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Schubert and Goethe (paintings by Wilhelm August Rieder, 1825/75 and Joseph Karl Stieler, 1828) (Wikipedia)

Goethe’s poem – a high water mark for early Romanticism – derives its subject from folklore generally and from the premedieval Scandinavian ballad Elveskud specifically. “Elveskud” is Danish for “Elf-shot,” and “Erl-King” is commonly translated as “Elf-King.” In fact, the song title’s etymology is thorny. While the Danish word “Ellerkonge” does indeed mean “Elf-King,” the German cognate “Erlkönig” literally translates as “King of the alder trees,” and a race of elf-like “alder tree people” – the Ellefolket – figure in Danish folklore. This implies that the sinister entity portrayed in “Der Erlkönig” is closely allied with the forest. He also clearly has little in common with modern notions of elves – as either Santa’s twinkle-eyed helpers or the mystic Aryans of Tolkien-style fantasy.

Nils Blommér: “Meadow Elves” (1850, oil on canvas)
(Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Wikipedia)

He does, however, have everything to do with Romanticism – that revolutionary style that straddled the 18th and 19th centuries, rattling Enlightenment era rationalism by exalting the monsters unleashed by reason’s sleep. Goethe and Schubert spanned the (Neo-) Classical and Romantic periods and served as cultural bridges between the two. Their renderings of “Der Erlkönig” strikingly assimilate the former’s values of balance and restraint with the latter’s themes of dramatic emotion, turbulent nature, and occult realms of fairy and folk tale.

“My son, why cover your face in such fear?”
“You see the elf-king, father? He’s near!”

(Zeydel)

“Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?”
“My son, ’tis the mist rising over the plain.”

(Bowring)

Sheet music (1894)
(Petrucci Music Library)

Lied worked well with such motifs. An intimate art, better suited to drawing rooms than opera houses, its focus on the expressive powers of a lone vocalist mirrored Romanticism’s elevation of the individual (“All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire,” wrote Goethe, “but my heart is all my own”). Its mission to match poetry with music, word for word and line for line, squared with the movement’s call to swap a century’s dispassionate, didactic verse for, in the words of one reformer (William Wordsworth), “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Today, Lied has the stuffy reputation of an ultimate snob’s art. But in the Victorian era art-song was, in a sense, a folk music of the bourgeoisie. Long before Western living rooms were organized around a television, house-guests were typically seated in relation to a piano. And if you had such an item (and many middle-class people did), someone in the household could probably play and knew at least a parlor song or two. Many of these were sentimental and unimaginative – the pop schlock of their era. But in those pre-Victrola days, finer, more meaningful fare by Schubert or Fauré or Brahms provided moments of respite – in one’s own home and, possibly, one’s own voice.

Parlor songs at the piano (c.1890, photographer unknown)

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