Music and Interpretation

photo of Aaron Jay Kernis

As Leta E. Miller points out in her full-length biography on Kernis, in the period leading up to the composition of Goblin Market, Kernis was attracting recognition, prizes and commissions and was a composer to watch (p. 71). Miller sees Kernis as developing from his early success by then gravitating toward weightier themes for his next compositions:  “The years 1991–95 are marked by a proliferation of dark, brooding works responding to world conflicts, most notably, the Second Symphony (1991), a reaction to the first Gulf War; Still Movement with Hymn (1993), provoked by the war in Bosnia; Colored Field (1994), inspired by his 1989 visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau; and Lament and Prayer (1995), a memorial to the Holocaust" (p. 71). Seeing Goblin Market in the context of Kernis’s trend toward more serious themes highlights the darker and more mature interpretation that Kernis brings to Rossetti’s poem. Kernis’s sophisticated composition reveals an appreciation for the poem’s layers of profound and complex meanings. 

a darker "Goblin Market"

In an undated note on Goblin Market in his personal archive, Kernis traced the composition's initial impulse to “the tangled roots of desire, seduction and the loss of innocence at the heart of the text, which connects to our own end-of-century lack of innocence” (qtd in Miller, p. 78). This comment makes explicit Kernis’s movement beyond the fairy tale mode so often foregrounded in readings of the poem, associating his Goblin Market instead with deeply felt human experience of real-world threats and present-day conflicts and losses. Elsewhere, Kernis described Rossetti’s poem as “Dense with symbolism and sexual allusions, passionate and decadent—a . . . journey through the darkest areas of the psyche” (qtd in Miller, p. 77).

This emotional complexity can be heard in the music itself. Commenting on Goblin Market, Kernis said, “I thought that such a dark story warranted a similarly gloomy musical language” (qtd in Miller, p. 79). Kernis’s darker and more mature interpretation of the poem is heard throughout the score in the often dissonant, “crunchy” and densely textured sound. Kernis describes Goblin Market as “one of my most chromatic works, using harmony in a strongly expressionist way reminiscent of the spirit of early Schoenberg. . . . [Nevertheless] the climax of the piece is reached through the explosion of an ultra-consonant chorale, almost provocatively based on very simple tonal harmonies” (qtd in Miller, p. 79). 

The musical climax comes in Part 2, scene 3 after a cured and rejuvenated Laura awakes, “And light danced in her eyes.” The triumphant climax builds through ascending passages (pp. 338-39) and arrives in measure 415 at its lush, harmonious and Romantic apex. The dynamic markings call for forte and fortissimo playing, the music to be played “Broadly, but with movement” (p. 340). The flute, oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon, piano, cello and bass parts are marked “molto,” while the B-flat clarinet, trumpet and horn are “soaring, singing, legato” and the violin and viola are “vigoroso.”