Des Knaben Wunderhorn
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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 collected (and heavily redacted) by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, and published in Heidelberg, Germany between 1805 and 1808. The German interest in ballad collection was a consequence of its interest in English and Scottish collections of a similar bent, notably Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [1765]. Goethe declared that Des Knaben Wunderhorn "has its place in every household".
Selected poems from this collection have been set to music by a number of composers, including Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Carl Loewe, Johannes Brahms and Alexander von Zemlinsky. Perhaps the most renowned settings, however, are those of Gustav Mahler, who numbered the collection among his favourite books and whose musical involvement with the poems extended from his mid-twenties (the text of the first of his four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, begun in 1884, is based on the Wunderhorn poem Wann mein Schatz) through to some two dozen specific settings made between 1887 and 1901, several of which were incorporated into (or composed as movements for) his Second, Third and Fourth symphonies (For further information on Mahler's settings see Lieder aus "Des Knaben Wunderhorn").
