Hilary Hahn’s Performance of Der Erlkonig

By Timothy Avery

(You can read the parent post to this essay here.)

Deciding what to analyse as a case study for my contribution to “On Human Excellence” has been very difficult. As someone who finds everything very interesting, I found myself thinking about how I should narrow down my options and select an example of human excellence which is unique in some regard, and which I have some degree of expertise in. As a violinist of six years, I was drawn immediately to the playing of Hilary Hahn, who, in my opinion, and in the opinion of my mentor, is the most skilled violinist alive. Consequently, my pick of Hilary Hahn should come as little surprise to many violinists, and classical fans alike, who have already been recognizing her excellence for a very long time.

However, I wish to draw your attention to a more niche performance from her which has garnered relatively little attention, that I nonetheless believe to be a perfect example of human excellence. For a long time, I have been intrigued not only by Hahn’s technical prowess in this performance, but also by the fact that something about this performance seemed to promote conceptual exploration for me on the concepts of art, craft, and the enjoyment we experience from these things. I will try to explore these things briefly later on.

There are many, many videos online of Hilary Hahn performing some of the most beautiful classical music ever written. When you run a search of her name on YouTube, you are greeted by many of her classic famous performances: Sibelius concerto, Brahms concerto, Dvorak, and so on. I wish to draw your attention to her performance of the piece Der Erlkonig, arranged for solo violin by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, which you can find here:

The mere name of this piece is enough to inspire terror into top-tier violinists around the world, as was the case for many of the pieces that Ernst wrote. (In fact, Hahn performed The Last Rose of Summer by Ernst during this same performance night, which is equally one of the hardest pieces in the world.) What separates the performance of this song from Hilary Hahn’s other more well-known ones, is the fact that Der Erlkonig is very rarely listened to for enjoyment. There are very few recordings of it on Spotify (the violin version), and the piece is rarely ever discussed as among a person’s favourite pieces to enjoy. Rather, it is discussed as a benchmark of the kind of cruelty that composers are capable of, and the kinds of failures that players are capable of. I do not, however, want to imply that this piece of music is not beautiful – I believe that it most certainly is. However, it is something probably best left to the listener to discover for themselves. Regardless, I think the fact that this does not seem to be a significant piece for enjoyment makes it even more perfect as a case study in human excellence, as it isolates the ‘craft’ aspect that we are interested in.

There are many ways to explain why this piece is so difficult, and as a violinist who has (thankfully) never come close to learning this piece, I can only explain the things that I notice. The first thing that struck me was how Hahn can exert extreme control over her tone. For those who don’t know, the violin is notorious for its punishing tone – its tendency to sound like a “dying cat” when the bow speed and pressure are not adjusted perfectly to what you are trying to play. As if the instrument itself were not punishing enough in this respect, Der Erlkonig is a piece where tone control seems impossible. When most people imagine beautiful violin playing, they imagine warm, silky, and haunting tones which mimic that of an expert soprano. Der Erlkonig instead demands the player to engage in a series of chords throughout the full duration of the piece. In violin talk we call these double and triple stops: this is where the player must play two or three strings at the same time with the bow. The player must attempt to use the perfect amount of bow pressure to execute the chord combinations correctly while keeping in time with the demanding tempo that the piece requires. Many of the other soloists who have performed this on YouTube have clearly failed to produce clear and consistent sound, creating dry and scratchy tones. Even others who claim that soloists such as Ning Feng produced a better interpretation of Der Erlkonig agree that such performances are less forgiving on sensitive ears.

One of the more unique difficulties of this piece is how it is polyphonic. A polyphonic piece is one that contains multiple melodies or ‘voices.’ This is probably best contextualized in Hahn’s own introduction to her performance (see her speech just before the performance in the video). As a brief summary here, Der Erlkonig was originally a Lied composed by Schubert which tells the story of a young boy who is pursued by a creature known as the Erlking, with the boy’s father as the narrator. Ernst seems to have had a “screw it” moment and composed the violin rendition to effectively ‘cram’ all these parts into a single piece for solo violin, whereas the original Lied would have multiple singers and a pianist. In other words, explained well by a line from Wikipedia “the solo violin has to perform the Erlking, the father, and the child in their different vocal colourations, but also the complete piano accompaniment at the same time.” The resulting challenge requires the player to seamlessly blend the piano accompaniment (the constant chords playing in the lower register, which the piece starts with) along with whatever ‘voice’ needs to be played. The higher-pitched melodies are the child, the gentle lullaby melodies are the Erlking luring the child in, and the father has lower melodies. Hilary Hahn puts this all together with outstanding precision. If you close your eyes while listening, it almost sounds as if two violins are being played – a sign of polyphonic perfection.

Not only is this effect difficult to achieve, but it puts further demands on the players’ tone. At about 5:33 in the video, Hahn plays a section that tests a violinist’s capacity to truly control tone and accuracy. This section portrays the Erlking luring the child away and involves the use of a technique called artificial harmonics. This is where the violinist, instead of pressing their finger all the way into the string to play a note, instead only gently touches the string with their finger to play the note. The result is a melody that sounds much like someone whistling, rather than the solid, clearer sound of normal notes. Artificial harmonics, while easy enough to play on their own, require a lot of accuracy; if you misplace your finger slightly or bow too hard, the note will sound truly awful, like nails on a chalkboard. This section at 5:33 requires that you play the artificial harmonics melody, while at the same time playing the backing melody. Hahn’s incredible control enables her to move seamlessly between the harmonic note and each backing note, each split second, never faltering and never giving up any part of the piece for accuracy.

To put things in perspective for you, look at the 1:43 mark of this video, which is the same section. This was, in my opinion, the second-best recording of Der Erlkonig on YouTube that I could find, played by Kerson Leong, a violinist described by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s Concertmaster as “one of the greatest violinists, period.” As Leong plays this section, notice first how the tempo is inconsistent – he takes liberties by drawing out certain chords to give himself time, yet he is unable to avoid squeaking and scratching on many of the notes, and outright misses a couple too. No discredit to him – I think Leong is a fantastic soloist, and to his credit he had his performance recorded in higher quality and thus revealing more imperfections in his sound, but his performance in my opinion serves to reinforce Hahn’s performance as the greatest performance of Der Erlkonig that I have seen.

While watching Hahn’s performance, I had some thoughts about Rowan’s distinction between craft and product. In this case, the distinction is very clear; Hahn’s technical prowess, in the aspects I have thus far described, resemble art in and of itself. The product on the other hand is clearly separated; the music, taken as a whole, is another kind of art. This performance, however, got me thinking about what else it might be that makes this performance so striking and so beautiful, even once craft and product have been accounted for. It led me to think about the role that dominance plays in providing access to human excellence. Not only this, but I also feel as if dominance is something that can be appreciated separately from craft, especially when we witness something which is obviously excellent, but we lack an understanding of the craft involved. Originally, I thought that this may be a third dimension of art to add to Rowan’s existing two (craft and product), but it is difficult to defend the case that dominance can be appreciated on its own as a kind of human excellence, rather than just being an important component of it. Although Rowan does incorporate some discussion of dominance into his argument, it was not given its deserved emphasis and so I will try to do that here.

When I speak of dominance, I mean the specific comparative brilliance that we see in an artist or athlete. If we borrow the example of Usain Bolt dominating an Olympic 100m sprint race from Rowan, we understand that many people will watch the race with a sense of awe whilst possessing little knowledge of the craft of an elite sprinter. This is one of many great examples where the importance of dominance in appreciating human excellence comes out. It allows the excellence in craft to be realised in the eyes of the layperson. Usain Bolt running alone within an empty stadium is probably pretty cool – watching him execute the perfect sprint alongside other world-class athletes though, feels like a new thing entirely. We see this kind of thing all the time: someone recognizes that an artist or athlete is doing something incredible, but lacks the knowledge to understand why it is incredible, as well as lacking any particular interest in that field of practice. They recognize, through the process of comparison, that something incredible has taken place and thus they experience awe. Dominance is not just a by-product, but something intimately linked with human excellence.

However, we do need to be careful in linking the concept of dominance too closely to human excellence. Dominance does not necessarily imply the existence of human excellence; it is only that human excellence often implies the existence of dominance. We may witness cases of dominance in which one bad artist out-performs another bad artist – yet no excellence exists here. Nonetheless, it is still important to understand the fact that dominance is often necessary to fully appreciate excellence of craft – if craft were not excellent, it would not be dominant. And although dominance is not a distinct version of human excellence on its own, it is still interesting how it can be appreciated in its own way. In the same way that we might appreciate a meal made by a chef without actually appreciating the chef, we may also appreciate how dominant an artist or athlete is without appreciating the craft, even though the craft is still there (and very much responsible for the dominance).

Hilary Hahn’s performance of Der Erlkonig is no exception in my books. When I was first watching the performances of this piece on YouTube, Hahn’s dominance was one of the first things that occurred to me. I was aware only that the piece was one of the hardest ever written for violin and had not yet analysed the technical demands of the piece, but I was immediately able to appreciate the clear difference between performances. It seemed to me that the more I listened to the other performances, the more I found Hahn’s beautiful. It has only been in the past year that I have begun to appreciate the piece for its musical quality.

Hopefully this essay may help someone to appreciate what happens beneath the surface in a seemingly regular solo violin performance. Appreciating music is enjoyable, but appreciating craft creates a direct link to the work ethic of the artist. Hilary Hahn is a relentlessly hard worker who posts videos of her practice online regularly – quite often showing her looking like a zombie or a machine, crunching away at the brutal hours required for perfection. I hope also that this essay may serve as a basic introduction to classical music and performance for some people, enabling people to better appreciate other classical performances, and to tolerate how bad I sound when I play the violin!