Wunderhorn revisited at La Monnaie

At several moments in the course of his life Gustav Mahler drew on Das Knaben Wunderhorn, an early 19th-century compilation of poems by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Mahler composed his first Wunderhorn songs, for voice and piano, in the late 1880s, and the second series followed in the 1890s, this time for voice and orchestra. The 24 Wunderhorn songs were not a true cycle, but on the basis of the poems Clara Pons wrote a film scenario in which a world imagined to be a paradise meets its doom in the violence of war – following the example of Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von gestern : ‘Only those who experienced light and dark, war and peace, rise and fall, lived truly.’ The film will be shown with live music. For this purpose the German composer Detlev Glanert was commissioned to orchestrate Mahler’s first Wunderhorn songs. Dietrich Henschel is the driving force behind this project, both as a singer and as a character in the film.