Des Knaben Wunderhorn - Des Knaben Wunderhorn in Music

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, Webern 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.’”