The Double Bass

The play Der Kontrabaß, the first work for the stage by critically-acclaimed German novelist Patrick Süskind, premiered in 1981. A one-act monologue that features a minimalist set, the play was staged many times throughout Germany before being translated into English in 1987 by Hamish Hamilton, who won the prestigious Schlegel-Tieck Prize for literary translation for this work. Since then, the play has been translated into twenty-eight other languages. The monologue is delivered by an orchestral double bass player who feels stuck in an oppressive, often damaging relationship with his instrument.

The play is set is the small, soundproofed, and almost claustrophobic apartment in which the unnamed double bass player lives. The player, a man in his mid-thirties who works at an unnamed State Orchestra, drinks beer, growing progressively drunker during the course of his monologue. He regales the audience with a variety of topics: the history of the instrument, his own personal relationship with music, and the ways in which he believes the bass has been detrimental to his life. The play calls for its performer to either actually play or convincingly simulate playing the bass, as the narration is accompanied by snippets from compositions by Schubert, Mozart, Brahms, and Wagner.

The player starts his monologue with a history lesson about the double bass, explaining its function in, and importance to an orchestra. The description is anchored with jokes and with facts and figures that the player easily reels off from the top of his head. As he describes various features of the instrument, the player demonstrates what he means by playing snippets of music that illustrate his points. Soon, however, it becomes clear that even though the player knows so much about the instrument to which he has devoted his life, he is not actually a fan of its sound or the music he plays with it.



As the player tells the audience more about his life, it turns out that he didn’t pick the double bass because he wanted to play it. Instead, he feels he was simply saddled with the bass in his professional career – something he now can’t get rid of, and which has come to define him as a person despite the fact that he is just a mediocre utility player in the orchestra.

The more we hear about the player’s life with the double bass, the more we see the depths of his misery. Anecdotes like this one complete the picture: one time, when the man was stranded outside in the cold with the bass after his car broke down, he was forced to give the bass his coat to protect the instrument’s wood from cold damage. A lonely man, he blames his lack of friends and romantic partners on the way the double bass dominates every aspect of his life. In his more paranoid moments, he imagines the double bass is staring at him unnervingly every time he is about to have a sexual encounter with a woman.

The player then tells the audience about Sarah, a young mezzo-soprano whom he finds attractive and who has never paid any attention to him. The one time he tried to impress her with his playing, he screwed up and sounded terrible. From the way he describes her beauty and then a split second later bitterly complains that she goes out to dinner with other men, it’s clear that the double bass player is an obsessive “nice guy” at best and a borderline misogynistic creep at worst. He can’t help but be drawn to Sarah, not only because of her personal charms but also because he realizes that they can never meet even musically since the very deep notes the double bass produces could never accompany her singing.



Showing off more of his knowledge, the player tells us about the two pieces of music that have been written for double bass and soprano – very obscure pieces that don’t tend to get played. He also recites the half-forgotten composers who have written for the double bass specifically. For his part, the player dreams of playing in smaller performances. He idolizes chamber pieces like Schubert's Trout Quintet, a piece for piano and four string instruments including the double bass.

The monologue ends with the player fantasizing about getting Sarah’s attention during the next show. In his mind, he could call out her name during the very soft opening music of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which the orchestra is about to perform. The play ends as he leaves for the show in concert dress, leaving the audience unsure whether he will go through with his plan.