Longing for Simplicity

Sitting on the banks of the Attersee, where Mahler composed many of his songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, you could easily drift back to a simpler age. If you can block out the roar of the Audis on Seeleiten Strasse, the chatter of children in the neighbouring caravan park and the smell of sun tan lotion, then Mahler’s little corner of Steinbach feels nearly as idyllic as it must have done at the end of the 19th century. Put down your bottle of Radler, turn up the iPod, slide your feet into the water and you might just be able to stop time for a moment… until the sounds of the latest Schlager bring you zipping back to the present.

Like us, Mahler often felt that the modern world intruded on his idyll. In a desperate attempt to put distance between him and modernity, he turned to the intangible poetic realm of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, first published in 1805. The book was, as its title and Moritz von Schwind’s later painting Im Wald suggests, a cornucopia of ‘Old German Songs’. It was doubtless a source of great pride that Goethe responded to Von Arnim and Brentano’s work with enthusiasm. There may be a note of condescension in his review of 1806, yet Goethe maintained that:

By rights, every household in which cheerful people live should possess this book, and display it by a window, or under a mirror, or wherever else song and cookbooks tend to be placed, so that it may be opened at any moment of high or low spirits, when one wishes to find something harmonious or inspiring.

He furthermore endorsed the idea that a musical German family should sing these songs around the piano, thereby bringing them back into the homes from which they had first emerged. Yet for all Von Arnim and Brentano’s attempts at cultural confederacy, at a time when larger issues of unification were on the populace’s mind, Des Knaben Wunderhorn proved to be a keepsake for the intellectual rather than the Volk. And it was professional as opposed to amateur musicians who clung to the volume, not as a reflection of their own milieu but as an escape from the thrilling but often wearying musical factionalism that arose during the 19th century. This is what baritone Wolfgang Holzmair calls a collective ‘longing for simplicity and order’.

As the 19th century turned into 20th, acceptance of the world of Des Knaben Wunderhorn began to wane and other popular songs, swiftly disseminated through recordings and broadcasts, began to dominate. Certainly the advent of war and the political and social turmoil of the inter-war years rendered the collection a thing of the past.

Perhaps the disappearance of Des Knaben Wunderhorn from our cultural spectrum is also symptomatic of our slow but certain division of high and low culture. While Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms bridged that divide by embracing what Goethe described as songs ‘plucked […] from the mouths of little old ladies’, the 20th century witnessed an understandable rejection of simplicity, as violence came to dominate. Although our connection with a mystical Volk and its Naturpoesie has withered, ‘we still have a longing for this kind of strophic song’, according to Holzmair, ‘which can, so to speak, be sung by everybody’. It is just that, nowadays, youth’s magic horn is filled with the Schlager that weave through the air on a summer afternoon by the Attersee. Click here to order a copy of Wolfgang Holzmair and Thérès Lindquist's Wunderhornlieder survey.

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