Mining the Past for New Expressions

Of Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs, eighteen possess the characteristics traditionally associated with the ballad as defined by Goethe: telling a story that passes through time with a discrete beginning, middle, and end that uses any combination of epic, dramatic, and lyrical narrative voices, excepting the purely lyrical. Mahler utilised numerous poetic and musical methods to bring these stories to life in his ballads, one of the most unique being the use of traditional song forms as a device to convey the overarching narrative. At his most complex, Mahler was forced to abandon the traditional formal models, creating ballads that unfold like miniature scenas to best convey the narrative material at hand. With his ballads from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Mahler refashioned tools that song composers had used for over a century, as a further layer of narrative reinforcement, tangling the old with the new, and modernising by way of nostalgia.

The Soul has to Leave the Land of the Living

A fragmentary Hittite tablet (a late copy of an Old Hittite original) describes the soul's journey in the Netherworld, unwilling to travel “the great road . . . the road that makes things disappear”, even though aware that “to the gods belongs the soul”. This is the belief, or cry of hope, that runs through the entire history of humanity, which a popular poem in Des Knaben Wunderhorn expresses in this way: “Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott”. Despite this, the soul does not want to “undergo the perdition of the mortal”. The journey starts in the second column (of which only a few words remain). It is not clear whether the narrative is interrupted here by a ritual act. At the end of the second column and up to the start of the third, the desolation of souls in the Netherworld is described. However, the fate awaiting this soul is different, but the text breaks of without telling us anything more definite. The fourth column contains a brief section of the ritual.