While composing his monumental Third Symphony, Mahler offered abundant explanations concerning his inspirations and intentions. Although he would ultimately renounce most programmatic information as unnecessary for an understanding of his music, the evolving layers of his thinking about the symphony are extremely revealing. Mahler’s comments about the genesis of his longest work provide a fascinating window into the workings of his creative mind. The ambition in this six-movement composition is enormous, and he drew upon a vast array of musical, philosophical, literary, and cultural sources to achieve his magnificent vision.
Mahler created the Third Symphony in Steinbach am Attersee, amidst the natural beauty of the Austrian Alps, during the summers of 1895 and 1896. He changed his mind at various points concerning how many movements to include, what their titles should be, and an overall name for the work, for which he considered, among others: The Happy Life, A Summer Night’s Dream, My Joyful Science, and A Summer Midday’s Dream. Yet Mahler’s basic concept remained firm: to trace the evolution of creation in nature. After the work was finished, he told a colleague he “imagined the constantly increasing articulation of feeling, from the muted, rigid, merely elemental form of existence (the forces of Nature) to the delicate structure of the human heart, which in its turn reaches further still, pointing beyond (to God).”
Originally conceived in seven movements, Mahler composed all but the imposing opening one in the summer of 1895. (The eliminated seventh movement dates from 1892.) In August he wrote similar letters to various friends, mainly ones who were not themselves professional musicians, seeking responses just to the titles he had devised rather than to any actual music. He told physicist Arnold Berliner:
What I need is simply to find out what impression this title makes on the listener—i.e. whether the title succeeds in setting the listener on the road along which I wish to travel with him.
The Joyful Science
A Summer Morning’s Dream
I. Summer Marches In
II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me
III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me
IV. What the Night Tells Me
V. What the Morning Bells Tell Me
VI. What Love Tells Me
VII. The Heavenly Life
Mahler soon changed the last movement’s title to “What the Child Tells Me.” It was a playful setting he had written three years earlier to a poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), but he ultimately decided to drop the song entirely and later used it to conclude his Fourth Symphony.
At the end of the summer, his vision of the symphony still evolving, Mahler wrote to archeologist Friedrich Löhr:
My new symphony will take approximately 1½ hours—it is all in grand symphonic form.
The emphasis on my personal experiences (that is, what things tell me) corresponds to the peculiar ideas embodied in the whole work. Movements II–V are meant to express the hierarchy of organisms ...
The First Movement, “Summer Marches In,” is intended to hint at the humorously subjective content. Summer is conceived in the role of victor—amidst all that grows and flowers, creeps and flies, thinks and yearns, and finally all that of which we have only an intuitive inkling (angels—bells—transcendental).
Eternal love spins its web within us, over and above all else—as rays flow together into a focal point. Now do you understand?
It is my most individual and my richest work …
During the 1895–1896 season, Mahler resumed his duties at the Hamburg Opera, where he was principal conductor, and continued work on the symphony the following summer back in Steinbach. All that remained to be written was the first movement, the longest of them all. He told his confidant Natalie Bauer-Lechner, “It’s frightening the way this movement seems to grow of its own accord more than anything else I have done … It is in every sense larger than life … Real horror seizes me when I see where it is leading.” He believed that he could not have written this gigantic opening, over 30 minutes long, had he not already composed the later ones: “They are as infinite in their variety as the world itself, reaching their final culmination, their liberating resolution, in the ‘Love’ movement.”
The celebrated dramatic soprano Anna von Mildenburg, with whom Mahler was romantically involved at the time, was understandably interested in this finale. Mahler wrote to her:
You would like to know “What Love Tells Me?” Dearest Annerl, love tells me very beautiful things! And when love speaks to me now it always talks about you! But the love in my symphony is one different from what you suppose. The [motto] of this movement … is:
Father, behold the wounds I bear!
Let no creature be lost!
Now do you understand what it is about? It is an attempt to show the summit, the highest level from which the world can be surveyed. I could equally well call the movement something like “What God Tells Me!” And so my work is a musical poem that goes through all the stages of evolution, step by step. It begins with inanimate Nature and progresses to God’s love! People will need time to crack the nuts I am shaking down from the tree for them …
The mammoth symphony, now divided in two parts, was completed by the beginning of August 1896. Mahler was still willing to divulge the program, which by this time had changed in significant ways. He informed critic Max Marschalk of his latest thoughts:
My work is finished. It has the following titles, from which you will be able to gather at least something about the contents:
A Summer Midday’s Dream
First Part
Introduction: Pan Awakens
I. Summer Marches In (Bacchic Procession)
Second Part
II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me
III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me
IV. What Mankind Tells Me
V. What the Angels Tell Me
VI. What Love Tells Me
Mahler would have to wait some years to premiere the symphony, although its modest second movement, the Blumenstück (Flower Piece), was played separately on a number of occasions. This met with varying degrees of success, but Mahler had misgivings about performing detached movements, fearing it misrepresented the whole. He presided over the premiere of the complete symphony on June 9, 1902, in Krefeld, Germany, as part of a festival of which his friend and rival Richard Strauss was president. This concert marked one of the greatest triumphs of Mahler’s compositional career.
The Vienna premiere of the Third, with the Philharmonic on December 14, 1904, proved especially brilliant and earned great praise from the younger generation of composers associated with Arnold Schoenberg. In the years before his death in 1911 at age 50, Mahler conducted the Third Symphony more often than any of his other symphonies excepting the First, leading performances in Amsterdam, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Prague, Cologne, Leipzig, Breslau, and Graz.
Yet at the turn of the century, as Mahler’s personal life and compositional career were entering a new stage, he repeatedly and ardently denounced programmatic “crutches”: “Down with programs, which are always misinterpreted! The composer should stop giving the public his own ideas about his work; he should no longer force listeners to read during the performance and he should refrain from filling them with preconceptions.” He abandoned writing programs for his new symphonies and tried to suppress what he had already divulged about his earlier ones. When conductor Josef Krug-Waldsee, who gave a performance of the Third Symphony in Magdeburg in October 1902, inquired about the titles of the movements, Mahler’s response suggests that what had helped him formulate the symphony years earlier now caused difficulties when revealed to general audiences:
Those titles were an attempt I made at the time to provide non-musicians with a clue and a guide to the thought, or rather mood of the individual movements and so the relationship between the movements and their place in the whole. Only too soon, alas, did it become clear to me that the attempt had failed (indeed, it can never succeed), leading merely to misrepresentations of the direst sort …
Mahler never denied that ideas, images, and stories lay behind all of his symphonies. They clearly helped him formulate, organize, and execute his ideas, and one might be skeptical, no matter his protests, that they were intended just for “non-musicians.” Mahler explained to critic Max Kalbeck, who had intuited what he was trying to do:
Everyone will eventually get on the right track, just like you. From Beethoven onwards there is no modern music without its inner program. But any music about which one first has to tell the listener what experience it embodies, and what he is meant to experience, is worthless. And once more: Away with every program! One simply has to come provided with ears and a heart and—not least—give oneself up willingly to the rhapsodist. Some residue of mystery always remains—even for the creator!
Mahler conducted the Third Symphony for the last time on January 14, 1907, with the Berliner Philharmoniker. On that occasion, the movement titles were printed in the program. Mahler’s ambivalence about what to divulge continued, and near the end of his life he had become somewhat more accommodating with respect to his first four symphonies.
Eight horns in unison intone the imposing opening theme, which immediately leads to mysterious, primordial rumblings, a musical idea that will return to open the fourth movement. The first movement (Kräftig. Entschieden) oscillates between chorales, fanfares, marches, and quasi-vocal passages. In addition to Mahler’s title “Summer Marches In,” he wrote other indications in the score: “The Awakening Call” to open, “Pan Is Sleeping” for the haunting chorale with a folk-like solo violin melody, “The Herald” for one of the fanfares, and “The Rabble,” “The Battle Begins,” “The South Storm” for the march section in the middle.
The second part of the symphony opens with the “Flower Piece,” a delicate minuet into which more violent forces intrude (Tempo di menuetto: Sehr mässig). Mahler insisted that his view of nature was not limited to sweet little flowers:
Of course no one gets an inkling that for me Nature includes all that is terrifying, great and also lovely (it is precisely this that I wanted to express in the whole work, a kind of evolutionary development). I always feel it strange when most people speak of “Nature” what they mean is flowers, little birds, the scent of the pinewoods, etc. No one knows the god Dionysus, or great Pan. Well there you have a kind of program—i.e. a sample of how I compose. Always and everywhere it is the very sound of Nature!
The “animal” third movement is a scherzo (Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne Hast). The opening is an example of “unsung song”: Mahler casts one of his earliest Wunderhorn settings, “Ablösung im Sommer” (“Relief in Summer”) in purely instrumental form. The satirical poem tells of the death of a cuckoo bird and the ascendance of a nightingale, and begins: “Cuckoo has fallen dead / on a green meadow! / Cuckoo is dead! / Then who all summer long / will while away the time? / Hey, it should be Mrs. Nightingale / who sits on the green branch / the little, delicate nightingale!” During two extended points within the movement, there are elaborate solos performed by the posthorn, the instrument used to announce from a distance the arrival of the mail coach. The effect in the symphony is elegiac and nostalgic. Mahler said he had in mind “Der Postillon,” a poem by Nikolaus Lenau, in which a young man thinks of his dead friend. Near the end of the movement there is an eruption of panic horror, of which Mahler said, “We once again feel the heavy shadow of lifeless nature, of as yet uncrystallized, inorganic matter.”
The concluding three movements are performed without pause, with the first two being vocal settings. An alto solo sings the “Midnight Song” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra in the fourth movement (Sehr langsam. Misterioso). The haunting opening words are “O Mensch! Gib Acht!” (“O man! Take heed!”), and later she sings “Tief ist ihr Weh!” (“Deep is [the world’s] woe!”), sung to a theme that will return in the finale. In the middle of this slow, dark music, a plaintive oboe interjects the “bird of the night” and is instructed to play wie ein Naturlaut (“like a sound of nature”).
The pain of night is transformed without break to the happiness of day and the pealing of the morning bells. In the fifth movement (Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck), the alto soloist is joined by a chorus of sopranos, altos, and children for a setting of “Es sungen drei Engel” (“Three Angels Sang”) from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The bright orchestration calls primarily for winds, four tuned bells, and glockenspiel; the lower strings (the violins remain silent) are accompanimental.
The finale (Langsam. Ruhevoll. Empfunden) begins with a broad D-major chorale melody in the strings that contrasts with a minor-mode theme. Mahler may well have been alluding here to the opening of the slow movement of Beethoven’s final composition, the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135. There follow reminiscences of the symphony’s earlier movements, including the eight horns calling forth the “Tief ist ihr Weh!” motif from the fourth. The general tone evokes the solemnity of another final work, Wagner’s Parsifal, and prefigures the last movement of Mahler’s own Ninth Symphony. As Mahler told Bauer-Lechner, “In the Adagio, everything is resolved into quiet ‘being’; the Ixion-wheel of appearances has at last been brought to a standstill. But in the fast movements, the Minuet and Allegro (and even in the Andante, according to my tempos) everything is flow, movement, ‘becoming.’ So, contrary to custom—and without knowing why, at the time—I concluded my Second and Third symphonies with Adagios: that is, with a higher as opposed to a lower form.” The music builds to a loud and majestic conclusion, the loving final vision of Mahler’s vast evolutionary scheme.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
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