The double bass
The double bass is a one-act act from 1981 by Patrick Süskind . In the 1984/85 season, with more than 500 performances, it was the most played piece on German-speaking theaters. On September 22, 1981, the enigmatic and funny one-man play with Nikolaus Paryla in the leading role was premiered in the Cuvilliés Theater in Munich and immediately received enthusiastically by the audience. The drama, which was technically low-cost, ran successfully on almost all German-speaking theaters in the following decades.
action
The piece consists of the monologue of an aging double bass player (“a man, in his mid thirties, namely me”), a member of a state orchestra, who in his soundproof music room, hermetically sealed off from the outside world, gives the audience an emphatic lecture on the advantages of his instrument . His initial eulogies for the double bass, however, soon become more and more contradictory and finally turn into the opposite: The double bass player turns out to be a bitter, lonely, introverted couch potato, a moderately gifted musician who detests his instrument and his profession from the bottom of his soul, a nameless person ( only a “third desk”, a “tutti pig”) who hates Mozart and Wagner and likes to withhold a few of their notes in concert in revenge. He considers conductors to be overrated and even superfluous. After every performance he tries to fight his alleged loss of moisture and orchestral frustration with plenty of beer .
He focuses his only positive feelings, not without a certain lasciviousness, almost manically on the young soprano Sarah. But since he has never dared to speak to her, his enthusiastic admiration has been blossoming in secret for years. When she is on stage, he plays - as far as he can on his double bass - always particularly flawlessly, beautifully and devotedly. However, she "of course doesn't" notice him and his efforts.
Perhaps that could change tonight: While he is taking off his everyday clothes and changing for the imminent Rheingold Festival premiere under Carlo Maria Giulini , he is wondering what would happen if he named “Sarah! “Shouted loudly into the hall. Whether he will do this remains open. He says goodbye, turns off the light and goes to work.
Music examples in the "double bass"
To illustrate his remarks, the double bass player gives some examples from music literature in recordings. These are:
- 2nd symphony (Brahms)
- Richard Wagner : Prelude to Die Walküre
- Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf : Double Bass Concerto No. 2 in E major
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart : "È amore un ladroncello" , aria by Dorabella from Così fan tutte 2nd act, scene 10
- Franz Schubert : Piano Quintet in A major D. 667
Radio play version
- Recording by WDR with Walter Schmidinger , 1981, Der HÖR Verlag, DHV (1995), ISBN 978-3-89584-129-3
criticism
Marcel Reich-Ranicki called this a "cabaret (es) piece with whistle and charm and with a quiet, almost smiling melancholy". Süskind's humor, his “thieving pleasure in language” and, similar to Anton Pawlowitsch Chekhov , his weakness for the disadvantaged are expressed here.
Secondary literature
- Volker Krischel: Patrick Süskind: The double bass. King's Notes and Materials # 414. C. Bange, Hollfeld 2002. ISBN 978-3-8044-1778-6 (with further references)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The double bass - Süskind, Patrick. Retrieved February 3, 2020 .
- ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Thomas Anz (Ed.): My History of German Literature: From the Middle Ages to the Present , Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-421-04663-5 , p. 541