5 Lieder from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Der Schildwache Nachtlied (1888-92)

Der Tambourg'sell (1901)

Lied des Verfolgten im Turm (1898)

Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht (1892)

Verlorne Müh’ (1892)

Although he must have known Des Knaben Wunderhorn - the Arnim and Brentano collection of 500 German folk songs published in two volumes in 1805 and 1808 respectively - Schubert evidently took no interest in it as a source of texts for his Lieder. Schumann turned to it for no more than two songs in the Liederalbum für die Jugend and, for all his interest in folk song, Brahms drew on it for only one duet and two partsongs. For Mahler, on the other hand, Des Knaben Wunderhorn was a revelation, an inspiration for not ony 23 songs but also for significant sections of his Second, Third and Fourth symphonies.

The earliest of Mahler’s Wunderhorn settings - in the sense that it was sketched in 1888 although it wasn’t completed until 1892 - Der Schildwache Nachtlied is an immediate demonstration that the folk-song texts and the composer were made for each other. The first of his many military-march allusions is offset here by seductive interventions in an eerily inconclusive dialogue. Like the last three songs in this group, Der Schildwache Nachtlied was first performed with orchestra and published in group of ten such settings in 1899. Der Tambourg’sell, the last of Mahler’s Wunderhorn Lieder - published with a Wunderhorn companion, Revelge, and the five Rückert Lieder in 1905 - is another march but one of such tragic dimensions that it has parallels not only with the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies but also, in its lingering “Gute Nacht,” with Das Lied von der Erde.

Lied des Verfolgten im Turm is not so much a dialogue as an alternation, stanza by stanza, of two contrasting monologues - the prisoner defiant in mainly minor keys, the girl outside dreaming in the major - until grim reality seals the harmonic fate at the end. The remaining two Wunderhorn songs are less serious. Both of them Ländler, Wer hat dies Liedlien erdacht? is a conflation of two poems united by the cheerful whistling motif introduced in the opening bars, while Verlorne Müh’, in what the girl hopes is a seductive slower tempo, proves to be a rather one-side dialogue.