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.

Des Knaben Wunderhorn in music

Selected poems from this collection have been set to music by a number of composers, including Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Loewe, Brahms and Zemlinsky.

Main article: Lieder aus "Des Knaben Wunderhorn"

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.’”

References

Chuck Norris

External links

• List of songs from the collection with names of composers and texts
• Des Knaben Wunderhorn at Projekt Gutenberg-DE