| Music Encyclopedia: Des Knaben Wunderhorn |
Collection of German folk poetry edited by Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (3 vols., 1805-8). Its magical evocation of Romanticism and its German national spirit attracted composers. Mahler wrote over 20 Wunderhorn songs for voice and piano or orchestra and incorporated texts from it in his Second, Third and Fourth symphonies. Other composers who set its poems include Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Strauss, Schoenberg and Webern.
| German Literature Companion: Des Knaben Wunderhorn |
Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of more than 700 German folk-songs made by L. J. von Arnim and C. Brentano chiefly in the years 1804-7. The first volume was published in the autumn of 1805, though the title-page gives the year 1806; the second and third volumes followed in 1808. The title refers to the figure of a boy mounted on a horse and brandishing a horn, and this in turn illustrates Das Wunderhorn, the first poem in this anthology. It is a translation of an old French lay. The large collection covers a wide range, as the classified index, with its rubrics Geistliche Lieder, Handwerkslieder, Historische Romanzen, Liebeslieder, Trinklieder, and Kriegslieder, indicates. No attempt was made to preserve pure texts, and indeed the editors made frequent amendments in accordance with their own tastes; but the source, whether oral or printed, of many of the folk-songs is given. The Wunderhorn was criticized as an unscholarly publication, but it succeeded in its purpose of widely disseminating the extraordinary wealth of German folk-song, and has long been regarded as one of the most important and influential documents of the German Romantic movement.
| Wikipedia: Des Knaben Wunderhorn |
Des Knaben Wunderhorn (German, lit. The Youth's Magic Horn, referring to a magical device like the cornucopia) is a collection of German folk poems edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, and published in Heidelberg, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, between 1805 and 1808. The collection was an important source of idealized folklore throughout the nineteenth century, as the German folk movement came into being. Folklore offered the proponents of Pan-Germanism—the movement to create a German nation—a strong sense of unity for a people that was split by political borders. Des Knaben Wunderhorn became widely popular across the German-speaking world; Goethe, one of the most influential writers of the time, declared that Des Knaben Wunderhorn "has its place in every household".
Arnim and Brentano, like other early nineteenth-century song collectors, such as the Englishman Thomas Percy, freely modified the poems in their collection. The editors, both poets themselves, invented some of the poems themselves. Some poems were modified to fit poetic meter, to conform to then-modern German spelling, or otherwise to conform more closely to an idealized, Romantic "folk style." A twentieth-century critical edition by Heinz Rölleke describes the origin of each poem in the collection.[1]
Selected poems from this collection have been set to music by a number of composers, including Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Loewe, Brahms and Zemlinsky.
Gustav Mahler numbered the collection among his favourite books and set its poems to music throughout much of his life. The text of the first of his four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, begun in 1884, is based on the Wunderhorn poem Wann mein Schatz. Between 1887 and 1901, he wrote two dozen settings of Wunderhorn texts, several of which were incorporated into (or composed as movements for) his Second, Third and Fourth symphonies. In 1899, he published a collection of a dozen Wunderhorn settings that has since become known, slightly confusingly, simply as “Songs from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn.’”
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 | Music Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| German Literature Companion. The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Des Knaben Wunderhorn". Read more |
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