3 Ballads

Erlkönig Op. 1 No. 3 (1823?)

Herr Oluf Op. 2 No. 2; (1821)

Die Walpurgisnacht Op. 2 No. 3 (1824)

Loewe’s night-ride ballad Erlkönig is in a different tradition from that to which Schubert’s setting of the same words belongs. Each episode in the story has its own melodic material, metre and    tonality. Beginning in G minor in a galloping 9/8, it changes to G major in a lilting 6/8 as the Erlking makes his first entry and to a dancing 9/8 for his daughters. The construction is not as episodic, however, as that of its companion night-ride ballad. Driven by piano tremolandos at the same quick tempo and retaining a compound metre from beginning to near the end while the tonality remains centred on G, Erlkönig is lacking in neither unity nor continuity.

Herr Oluf, which Herder translated from a Danish folk source before Goethe adapted it for his Erlkönig, inspired a much more diverse Loewe setting. Although it is held together in the first half by the E minor dance tune of the Erlking’s daughter, after the delivery of the fatal blow it changes direction – stuttering into the C sharp minor conversation between Oluf and his mother, slowing the tempo to Andantino for the gracious E major entry of his bride, and the dramatic E minor ending. Colourful though it is, however, Herr Oluf is outshone by the brilliance of Die Walpurgisnacht. It challenges even Brahms’s duet setting of the same words in scary piano writing, in characterisation, as harmonies and dynamics change with the mother’s replies to the daughter, in weird modulations and in narrative pace as the dialogue become ever more intense before the mother’s octave leap into the last bar. Die Walpurgisnacht was a special favourite with Richard Wagner who enjoyed singing it to his friends.