It’s a Monday morning in Autumn, and time for a bit of Sturm und Drang.
(and this is where I confess that I just had to look up ‘Drang’, which turns out to mean stress. There you go. We all learned something new there…)
Erlkönig is, when it comes down to it, just a fabulous piece of music. It’s clever, clever musical writing that builds on Goethe’s spooky poem until you can just about hear what’s going on without understanding the words. Incidentally, this is another one of those pieces of music where you slightly hate the composer for composing something so spectacular at the age of 18 – not to mention for writing something with such a wrist-destroying left right hand part (all those octave triplets are just cruel).
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8noeFpdfWcQ&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]