The biography of the forest king

The country of Austria is a “forest king” - a work in which a romantic attraction to the unusual, fantastic images, to plots, where real is sometimes inseparable from fictional, was clearly manifested. The appeal to the genre of ballad is characteristic. For poets and musicians of the romantic direction, this kind of art has a special attractiveness. The ballad, one of the forms of folk poetic creativity, goes into the distant Middle Ages with its roots.

Having survived a long evolution, the ballad formed in the epic-dramatic genre with its typical signs. First of all, these are plot works. The plots of Ballad are legendary, sometimes inspired by distant historical events or ancient traditions transformed by folk rumor. The development of action often occurs against a gloomy-fantastic background, in unusual conditions. Ballad is a detailed epic canvas, in which an objective narrative of a long time passed freely into a dramatic show of events; At the same time, epic and drama do not exclude personal author’s attitude, lyrical digressions.

An plexus of epic, dramatic and lyrical revealed a wide scope of creative imagination.

In German poetry, the revival and new life of the ballad owes Goethe, Schiller, Heine. Tsumphgega - Schubert was still fond of his ballads in the Convict. Schubert himself has not much songs, and the “forest king” remains the most perfect creation of his new genre of romantic music in this new genre. But it is characteristic of Schubert that the condensed fantastic of the picture of the “forest king”, a gloomy night, a frantic jump of a horse, delusional visions of a dying child, he clothes into real images of the actual world, which is why the drama of what is happening is more tangible, acutely impressive.

At the same time, the harmony of all the relationships is remarkable: through musical and dramatic development and symmetry of forms, vocal and instrumental principles, expressiveness and visualization. The rhythm of escort, its continuous heavy beating octave and chord rehearsals with triols, permeates the ballad, fastens and unites all parts of the whole. In this non-stop octave fraction-imitation of the horse’s clatter, a jump-an alarming-excited gamma-like upsets into the bass are interrupted.

Combining visual and expressive techniques, Schubert creates a complete visual-liable illusion. The ballad begins with a large piano entry, the material of which continues to develop in the escort party. In addition to the piano entry, there is also a vocal framing, that is, a vocal introduction and afterword; It is conducted on behalf of the narrator: who jumps, who rushes under the cold hare?

The riding is belated, with him a young son. The storyteller’s words ended: his dead baby lay in his hands. Zhukovsky the rest of the text is a direct speech distributed between his father, his son and the forest king. Real persons - the narrator, father, child - are united by the proximity of the intonation system. But in accordance with the text, new strokes are brought to the music of ballads, which shade individual features, the condition of each character.

In the storyteller’s melodies, chord sounds, quinta, quart moves prevail; This gives her the nature of the dramatic recitation: in the parties of the father and child, the drama of feelings is expressed by enhanced chromatization of the melody, exacerbation of recitative and declining revolutions, tension of the tessature itself, especially in the party of the child. His phrases are distinguished by the rigid dissonance of the low seconds and nons, which arise from continuous “friction” of the vocal melody and octave rehearsals in the piano party: the dramatic remarks of real characters are contrasting with a alluring, attracting the sweetness of the speeches of the forest king.

Its melody with smooth and rounded cadents is permeated by the intonations of names; The texture of the escort is gathering in as if rustling, slightly “dancing” chords, it “spreads” in harmonic figures: only for the third time, when attempts to lure the child replace threats - “child, I am captivated by your beauty: it is bombed, or you will be mine,” the main material of the ballad, and the party of the forest king is included in the general repriser.

Here, development reaches maximum stress and dynamized reprise develops into the culmination of the entire work.