The other characters of major significance are The Captain and The Doctor, specified as Tenorbuffo and Bassobuffo, respectively. The Captain is surely the most extravagantly written such role in operatic history, though it also serves as the model for Piet the Pot in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre and perhaps a few other post-WW2 adventures I may have evaded. It is again very long in range (low A to the high C, the latter sometimes in falsetto and sometimes in full voice, once sustained and crescendoed on the “ih” vowel sound), and utterly lacking in so much as a phrase that could be called cantabile. Though bespattered with crush notes, some calling for deliberate cracks (“überschappend“) like those of the apprentices in Act 1 of Die Meistersinger; excursions into falsetto ^(I);an attack of hysterical coughing, wheezing, and blubbering; and many other affective indications, he does not (and this may surprise you) indulge in Sprechgesang—not according to the score, that is. He sings, after his fashion, and he speaks, but he does not speaksing. The setting is brilliantly descriptive of an easily unmanned person trying with spotty success to hold himself together, to behave in accordance with the bit of rank he has somehow attained, and to be thought of upon final departure as “ein guter Mensch.” The task—no small one, with all due concession to the reduced aesthetic requirements of the character tenor species—is to make it all listenable.

The part of The Doctor is also extreme in range, also includes natural speech but no Sprechgesang, and deploys many of The Captain’s vocal tactics, such as diving glissandos over very wide intervals and short falsetto Fs. These last are intentional points of repartee, though, and he never loses control with a cracking voice. He and The Captain play off each other like a slapstick vaudeville duo; their exchanges at the top of Act 2, Scene 2 parody donnish pseudo-intellectual banter, and The Doctor’s baiting of the Captain amounts to a kind of hazing. His many excursions to profondo depths make it clear that a true bass is the preferred voice; yet there must be a bright snappiness to the articulations and an ease at the top that only the best of Germanic comic basses could command—a great Ochs, or Lustigen Weiber Falstaff. In both of these roles there is a strain of Expressionist caricature that must be honored, yet not allowed to slip into jolly buffoonery. Which leads me to the question of: