Erlkönig
Tell the story in Goethe’s poem ‘Erlkönig’ as you understand it and try to explain it. Listen to the
version set to music by Schubert. How are the different characters expressed in the music?
Compare both with the German pop group Rammstein’s modern take, ‘Dalai Lama’
What happens in Erlkönig?
It is difficult to make this out when hearing this poem for the very first time, as the first
impression is one of different voices, all talking at the same time. Slowly, with closer reading, we
can see, in the eight stanzas, a clear structure and four speakers: a narrator, a father, a child,
and the mysterious Erl King.
In the first stanza, the narrator tells us that a father is riding home through the night, holding his
son tightly in his arms. The same narrator in the last, eighth, stanza laconically reports the
death of the child. In stanzas two, four and six we hear a dialogue between father and child on
the nature of the Erl King, and in stanzas three and five the Erl King himself speaks. In the
seventh, the Erl King and the child’s voices are combined, clearly pointing to a dramatic ending.
The very first version of the poem had no speech marks, and they were added to later versions
for the voice of the Erl King only; but dashes indicate a change of speaker.
The story has the narrative force of a ballad and is told with an onward pressing urgency: the
father riding home through the night, carrying his son who is frail and may be ill. Soon enough
the son is frightened by what he sees and hears lurking in the woods around him: a beckoning
presence, menacing and seducing him at the same time, speaking to him softly, promising
flowers, dance, girls, play, happiness, but also, in the end, threatening force. The child asks his
father repeatedly and with growing alarm whether he also sees and hears the Erl King’s
advances, but the father denies any such presence and tries to assuage the child’s terror by
soothingly explaining the child’s perceptions, pointing out natural phenomena all around them:
the swirls of mist, the whistling of the wind in the leaves, the old willow trees. Only right at the
end, when the child actually cries that harm was done to him by the Erl King, the father is
overwhelmed by terror himself: too late, the child has died in his arms.
How can we understand the poem?
There is a very good, readable and scholarly short interpretation in a book called ‘Reading
Goethe’ by Martin and Erika Swales (p. 29 – 32):
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0AY1AE3zV6AC&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=notes+on+Erlk
%C3%B6nig&source=bl&ots=1aPTSVRds2&sig=yd6I1cmbJZq67FCWR5vQjpBgYxE&hl=en&ei
=fdWlSYTsNJDRjAffiqzJBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result#PPA29,M1
It sets out some ideas clearly and persuasively, and distinguishes between a non-supernatural
and a supernatural level. On the non-supernatural level,
•
The child is frail, or ill, and is so terrified by the sounds of the night world around him that
he dies
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•
•
The child experiences auditory and visual hallucinations, due to his feeble physical state
and heightened anxieties
The father represents reason and rationality. He experiences the nightmare of seeing
his child slipping away into death
On a supernatural level,
•
•
An evil beckoning force, the Erl King, invades and dominates the human world, and
violently takes the child from his father
This evil force tempts the child, by promising pleasure and play, and even makes sexual
advances to him, threatening force: this is expressed with what has become one of the
most famous lines in all German literature: “Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich
Gewalt”
Most interpretations emphasise Goethe’s use of the past tense in the last line in the poem: “In
seinen Armen das Kind war tot”, with the use of the past, which is the narrative tense, that is to
say, the tense which is used to tell the reader ‘what happened’, the reader is taken back from a
twilight world of ‘other’ forces into the ‘real world’, the present time, as it were, where a child has
died.
On whichever level we choose to read this poem, whether we choose to believe in the
supernatural or not, the sense of urgency and drama never fails to convey an extraordinarily
dramatic and tragic event. In Erlkönig, human fears, conscious and unconscious, are tapped
into: on a more conscious level, the fear of night and darkness, the fear of a parent losing their
child, the fear of seduction and sexual temptation, the fear of violence, even rape, the fear of
death. But the story also plays with more irrational and subconscious fears: the fear of evil
spirits, menacing presences in haunted woods. Many people, when challenged, would say that
they don’t believe in ghosts, but they are nonetheless frightened of them.
Franz Schubert’s version of Erlkönig
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=200691
Franz Schubert’s setting of Erlkönig to music is the most famous of all classical versions. It was
written over 30 years after the poem itself, in 1815. Schubert (1797-1828) was then only 18
years old. He is said to have been enthralled when reading the poem for the first time and to
have jotted the score for piano down in a few minutes, but there is more than one version by
Schubert himself, so this account, by one of Schubert’s friends, may not be accurate. Goethe
himself, to whom Schubert sent his score, characteristically took no notice of it, but the song has
nonetheless become the most famous of all classical ‘Lieder’ in the German classical repertoire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Erlk%C3%B6nig
The song is extremely taxing to perform for any soloist and accompanist. The accompanist has
to maintain the furious tempo throughout, with rapid triplets re-creating the sound of a horse’s
hooves, and almost to the end. One of the most famous performances is that of Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau (born 1925) one of Germany’s most accomplished singers of ‘Lieder’. He
perfectly portrays the four different characters, or speakers, switching effortlessly between major
and minor mode, as the narrator and child are set in minor mode, the Erl King in major, and the
father both in major and minor. It could be argued that the minor mode represents the worry of
the narrator and the terror of the child, the switch between major and minor the father’s wavering
between assurance and doubt, and the minor for the Erl King, who undulates in soothing
pianissimo when seducing the child, before breaking out into menacing violence towards the
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end. The music becomes faster towards the end, with the father spurring on the horse to get
home, then slows and stops altogether when the line reporting the child’s death is delivered.
Fischer-Dieskau does this most dramatically, in a voice that has lost all emotion and reflecting
utter disbelief, shock and numbness. One final chord puts a full stop, symbolising the end of a
life.
There are many interpretations of this song on YouTube, some read, some sung, some
amateurish, some of the highest artistic quality. One point worth considering is what the relative
merits are of a male or a female artist performing the song. In the end, this must come down to
personal preference, but it could be argued that a woman artist can bring to the performance
what no male could: the essential element that is missing in the poem itself: the child’s mother,
the unthreatening female presence, furiously protective of the child. Jessye Norman’s
performance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz5TV8LWbro) reflects this clearly, while Anne
Sophie von Otter’s interpretation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdhRYMY6IEc), one of the
most dramatic ones to be found on YouTube, shows how the female voice is excellently suited
to expressing the growing pitch of the child’s terror as well as the snares of the Erl King. Here,
the piano is replaced by a chamber orchestra, with the strings driving the performance forward
and creating a more feverish pitch than a piano ever could.
Rammstein’s take on Erlkönig, ‘Dalai Lama’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_Lama_(song)
In 2004, the German heavy metal band Rammstein, produced their own version of the Erlkönig,
in the album Reise, Reise. The song is called ‘Dalai Lama’ which is in itself puzzling. The only
explanation so far that has been offered is that the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the people
of Tibet, is suffering from fear of flying. In one comment on the Song on YouTube, a contributor
also states that Rammstein’s working title for this song had been ‘Fear of Flying’, but this is not
easily verifiable.
Here are some differences between this song and its inspiration:
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Rammstein transplant the story into the modern age: father and son are on an airplane,
travelling to meet the child’s mother, as it’s her birthday. In Goethe’s poem, we are only
told that father and child are riding home, not why; somehow it’s implied that the child is
feeble or ill, but we don’t know whether the mother is waiting for them.
•
The plane in the Rammstein song is going through thunder and turbulence, air pressure
drops and all passengers are threatened with extinction. No such thing is - on a
comparable level – ever implied in Erlkönig – there are no other people around, and we
never fear for the father.
•
As in Erlkönig, at the height of his distress, the son in ‘Dalai Lama’ hears voices
beckoning him to come and stay with them. It is the ‘King of all Winds’ who has
summoned his sons to bring him this human child. These express their seduction in far
less beguiling, but also far less terrifying terms than the Erl King does: “Komm her, bleib
hier, wir sind gut zu dir, Komm her, bleib hier, wir sind Brüder dir.” There is never a
threat of violence, as in Erlkönig.
•
In the Rammstein song, the narrator takes on a much bigger role than in the Erl King,
and the father, again in contrast to Goethe’s poem, says nothing at all, no soothing
reassuring words to the son, who instead turns to God to help him.
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•
While we assume either that in Erlkönig the child dies of his terror, having seen and
heard things, or that an evil force has taken him, the death of the child in ‘Dalai Lama is
brought about by the father himself in a very disturbing twist: presumably in a fit of terror
of approaching death – we assume the plane is going down – the father presses his child
to his chest so hard that his son suffocates, and his soul joins the King of the Wind’s
sons.
Rammstein’s score imitates Schubert’s compelling theme of the rhythmic forward thrust with
guitars and drums: it’s one repetitive theme, expressing the continuous hum of an airplane. The
lyrics are expressed very clearly, with the explicit pronunciation of the German ‘r’ as ‘rolling’ ‘r’
adding to the impression of growing menace. This is also achieved by eerie guitar sounds
accompanying the core line in the song: “Weiter, weiter ins Verderben, wir müssen leben, bis wir
sterben”. In the Rammstein song, the different speakers (narrator, child, King of all Winds and
his sons) are less clearly distinguishable than those in Schubert’s version, and it is very
confusing that, in ‘Dalai Lama’, the child’s terrified cries “Das ist der König aller Winde / er will
mich zu seinem Kinde” and his prayer to God “Himmel nimm zurück den Wind / Bring uns
unversehrt zu Erden” are sung in an even lower and more menacing tone than those of the King
of all Winds himself, whereas in Schubert’s version, the voice of the child is clearly
distinguishable by its pitch. As in Erlkönig, the seducers’ lines are sung more softly, and
accompanied with undulating guitar sounds. And as in Erlkönig, the pitch towards the end
approaches hysteria, through a higher tone and even faster pace. The end of ‘Dalai Lama’ is, in
terms of the score, far less stark and shocking than of Schubert’s song, suggesting, by closing
with the seducers’ rhymes, that the child has found brothers in the sons of the King of all Winds.
.
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