Gade: Erlkönigs Tochter

Lingua disponibile: inglese

No relation between Niels Gade's Erlenkönig and the Erl-King that was ballad-ified by Goethe and set to music by Schubert. The original Danish, in fact, is Elverskud, or in other words elfin shot (from a rifle, a musket, or whatever) but the closeness of the words means that the translation put down as Erle [or alder] which should in fact have been elf – presumably the celebrity gloss provided by Goethe and Schubert was the cause of the spot of sleight of hand that saw it confounded with the better-known German version. So Niels Gade's work is really called Elverskud, initially translated into German as Erlkönigs Tochter, and the hero of this "ballad based on three Danish folk tales" has nothing to do with any alders at all. The plot? Sir Oluf has been seduced by lady elves. He was set to wed - not with an elfin lady, of course - but things took a turn for the worse when Oluf, to his mother's astonishment, took off on horseback in the middle of the night. He explains that his heart is torn in two between his beautiful fiancée - blonde with blue eyes - and the daughter of the elfin King - with black locks and a smouldering glance. Despite his mother's entreaties, Oluf heads for the dark and dangerous forest where he finds the elfin daughters. The daughter of the King of the elves demands that he stays; he refuses; she curses him; he manages to get away and returns home. But when he arrives, he is met by Death himself... Finalé: the choir sings a short moral which enjoins the audience never to tarry with elves and certainly never to go into their hilltop kingdoms. Gade's sumptuous, very romantic work, completed in 1854, is presented as a kind of great cantata, originally written in Danish, but whose German translation – Erlkönigs Tochter – was published in 1855 and widely distributed across Europe, before conquering North America, Russia, and even Australia! Ten years later, Gade gave his score a very serious makeover: instrumentation, the shape of several passages, and it is this definitive version - moreover the only version which would be conducted by the composer himself - which is recorded here, a discographical world first. © SM/Qobuz