Throughout his lifetime, Gustav Mahler’s musical imagination got sparked by the Wunderhorn anthology of folk poetry compiled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Whether autonomous lieder or conscripted into symphonic service, Mahler’s Wunderhorn settings represent some of his most exotic, exhilarating, but also visionary music. The Wunderhorn songs evoke and celebrate a lost era but they also prefigure its demise. Mahler captures this ambiguity in uncompromisingly melodious and idyllic, but also satiric, relentless and cruel music.