4 songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Rheinlegendchen (1893)

Das irdische Leben (1893)

Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (1895)

Lob des hohen Verstandes (1896)

Mahler’s discovery in 1887 of Des Knaben Wunderhorn - Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s anthology of German folk poetry published in two volumes in 1805 and 1808 respectively - was a turning point in his career. It wasn’t a complete change of direction, since he had long favoured the folk idiom in the texts he chose (or even wrote) for song-setting. But in Des Knaben Wunderhorn he found a collection of such breadth, depth and variety that it took him thirteen years or more, not only in his songs but also in his symphonies, to realise its creative potential.

Rheinlegendchen - composed in a voice-and-piano version in 1893 but first published, like the other three songs in this group, among the ten Wunderhorn settings for voice and orchestra in 1899 - is a particularly delightful example in its naive sentiment and its playful Ländler rhythms combined with teasingly but not incongruously sophisticated harmonies. The melodic material was actually in Mahler’s mind before he discovered the words to go with it. What pleased him about his setting was its “childish, mischievous and heartfelt” qualities, and the “gentle and sunny”colouring of the accompaniment.

Das irdische Leben was written at much the same time as Rheinlegendchen and is as starkly realistic as its companion is fanciful. With its tragic outcome implicit from the start in its Lydian minor harmonies, it sets what the composer described as “the tortured and anguished cries of the child” and “the slow monotonous replies of the mother” against an accompaniment that “roars and whistles like a storm” (so memorably in fact that it found its way into the Purgatorio third movement of the Tenth Symphony seventeen years later). Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen is no happier in the end, but in the romantic episodes between its eerie trumpet calls, apprehension is temporarily relieved by soothing modulations and lyrically affectionate melodic lines.

Lob des hohen Verstandes (a clear reference to which introduces the high-flown counterpoint of the Finale of the Fifth Symphony) is directed at the composer’s uncomprehending critics. The allusion to Die Meistersinger on the words “Täten ein Wett’ anschlagen,” discreetly ironic as it is, probably escaped even the biggest ears of the objects of Mahler’s wickedly satirical caricature.