Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

In German legend, the Erl-King or Erlkönig is a spooky, supernatural being who haunts forests and preys on young, innocent souls. The Austrian composer Franz Schubert wrote a very famous art song about it, based on an equally famous ballad by Goethe. But the main inspiration behind this piece is more recent: a short story from The Bloody Chamber by the 20th Century English author Angela Carter.

The bare bones of Carter's story are faithful to the original. But while Goethe's Erlkönig is a sinister, spectral goblin, Carter's 'Erl-King' is a man, seemingly born from the forest's will: mysterious, captivating, adoring-but dangerously so. And while the victim in Goethe's poem is a boy who pleads frantically with his father to save him from the spirit's clutches, Carter's protagonist is female. She also walks, 'willingly', into the Erl-King's wooded domain (no galloping on horseback in this story).

Here she is entranced by the Erl-King's song, which he uses to call birds from the sky so that they might be his companions. Together, they explore and enjoy the dark, tangled depths of the woods, and, mesmerised by the swirling green gaze of his eyes, she reciprocates the Erl-King's love, submitting herself to his will. But the more she gives of herself, the more she realises the Erl-King's true intentions: to transform and trap her, in a cage, like the birds.

Carter's lush, spellbinding imagery-of rustling leaves, singing birds, hypnotic eyes, and a man who is one with the forest-has been a wellspring of inspiration for my orchestral version: a kind of tone poem that's also full of musical symbols, and is steeped in the musical traditions of Romanticism. Keen listeners will hear I've borrowed the famous opening notes from Schubert's song setting, but I've twisted and reshaped them into a series of new motifs that at turns sound like treading footsteps, mysterious calls, plaintive cries, and doom-laden warnings.

Like the forest setting of Carter's tale, this music shimmers and glistens, winding and turning like a strange fairy-tale which ends with a surprise: a wrenching discord as the protagonist strangles her demonic lover with his own hair, frees the trapped birds, and flees the forest to the discordant sounds of a fiddle playing itself in a twisted danse macabre.

But after this joyous, triumphant flight, the closing bars of this tone poem leave you ill-at-ease, and the final strident chord smacks you like a blunt question mark: did she really escape, or is this just another figment of our protagonist's enchanted mind, and she's still trapped in the Erl-King's 'bird haunted' nightmare?

This music is ultimately a love letter to German romanticism, and to the dark and delicious ambiguity that is the heart of Angela Carter's genius.