Page 196 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 11.4
The ballad of the Elf King depicted by Schubert’s close friend Moritz von Schwind. The artist had heard Schubert perform the song at many Schubertiads.
In 1822, disaster befell the composer: Schubert contracted syphilis, a venereal disease that, before the advent of antibiotics, was tantamount to a death sentence. Although he completed a great C minor symphony (1828), a more lyrical one in B minor—appropriately called the “Unfinished Symphony”—was left incomplete at his death. When Beethoven died in 1827, Schubert served as a torchbearer at the funeral. The next year, he, too, was dead, the youngest of the great composers. The epitaph for his tombstone reads, “The art of music here buried a rich treasure, but even fairer hopes.”
Although Schubert composed symphonies, piano sonatas, and even operas in the course of his brief career, he was known in his day almost exclusively as a writer of art songs (Lieder). Indeed, he composed more than six hundred works in this genre, many of them minor masterpieces. In a few cases, Schubert chose to set several texts together in a series. In so doing, he created what is called a song cycle (something akin to today’s “concept album”)—a tightly structured group of individual songs that tell a story or treat a single theme. Die schöne Müllerin (The Pretty Maid of the Mill; twenty songs) and Winterreise (Winter Journey; twenty-four songs), both of which relate the sad consequences of unrequited love, are Schubert’s two great song cycles.
Erlkönig (1815)
Like Mozart, Schubert was a child prodigy. To get an idea of his precocious talent, we need only listen to his song Erlkönig (Elf King), written when he was just eighteen (see Listening Cue). According to a friend’s account, Schubert
was pacing back and forth, reading a book of poetry by the famous poet Johann Wolf- gang von Goethe. Suddenly he reached for a pen and began writing furiously, setting all of Goethe’s ballad Erlkönig to music in one creative act. A folk ballad is a dramatic, usually tragic, story told by a narrator (to- day’s “country music ballad” is a distant descendant of such European folk ballads). In Goethe’s Erlkönig, an evil Elf King lures a young boy to his death, for legend had it that whomever the Elf King touched would die (Figure 11.4). This tale exemplifies the Romantic fascination with the supernatural and the macabre.
The opening line of the poem sets the frightening nocturnal scene: “Who rides so late through night and wind?” With his feverish son cradled in his arms, a father rides at breakneck speed to an inn to seek help. Schubert captures both the general sense of terror in the scene and the detail of the galloping horse; he creates an accompanying figure in the piano (Example 11.5) that pounds on relentlessly just as fast as the pianist can make
it go.
174 chapter eleven romanticism and romantic chamber music
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Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY
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