ahnung,” in which a soldier worries about dying in battle and longs for “how
cheerful the fireside glow seemed when she lay in my arms.” “My storytelling
is, say, the last hour of this wounded soldier,” Guth said. “And in this
last hour you see his flashbacks and his dreams.”
Levine — a
collaborator with Guth on a Metropolitan Opera-bound production of Janacek’s
“Jenufa” — responded to that idea with a design incorporating a dreamily
expansive field of hospital beds, in part as an attempt to rise to the drill
hall’s size.
“You want to address the space itself,” he said on a
recent afternoon at the Armory, gesturing to the set as it was being
arranged. “It’s a thrilling space to put anything in, and in a way it’s your
responsibility to do justice to it. I’ve seen some beautiful, beautiful
things here, but it’s not an easy space to get right.”
He first
submitted his designs in early 2020, just as he was reading about how Wuhan,
China — a city of roughly 8.5 million people — was shutting down because of
Covid-19. He couldn’t imagine that; it would be like New York City doing the
same. Once that happened too, he began to see pop-up hospitals similar to
the one he had conceived for “Doppelganger.”
Now it has taken on an
eerie resonance. Set vaguely in the first half of the 20th century, the
production, with its rows and rows of beds, seems like a darkly familiar
sight, especially to New Yorkers. And, Levine said, the isolation of a
temporary hospital — whether during a war, as in “Doppelganger,” or
somewhere like the Javits Center in the early days of the pandemic — is
supported, even amplified, by Schubert’s music.
“There’s something
lonely about these songs,” Levine said, “and there’s something quite lonely
about this space.”
Kaufmann will be lightly amplified, but the
concept of “Doppelganger” still relies on a performer with his immense
presence, Audi said. “You need a personality like this,” he added, “because
he’s alone onstage, and this is all taking place inside his head.”
He
won’t be entirely alone. Among the beds will be dancers, who play the parts
of fellow soldiers, as well as actors playing hospital workers. And
Schubert’s score will be joined by Mathis Nitschke’s original music — which
joins the songs together, picking up the harmonic thread of one and
transitioning to that of the next. (Deutsch also has a showcase in the form
of an interlude pulled from a late Schubert piano sonata.)
All this
is possible, Kaufmann said, because “Schwanengesang” isn’t really a cycle.
“We’re allowed to do something different with it,” he added, in a
collaborative process among friends. “That’s our privilege, that we can
present our ideas in a new package.”
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