6 songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Rheinlegendchen

Verlorne Müh

Das irdische Leben

Wer hat dies Liedlien erdacht?

Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen

Lob des hohen Verstandes

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 development. It didn’t mean 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 – written originally for voice and piano in 1893 but first published, like the other 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, he said, its “childish, mischievous and heartfelt” qualities and the “gentle and sunny”colouring of the accompaniment. The slightly earlier Verlorne Müh’ is another Ländler but one concerned not so much with rhythmic and harmonic wit as with characterisation: it is a meeting of the unaware with the ungracious in a decidedly one-sided conversation.

Das irdische Leben was written at much the same time as Rheinlegendchen and is as starkly realistic as the other 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).

Perhaps the most attractive and certainly the shortest of the six songs in the present selection, Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht? runs with irresistible charm on the whistling tune that so cheerfully pervades the accompaniment and so effectively joins the vocal part at the end of the first and last stanzas. The longest and musically the most ambitious is Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen. Mahler himself apparently felt that it is not a ghost that knocks on the door in the middle of the night but the lover in reality anticipating his early death on the battlefield. Either way, it is an appropriately eerie setting illuminated by brass scoring which, though the fanfares sound from beyond the grave, are magically seductive in effect.   

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.

Gerald Larner © 2009