Erlkönig-Archive

Formation: Baritone, piano, player piano and string quartet
Creation: 2024-25
Duration:  35 min.
Premiere:  29-10-2025. Festival Coma / Sala Berlanga (Madrid). Pablo Rossi (bar.), Mario Prisuelos (pno.), Leonor Quartet, Víctor Velasco (stage direction)

Erlkönig is undoubtedly J. W. von Goethe’s most emblematic and representative poem. Best known for Schubert’s widely recorded musical adaptation, in the first few years after its publication alone there were more than 30 different musical settings (Beethoven, Loewe, Schroter, Reichardt…), and since then a huge number of interpretative studies, translations, versions, and derivative works have appeared.
What, then, is Erlkönig today? To what extent can we separate that original ballad from 1782 from this immense network of multiplicities that continues to grow?
The present version is a version of versions, an archive in which the particular meaning is constantly diluted in all those others with which the supposed obviousness of the here and now coexists. Starting from Schubert’s lied as a kind of obsessive motor from which the poem is explored, it will gradually disintegrate into multiple material elements (a player piano, the string quartet, the video projection…) and immaterial elements (musicalizations, adaptations, translations, interpretations…). In this way, the challenge is to talk about our virtualized and saturated information society through the mouths of the characteristic characters of the original poem: the external narrator, the father of evidence and objectivity, the blinding glare of the Earl King (Erlkönig), and the son who struggles helplessly between reality and seemingly unreal fantasy.