Schubert's "Erlkönig:" Motivic Parallelism and Motivic Transformation

Abstract

In his landmark 1978 paper on motivic parallelism, Charles Burkhart demonstrated how the opening gesture of Schubert's piano introduction to Erlk6nig prefigures with two important surface motives-the arpeggiation and the neighbor-note figure--the song's large-scale tonal design: G-Bb-D-EK-D-G (see ex. 1).1 Burkhart further noted that the tonicizations that form this middleground parallelism coincide with the entreaties of the Erlking and thereby reflect the ongoing drama of the poetry. Taking these two notions of motivic parallelism and dramatic/harmonic association as a point of departure, I propose in this paper that Schubert's song achieves its richness of poetic depiction and musical coherence through two additional means. First, several musical motives and their associated poetic images are transformed in special ways; second, those motivic transformations create within the song a special form of coherence, a unity that involves a chromatic middleground structure.2 Because the song's structure is so intensely linked to that of the poem, we begin with an examination of the poetry itself (see box).3