Pain and Secrets

Worse than a pronated grip chin-up routine, Schubert's fiendish "Erlkönig" provides a tortured muscle-flailing workout like no other:



Think of it: 4 minutes of spastic, non-stop, high-speed, highly coordinated repetitions...my arms feel like falling off barely a third of the way through! What i'd give to be able to play this on a nice, light 19th century Pleyel instead of our modern Steinway elephants...

My old teacher, Jorge Bolet, was the quintessential master of pianistic cheating. Hand over substitutions, clever fingering, subtle note omissions - his point was as long as it sounded good, who cares how you get the results? Here's my humble approach at cheating the fearsome Erlkönig:



The red lines indicate where the left hand leaps up to give my right arm some relief - both hands simultaneously finger out the octave orgies with 3-2-1's.

Interestingly, a YouTube video of Fischer-Dieskau's pianist (whom i suspect to be the famed Gerald Moore, but i could be wrong...) reveals an even cleverer cheat - look carefully at the pianist's hands at the very beginning of the video:



Here's what this cheat looks like on paper:



Essentially what's happening is that the pianist is taking the first note of every right hand triplet (wherever possible) as a single note with the left hand (omitting the top octave note of the right hand). Hey, sounds good to me - and sure is a LOT easier than being slavishly faithful to the masochistic muscle shredding score!






tags: Erlkönig, Fischer-Dieskau, erlkonig, erlkoenig, Schubert, lied, lieder, piano, vocal, baritone, song, Gerald, Moore, accompanist, collaborative, piano, score, fingering, Jorge, Bolet



tags: Erlkönig, Fischer-Dieskau, erlkonig, erlkoenig, Schubert, lied, lieder, piano, vocal, baritone, song, Gerald, Moore, accompanist, collaborative, piano, score, fingering, Jorge, Bolet

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