On January 31, my friends and I marked Schubert’s birthday listening to a remarkable quartet, the Erlkings, at Wigmore Hall in London.
This crossover band from Austria is fronted by an American baritone/guitarist who sings everything in English translation. They specialize in Schubert (their name comes, of course, from “Der Erlkönig,” one of his small masterpieces), but they have branched out into Schumann and Beethoven as well, taking early 19th-century art songs and turning them into contemporary popular song.
Well, that makes them sound just a bit horrible to a lover of Schubert like myself, but—trust me!—they’re splendid, thoughtful interpreters of the songs. Or don’t trust me, and see for yourself on the streaming platform of your choice.
The reason I’m writing about them now, though, is the way their performance of that namesake song has been sticking in my head. “Der Erlkönig,” if you don’t know it, is a poem by Goethe, best known today through its terrifying musical setting by Schubert. A father rides through the night with his feverish child, who sees and hears the seductive, menacing Erlking—an otherworldly figure who coaxes, cajoles, and finally threatens him. The accompaniment’s relentless gallop—cello, tuba, and percussion here taking the place of Schubert’s fortepiano—mimics the horse’s hooves while the singer rapidly alternates between narrator, father, son, and Erlking. The father finally reaches his home, but the song ends brutally: “In his arms the child was dead.”
But when Brian Benner reached the end of the song in the performance I attended, instead of “the boy was dead,” he sang, “the boy went to bed.”
Even those who didn’t know Schubert’s original could tell that neither the text nor the music was leading to this ending, and when the applause subsided, Benner shrugged apologetically and gestured to one of his colleagues. “He had a baby this year and I can’t sing the other ending anymore.”
A small moment in a terrific recital, but it has stuck with me because it encapsulates the power of the imaginative world created by the artists I go to see, hear, and experience.
I’m reminded of another time when the imagined world became too real. The actor Martin Hutson came to speak to the theater group I was part of ten years ago, and when asked how an audience affects a performance, he recounted a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Titus Andronicus he was in. At one point, when the actor playing Lucius was threatening to kill Aaron’s baby, he would hand the baby—an inanimate doll—to an audience member in the front row. Invariably, Hutson told us, the audience member would cradle the doll like a real child. One evening, the woman holding the baby refused to give it back.
That’s not just a moment requiring an actor to improvise, it’s a moment that encapsulates the spell we fall under during a performance. Is it a doll? Is it a baby? The audience member—no doubt a sane, rational person in real life—certainly knew the difference. And just as certainly she knew in her heart that she needed to protect that baby.
Why do we go to the theater? Or why do I go to the theater? It’s to feel that heightened reality, to experience danger, grief—all the frightening emotions—in an imaginative space that’s both safe and not safe. Safe, because I know at the end that everyone will appear smiling and unhurt at the curtain call. Not so safe, because in the best performances I feel the inevitable pain that we all must bear as human beings in this world.
And that perhaps touches on why Benner’s revised ending stays with me. I know the Erlking is imaginary, I know the baby is a doll, I know that everyone on stage lives to take the curtain call. But sometimes the imagined world is just a little too present, a little too real, and an audience member—or even the performer himself—feels the need to break the spell.
Even as I felt the approach of Schubert’s inevitable tragic ending, I found myself responding to Benner’s softening of it, relieved despite myself. We need that imaginative world to feel fully alive to grief and terror, but occasionally it presses so close to our own lives that someone flinches—and the boy goes to bed.
Leave a Reply