Der Doppelganger Schubert By the early 19th Century, most well-to-do households had a piano which formed the

basis of domestic music making. Singing with piano accompaniment was a popular pastime for family and guests, and composers wrote vast numbers of songs to supply this market. Some examples are light and inconsequential, but Schubert was prepared to explore much deeper emotions in many of the 630 lieder he wrote in just 18 years. Schubert wrote Der Doppelganger (The Ghostly Double) in 1828, when he was 31 and knew that he only had a short time to live. It is a setting of a poem that had been previously published the previous year. In the poem, the narrator walks at the dead of night to a house where the woman he loved once lived. There he sees a man in agony, overwhelmed with grief. In the moonlight he realises that this man is himself, gone mad with torment. Although the poem has three verses (starting at bars 5, 25 and 43), Schubert doesnt repeat the same music for each of them. His setting is through-composed the music develops throughout the song. However, it is based on a four-bar ostinato figure which is heard in its original form five times during the course of the work. Der Doppelganger makes its initial impact from its very slow (Sehr langsam) tempo and minor key. The stillness of the night is represented by the extremely low dynamic level, the very static rhythm of the accompaniment and by the F# which forms an inner pedal on the dominant of B minor throughout the first 40 bars. Schubert creates a sense of obsession by beginning and ending every one of the singers two-bar phrases on this pitch in the first verse. The opening bars suggest B minor, but the triads are incomplete and the bare 5ths in bars 1/4/5/8 suggest the empty loneliness of the poet, as does the halting and fragmented vocal line. As the poet fills in the detail of the scene, so the tolling piano chords fill out until the singer gradually starts to break free of the fateful F# in the second verse. But the piano retains the F# and the rising melodic line returns to F# in the climax of the song, marked to be played as loud as possible in bar 31 and underpinned by the chromatic dissonance in the next bar. The ostinato returns in bar 34, but this time the tenor claws his way up from F# to reach G, the highest note of both the vocal and piano parts. It is at this second climax (bar 41) that the pianist at last relinquishes the dominant note and it is here that the poet realises that he is seeing a horrifying reflection of himself. He knows that he is doomed, for the person who meets their other self, according to legend is about to die. Now begins one of the most remarkable harmonic progressions that Schubert devised. While the voice revolves hopelessly around F#, the piano rises chromatically from B to D#, retaining an F# in every one of these bleak chords. The chromaticism leads to a modulation to D# minor, and this unusual and remote key is affirmed by alternate tonic and dominant

hammer blows in bars 47-50. This is the only passage not in the key of B minor it is as if the poet has already gone and his mocking ghost has triumphed. Another chromatic dissonance (bar 51) at a stroke returns to B minor and the last climax of the song, in which the poor poet recalls the torment of love in days gone by. From this point the singer sinks exhausted back to the tonic. Finally the ostinato returns, but this time its fourth chord is changed to C major. In the context it seems enigmatic and questioning the major chord certainly sheds no ray of hope. The piano postlude ends with a plagal cadence and tierce de Picardie and no ray of hope is shed by that either.