Three Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Der Schildwacher Nachtlied

Revelge

Lob des hohen Verstands

There is no more convincing example of composer and text apparently made for each other than Gustav Mahler and the German folk songs collected by Arnim and Brentano and published in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boy’s Magic Horn”) early in the nineteenth century. Between 1888 and 1896 Mahler made more than twenty settings of songs from the anthology, some with piano accompaniment but most for voice and orchestra. The effect they had on him, liberating a whole area of his imagination and providing the inspiration for significant sections of at least four of his symphonies, is incalculable.

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 of the heaven-sent compatibility of the composer and the folk-song texts. This first of Mahler’s military-march songs contrasts the opening soldierly material, characterised by trumpet calls and drum rolls, with seductively feminine interventions, alluringly coloured by strings and woodwind, in an eerily inconclusive dialogue. There is no such distraction from reality in Revelge, another military-march inspiration but a bitterly ironic one which finds no glory in war and no consolation: marching past his sweetheart’s house, the drummer boy feels only pain, as the distortion of the vocal line so vividly confirms. The macabre orchestration of the interlude before the last stanza is a particularly chilling sound in an extended and unremitting expression of anguish. The last but one of his Wunderhorn settings, written in 1899, it was once described by Mahler as “the most important” of all his songs.

Mahler’s 1896 setting of Wettstreit des Kuckucks mit der Nachtigall (The Competition between the Cuckoo and the Nightingale), which he retitled Lob des hohen Verstandes, was still in the composer’s mind six years later, when he was working on his Fifth Symphony: a clear reference to it introduces the high-flown counterpoint of the Finale. In that case the irony is directed at the composer himself. The original song, on the other hand, is a wickedly satirical caricature of his uncomprehending, donkey-like critics. Whether even the biggest ears among them detected the discreet allusion to Die Meistersinger, on the words “Täten ein Wett’ anschlagen,” one rather doubts.

Gerald Larner ©2007