Achim Von Arnim

Fish that speak and donkeys as judges; deserters, phantom drummers, cheeky angels – but also wild, flirty country girls and macho guardsmen, even the Lord God himself: The Wunderhorn songs of Gustav Mahler are populated by a highly original, heterogeneous set of characters. What could be their common factor, apart from their typical Mahlerian tone? The answer is to be found some 90 years before these songs were composed. In 1805, under the collective title “The boy’s magic horn. Old German songs”, the two German Romantic poets Achim von Arnim und Clemens Brentano began publishing these and many other texts. They conceived their collection as a conscious revival of folk nature poetry and as offering a mirror to the “Riches of our whole people (and) its own inner, living art”, as von Arnim wrote. But these texts also reflect the (early) Romantic delight in the primordial, unspoilt and elemental.