Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Mahler)

Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) is a series of songs with music by Gustav Mahler, set either for voice and piano, or for voice and orchestra, based on texts 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,[1] but in total 12 orchestral songs exist,[2] and a similar number of songs for voice and piano.

  1. ^ Kurt Blaukopf: Gustav Mahler - Page 264 - 1985 on original texts and on words from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Pages 60-64, I05, 119 Twelve Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1892-95). Pages 105-9 Ten songs were published by Mahler in 1905 in the form of a cycle.
  2. ^ Donald Mitchell - 1980 "We have come to think of the Wunderhorn songs as a collection of ten rather than twelve songs — i.e. excluding the two excerpts from the symphonies"