Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Mahler)

The settings of Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Gustav Mahler are orchestral songs and voice and piano settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn ('The Youth's Magic Horn') a collection of anonymous German folk poems assembled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano and published by them, in heavily redacted form, between 1805 and 1808. 10 songs set for soprano or baritone and orchestra were first published by Mahler as a cycle in 1905. but in total 12 orchestral songs exist, and a similar number of songs for voice and piano.

Mahler's self-composed text for the first of his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ('Songs of a Travelling Journeyman', regularly translated as 'Songs of a Wayfarer'; 1884–1885) is clearly based on the Wunderhorn poem 'Wann mein Schatz'; his first genuine settings of Wunderhorn texts, however, are found in the Lieder und Gesänge ('Songs and Airs'), published in 1892 and later renamed by the publisher as Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit ('Songs and Airs from Days of Youth'). The nine Wunderhorn settings therein were composed between 1887 and 1890, and occupied the second and third volumes of this three-volume collection of songs for voice and piano. The titles of these nine songs (different in many cases from the titles of the original poems) are as follows:

Volume II:

Volume III:

Mahler began work on his next group of Wunderhorn settings in 1892. A collection (not a 'cycle') of 12 of these was published in 1899, under the title Humoresken ('Humoresques'), and formed the basis of what is now known simply (and somewhat confusingly) as Mahler's 'Songs from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn"'. Whereas the songs in the Lieder und Gesänge collection were conceived for voice and piano, with no orchestral versions being produced by the composer, the Humoresken were conceived from the first as being for voice and orchestra, even though Mahler's first step was the production of playable and publishable voice-and-piano versions. The titles in this 1899 collection are:

'Urlicht' (composed ?1892, orch. July 1893) was rapidly incorporated (with expanded orchestration) into the 2nd Symphony (1888–1894) as the work's fourth movement; 'Es sungen drei Engel', by contrast, was specifically composed as part of the 3rd Symphony (1893–1896): requiring a boys' chorus in addition to an alto soloist, it is the only song among the twelve for which Mahler did not produce a 'singer-with-orchestra' version and the only one which he did not first publish separately. (Other songs found themselves serving symphonic ends in other ways: a singer-less version of "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" forms the basis of the Scherzo in the 2nd Symphony, and "Ablösung im Sommer" is adopted in the same way by the 3rd.)

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