Songs gave rise to symphonies during Gustav Mahler’s “Wunderhorn years.”
This was the period from 1887 to 1904 when Mahler composed his first four symphonies, all of which are rooted in nature and song. In some cases, songs provided the seeds for symphonic movements. The texts for Mahler’s twelve-song cycle, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boy’s Magic Horn”) were based on a collection of anonymous German folk poems of the same title, compiled and published in 1805 by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano.
Composed in July of 1898, the ninth Wunderhorn song, Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (“Where the Fair Trumpets Sound”) begins with distant (offstage) military fanfares. Pianist Roger Vignoles describes the song’s haunting drama:
…a girl is visited by her lover, or by his spirit, on the eve of battle. Whether he is already dead, or has a premonition of death next day, is not absolutely clear, but in either case the rapt tenderness of the encounter, and its foreboding, is unmistakeable, contrasting the tight-laced 2/4 of military duty with the lilting, dreamlike 3/4 of the lovers’ embrace.
The soldier urges the girl to stop weeping, promising that they will be together within a year. The promise becomes a prophecy of the girl’s impending death.
The song unfolds as a ghostly nocturnal dream. Ominous shadows, and the sting of the dissonant tritone give way to visions of celestial beauty and the gentle repose of a lullaby. The harmony slides unpredictably between major and minor. As with so much of Mahler’s music, there is a thin, blurred line between torment and exultation.
This 1989 recording features soprano Lucia Popp with Leonard Bernstein and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra:
An English translation of the text by Richard Stokes:
Who stands outside and knocks at my door,
Waking me so gently?
It is your own true dearest love,
Arise, and let me in.Why leave me longer waiting here?
I see rosy dawn appear,
The rosy dawn and two bright stars.
I long to be beside my love,
Beside my dearest love.The girl arose and let him in,
She bids him welcome too.
O welcome, dearest love of mine,
Too long have you been waiting.She gives to him her snow-white hand,
From far off sang the nightingale,
The girl began to weep.Ah, do not weep, my dearest love,
Within a year you shall be mine,
You shall be mine most certainly,
As no one else on earth.
O love upon the green earth.I’m going to war, to the green heath,
The green heath so far away.
There where the splendid trumpets sound,
There is my home of green turf.
Recordings
- Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, Lucia Popp, Leonard Bernstein, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Deutsche Grammophon