Erlkönig

Schubert had a genius for embodying inhuman forces and personae in his piano accompaniments. Throughout Die schöne Müllerin the piano gives voice to the brook, and we have mentioned the key motive which signifies the spinning wheel in “Gretchen am Spinnrade.” In “Erlkönig” it is wrist-wearying right-hand octaves played at an extremely fast tempo for all of the song’s four minutes that represent the frantic pace of the horse upon which father and son ride. The structure of the poem hangs upon Goethe’s division of the action across four (!) different speakers. A narrator provides the framing stanzas—setting the scene and then spelling out the tragic conclusion that neither father nor son could put into words. The bulk of the poem takes place as direct discourse between father, son, and the Erl-king (whom only the child, and we, can hear). Schubert’s achievements in this song are too numerous to cover in detail, but one might note his use of register to distinguish father from son, the increasing pitch level as the boy’s hysteria mounts, and the charming musical characterization of the Erl-king. Rather than setting the Erl-king in typical “specter” music (i.e., agitated, minor mode, dissonant), Schubert paints him in serene, major-mode lyrical episodes. This is the Romantic spirit of “bliss in death” that would resound so deeply throughout later German art (think of Wagner or Thomas Mann).

(c) Jason Stell