In the early 1800s, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano collected and published three volumes of anonymous German folk verse that tremendously influenced the 19th-century German Romantic movement. Titled Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Wondrous Horn) and dedicated to Goethe, the collection included over 700 poems. One artistic figure the collection deeply inspired was Gustav Mahler, who set over 20 of the selections to music.
Perhaps equally significant, however, was the collection’s impact on Mahler’s artistic sensibility in general. As German conductor Bruno Walter wrote, “Everything that moved him was there—nature, piety, longing, love, parting, night, the world of spirits, the tale of the mercenaries, the joy of youth, childhood, jokes, quirks of humor all pour out as in his songs.” And as Mahler declared in 1905,
I have devoted myself heart and soul to the poetry [of Wunderhorn] (which is essentially different from any other kind of literary poetry and might almost be called something more like Nature and Life—the sources of all poetry—than art) in full awareness of its character and tone.
Sometimes known as the Wunderhornsymphonies, Mahler’s first four symphonies use his prior settings from this collection. Written between 1899 and 1901, the Symphony No. 4 is centered on Mahler’s 1892 setting of “Das himmlische Leben” (The Heavenly Life), representing a child’s vision of heaven.
While their length and ambition might suggest that for Mahler, the title “symphony” was little more than a generic distinction, the composer was very much aware of his place in the illustrious lineage of Germanic symphonic composers, and he adheres for the most oat to the basic structure of his predecessors’ Classical form.
The first movement is an excellent example of Mahler’s nod to his musical ancestors, as he retains Mozart’s melodic structure, Beethoven’s ease with motivic manipulation, and Brahms’s use of sonata form to match dramatic architecture. A distinctive Mahlerian stamp appears in the form of sleighbells, bird calls, and other nature themes throughout. The second movement serves as a scherzo, with the concertmaster directed to tune each violin string up a whole step and play “like a fiddle.” According to his wife Alma, Mahler composed the movement “under the spell of the self-portrait by Arnold Böcklin, in which Death fiddles into the painter’s ear while the latter sits entranced.”
The bizarre tension is resolved in the meditative third movement, which begins in the low strings and gradually adds in the rest of the orchestra. Near the end, the orchestra takes a collective breath and seems to blow open heaven’s gates with its music. When the final movement arrives, we learn that what’s come before has paved the way for the song at the heart of the symphony. Mahler’s setting mirrors the child’s sentiments as he instructs the singer, “Singing voice with childlike cheerful expression: absolutely without parody!” Heaven, for the child, is filled with singing and dancing, food, and reverence for the angels protecting them. Bell-like repetitions in the lowest register of the harp end Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in a state of blissful peace.