The earliest and (for most musicians) greatest master of the lied is Franz Schubert. He wrote close to seven hundred songs in his short lifetime. In his eighteenth year, 1815, he averaged better than a song every two days! Many of these are quite short tunes with simple piano accompaniments, but Schubert’s tunes are like nobody else’s; he was a wonderfully spontaneous melodist. Later in life his melodies became richer but no less beautiful, and taken together with their poems, the songs often show remarkable psychological penetration.

One of those songs from 1815 was an instant hit: “Erlkönig” (The Erlking), published as the composer’s opus 1, and still today Schubert’s best-known lied. In those early years, Schubert wrote a considerable number of long, narrative songs, though this one stands out from the others in its dramatic intensity.

The poem is by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest literary figure of the day — by turns a Romantic and a Classical poet, novelist, playwright, naturalist, and philosopher, and a favorite source of texts for many generations of lied composers. Cast in the old storytelling ballad form, which enjoyed a vogue in the Romantic era, and dealing with death and the supernatural, the poem is famous in its own right.

Though Goethe’s poem consists of eight parallel stanzas, they are not set to the same music. Schubert provided the later stanzas with different or modified music; such a song is said to be through-composed. (A song that repeats the same music over and over for all its stanzas is called strophic; see page 50.) The poem certainly invites this kind of musical setting, as its mood changes dramatically as it goes along. A father rides furiously through the night with a child who is presumably running a high fever, for he claims to see and hear a murderous demon. The Erlking first beckons the child, then cajoles him, then threatens and assaults him. The father — uncomprehending, even impatient — tries to quiet the boy, but by the time they reach home the boy is — dead!

The opening piano introduction sets the mood of dark, tense excitement. The right hand hammers away at harsh repeated notes in triplets, representing the horse’s hooves, while the left hand has an agitated motive:

Schubert invented different music for the poem’s three characters (and also the narrator). Each “voice” characterizes the speaker in contrast to the others. The father is low, stiff, and gruff, the boy high and frantic. Marked ppp, and inaudible to the father, the ominously quiet and sweet little tunes crooned by the Erlking, offering his “schöne Spiele” — lovely games — add a chilling note.

Two things help hold this long song together. First, the piano’s triplet rhythm continues ceaselessly, until the very last line, where recitative style lets us know that the ride is over. (The triplets are muffled during the Erlking’s speeches — because the child is hearing him in a feverish daze?) Second, there are some telling musical repetitions: the agitated riding motive (stanzas 1–2 and 8), and a desperately strained phrase sung higher and higher by the boy as he appeals to his father (stanzas 4, 6, and 7).