Music homework Unit 4
hwang12s
music5.docxListent to The Erlking. Schubert uses one performer to convey four different characters. In what ways does he let the audience know when each character is speaking? How does the music change with each character? Describe in detail the Father, Son, and Erlking. Does the Erlking scare you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuG7Y6wiPL8
Here are some references if you want:
Erlkönig (The Erlking; 1815)
Schubert’s song Erlkönig (The Erlking) is one of the earliest and finest examples of musical romanticism. It is a musical setting of a narrative ballad of the supernatural by Goethe. A friend of Schubert’s tells how he saw the eighteen-year-old composer reading Goethe’s poem. “He paced up and down several times with the book; suddenly he sat down, and in no time at all (just as quickly as he could write) there was the glorious ballad finished on the paper.” Goethe’s ballad, in dialogue almost throughout, tells of a father riding on horseback through a storm with his sick child in his arms. The delirious boy has visions of the legendary Erlking, the king of the elves, who symbolizes death.
Schubert uses a through-composed setting to capture the mounting excitement of the poem. The piano part, with its rapid octaves and menacing bass motive, conveys the tension of the wild ride.
The piano’s relentless triplet rhythm unifies the episodes of the song and suggests the horse’s gallop.
By imaginatively varying the music, Schubert makes one singer sound like several characters in a miniature drama. The terrified boy sings in a high register in minor. Three times during the poem, he cries out, “My father, my father.” Each time, the boy sings a musical outcry that is intensified through dissonant harmonies.
To convey mounting fear, Schubert pitches the boy’s outcry higher and higher each time. The reassuring father sings in a low register that contrasts with the high-pitched outcries of his child. The Erlking, who tries to entice the boy, has coy melodies in major keys.
The deeply moving climax of The Erlking comes when father and son arrive home and the galloping accompaniment gradually comes to a halt. In a bleak, heartbreaking recitative that allows every word to make its impact, the narrator tells us, “In his arms the child was dead!”
