President Erlkönig
Franz Schubert wrote a piano accompaniment that sounds the way it feels to be gaslit.
It’s in his musical setting of Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” analyzed by every music major ever. It’s brilliant on every level from the most obvious superficial manipulations of mode and range to subtle nuance and structural metaphor.
The poem is about a boy riding on a horse with his father, saying, “Yikes, Dad, the Erlking is coming!” The dad doesn’t believe him, and the Erlking tempts the kid with candy in his van, and by the time the dad believes the kid, it’s too late.
No wonder I can’t get it out of my head.
I feel like running around screaming because the president of my country lies an average of 7.6 times a day.
“Everything’s fine,” the world coos. “You’re overreacting.”
Goethe knows what happens when the world ignores a creeping threat: a kid dead in the arms of the father who didn’t believe him. More the point, as Dr. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes points out, Goethe knows what happens when our culture shouts down the truth in our own hearts: crushed souls in the people who could be making the world a better place.
And Schubert’s nightmare of a piano accompaniment sounds exactly like it feels to be gaslit: panic, anxiety, dread, while that creepy motive keeps coming back to the left hand to pinch your ass and call you sweetie.
My brain grabs onto music that sounds how I feel, so I have that doodly-doodly-doot-doot-dooooo stuck in my head, and Schubert did not give us any hope or any solution. So I had to unstick myself without Schubert’s help.
Real problems are real. But they’re separate from my experience of them. I can’t solve the problems right here right now. But I can deal with my feelings of frustration and fear for the moment, to give me comfort and hope to get up and try to face reality again tomorrow.
Prescription: Mahler.
CHORUS
With wings, which I have won,
I shall soar upwards
I shall die, to live!
CHORUS, SOPRANO AND ALTO
Rise again, yea, thou wilt rise again,
My heart, in the twinkling of an eye!
What thou hast fought for
Shall lead thee to God!
Unlike Schubert’s tiny little art song for one singer and one pianist telling the story of two people, an elf, and a horse; Mahler harnesses enormous forces of full chorus and orchestra to communicate the first person experience of a single individual. Why? Because the experience of an individual requires great art to express; because it deserves a cast of thousands to tell. Because the spirit of an individual set free is so much more powerful than any tiny-handed Elf King.
Ahhhhhhhhh. Thanks to Lenny and Gustav and the cast of thousands, I don’t feel doomed. Hope makes it possible to fight a little longer. Maybe Mahler will even get me to the midterms.
