The songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Gustav Mahler are voice-and-piano and voice-and-orchestra settings of German folk poems chosen from a collection of the same name assembled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano and published by them, in heavily redacted form, between 1805 and 1808. Ten 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.
History of composition
Mahler's self-composed text for the first of his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen is clearly based on the Wunderhorn poem 'Wenn mein Schatz'; his first genuine settings of Wunderhorn texts, however, are found in the Lieder und Gesänge, published in 1892 and later renamed by the publisher as Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit. 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 are as follows: Volume II:
"Um schlimme Kinder artig zu machen" – To Teach Naughty Children to be Good
"Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald" – I Went Happily Through a Green Wood
"Aus! Aus!" – Finished! Finished!
"Starke Einbildungskraft" – Strong Imagination
Volume III:
"Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz" – On the Ramparts of Strassburg
Mahler began work on his next group of Wunderhorn settings in 1892. A collection of 12 of these was published in 1899, under the title Humoresken, and formed the basis of what is now known simply 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 beginning 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:
"Der Schildwache Nachtlied" – The Sentinel's Nightsong
"Verlor'ne Müh" – Labour Lost
"Trost im Unglück" – Solace in Misfortune
"Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?" – Who Thought up this Song?
"Das irdische Leben" – The Earthly Life
"Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" – St. Anthony of Padua's Sermon to the Fish
"Rheinlegendchen" – Little Rhine Legend
"Lied des Verfolgten im Turm" – Song of the Persecuted in the Tower, see: Die Gedanken sind frei
"Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" – Where the Fair Trumpets Sound
"Lob des hohen Verstandes" – Praise of Lofty Intellect
"Es sungen drei Engel" – Three Angels sang a sweet air
"Urlicht" – Primeval Light
'Urlicht' was rapidly incorporated into the 2nd Symphony as the work's fourth movement; 'Es sungen drei Engel', by contrast, was specifically composed as part of the 3rd Symphony : requiring a boys' chorus and a women's chorus in addition to an alto soloist, it is the only song among the twelve for which Mahler did not produce a voice-and-orchestra version and the only one which he did not first publish separately.
An additional setting from this period was "Das himmlische Leben", of February 1892. By the year of the collection's publication this song had been re-orchestrated and earmarked as the finale of the 4th Symphony, and thus was not published as part of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection, nor was it made available in a voice-and-piano version. After 1901, 'Urlicht' and 'Es sungen drei Engel' were removed from the collection, and replaced in later editions by two other songs, thus restoring the total number of songs in the set to twelve. The two new songs were: Shortly after Mahler's death, the publisher replaced Mahler's own piano versions of the Wunderhorn songs by piano reductions of the orchestral versions, thus obscuring the differences in Mahler's writing for the two media. In spite of this, voice-and-piano performances, especially of the 'lighter' songs, are frequent. The original piano versions were re-published in 1993 as part of the critical edition, edited by Renate Hilmar-Voit and Thomas Hampson.
