Luogo e data di registrazione		Großer Saal, Philharmonie, Berlin (Germania) - febbraio 1998
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Produced by		Dr. Marion Thiem
	Recording Engineer		Reinhard Lagemann
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Ulrich Vette
	Editing		Reinhild Schmidt, Matthias Schwab
	Prima Edizione LP		nessuna
	Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon - 459 646-2 - (1 CD) - durata 57' 04" - (p) 1999 - 4D DDD
	Note		Cover Photo: Mats Bäcker (von Otter), Susesch Bayat (Quasthoff)

In the summer of 1893, while he was seting the Wunderhorn text "Rheinlegendchen" to music, Mahler was asked by his confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner how he composed. "It happens in a hundred different ways", he responded. "Today, for instance, I had a theme in mind; I was leafing through a book and soon came upon the lines of a charming song that would fit my rhythm. [...] It is [...] direct but whimsically childlike and tender in a way that you have never heard before. Even the orchestration is sweet and sunny - nothing but butterfly colours." (We know that Mahler thought of his Wunderhorn and Rückert songs as a kind of vocal chamber music, involving orchestral resources and an acoustic appropriate to that concept and its harmony.) "But", he continued, "in spite of all its simplicity and folklike quality, the whole thing is extremely original, especially in its harmonization, so that people will not know what to make of it, and will call it mannered. And yet it is the most natural thing in the world; it is simply what the melody demanded." Three years later, in the summer of 1896, Natalie relates, Mahler composed Lob des hohen Verstandes: "'Here', he said to me, 'I merely had to be careful not to spoil the poem and to convey its meaning exactly, whereas with other poems one can often add a great deal, and can deepen and widen the meaning of the text through the music'." The majority of Mahler's orchestral Wunderhorn songs were composed between 1892 and 1898 and published in 1899; two last settings, Revelge and Tamboursg'sell, were made in 1899 and 1901 respectively. About the latter song, Mahler spoke to Natalie Bauer-Lechner in the summer of 1901: "[Der Tamboursg'sell] - almost as if according to a pre-established harmony between notes and words - came into being as follows. It occurred to him literally between one step and the next - that is, just as he was walking out of the dining-room. He sketched it immediately in the dark ante-room, and ran with it to the spring - his favourite place, which often gives him aural inspiration. Here, he had the music completed very quickly. But now he saw that it was no symphonic theme - such as he had been after - but a song! And he thought of 'Der Tamboursg'sell'. He tried to recall the words; they seemed made for the melody. When he in fact compared the tune and the text up in the summer-house, not a word was missing, not a note was needed. They fitted perfectly!" Mahler drew his texts for Des Knaben Wunderhorn from that famous anthology of "old German songs", collected by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano and first published in three volumes in 1806 and 1808. The Wunderhorn collection was, as Dika Newlin once put it, a "typical product of the romantic Zeitgeist, with its stress on the semple, artless life of the 'little people' and the glamour of bygone days". One reason for the anthology's popularity was its appeal to the 19th century's nostalgic yearning after the lost innocence of a remote past. Mahler's approach in his orchestral settings (he had already made use of Wunderhorn poems in two volumes of his early Lieder und Gesänge with piano) was, however, stubbornly independent of this romantic indulgence. He eschewed all false medievalism and self-conscious "folkiness" (there are no folk-tune quotations, references or "arrangements" in Mahler's Wunderhorn songs) and simply accepted the texts at their face value. He did not adopt a fairytale, "once upon a time" approach to the texts, but relived them as if they were of the present moment. The reality - the immediacy and dramatic or lyrical truth - og his settings, their well-nigh anti-romantic character, is what lends them their singular flavour. It is possible to divide Des Knaben Wunderhorn, roughly, into three contrasted groups: 1. songs which are marches or pervaded by military imagery (fanfares and the like); 2. songs which are primarely lyrical in tone (often love songs); and 3. humorous songs. (Urlicht, which was incorporated intho the Second Symphony, is mystical and religious in spirit and thus belongs to a group on its own.) Into group one fall Revelge, Der Tamboursg'sell, Der Schildwache Nachtlied and Wo di schönen Trompeten blasen - and at once we are aware of the impracticality of the grouping. True, all four songs are rich in references to the military music with which Mahler had been familiar since childhood, and which he continued to hear on the streets about him, but the third and fourth songs, in which fanfares and march rhythm are contrasted with passages of the tenderest lyricism, also have a foot in group two, which comprises Verlorne Müh', Trost im Unglück, Das irdische Leben, Rheinlegendchen and Lied des Verfolgten im Turm. Here again the consistency of the grouping does not really stand up to close scrutiny. How can we accomodate under one heading the teasing character of the first song, the lilting geniality of the fourth, the plaintiveness of the third, and the drama and impetuosity of the second and fifth? The last, indeed, is a miniature dramatic "dialogue", a form that occurs more than once. And in the same way, we find in group three the good humour of Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht? juxtaposed with the caustic wit of Lob des hohen Verstandes (wich Mahler conceived as a hit at his critics, and which anticipates a leading idea in the finale of the Fifth Symphony) and the pungent irony of the Fischpredigt (the basis of the Second Symphony's scherzo). Another feature of Mahler's Wunderhorn setting, their extraordinary harmonic invention, is exemplified by the very last bars of Der Schildwache Nachtlied, that ghostly ballad which at ist very end fades with a ravishing poignancy into nothingness, like the spectre of Hamlet's father with the coming of dawn. Mahler accomplishes this stunning effect by leaving his song - and his performers and his audience - suspended on the unresolved dominant. It is a transfixing moment, and a bold technique to have deployed in the early 1890s. The critic and author Ernst Decsey tried once, in a conversation with Mahler, to draw the composer out on this passage, commenting on "a remarkable evolution of the dominant chords that produced an ever-rising tension". But Mahler "refused to take the point": "Oh, go on! Just accept things with the simplicity with which they're intended." "Simple" it may be, in the effect it makes; but it is a simplicity that strikes deep, of the kind that only genius has at its command. Finally, a word about Mahler's last two Wunderhorn settings, Revelge and Der Tamboursg'sell, which were published independently of the rest. The sheer scale of these songs speaks for itself, as does the high profile allotted the orchestra alone. Each song inhabits a unique sound-world, a consequence of the orchestra's transformation into something corresponding to a military wind band. Percussion is prominent. In Revelge, a vocal march of epic proportions, the strings themselves are used as a percussive resource, while in Der Tamboursg'sell only the lower strings - execlusively cellos and double basses - are employed. The intensity of his music has few parallels, even elsewhere in Mahler. These final, late-style Wunderhorn settings, fertilized by Mahler the symphonist, remind us again of one central truth about his approach to his texts: that for Mahler the poems were not artificial evocations or revivals of a lost age of chivalry and German romanticism but, with the exception of a few genial, sunny inspirations, vivid enactments of reality - of sorrow, heartbreak, protest, terror and pain. His Wunderhorn songs often report a chilling trith about the human condition. Donald Mitchell