Program Notes: Mahler Symphony No. 3

GUSTAV MAHLER  
Symphony No. 3 in D minor 
BORN: Kalište, Bohemia, July 7, 1860 
DIED: Vienna, May 18, 1911 
COMPOSED: 1893–1896 
FIRST COMPLETE PERFORMANCE: June 9, 1902, in Krefeld, near Dusseldorf, conducted by the composer. (Several movements had been performed earlier.) 

What to Listen For: 

• This symphony is remarkable for its great number and variety of sounds and musical ideas. In the first movement, horn calls, shrill woodwind fanfares, march tunes and a good deal more crowd each other in an almost unruly manner, often playing against each other in counterpoint. Later, Mahler adds voices — both solo alto and choruses — to his large orchestra. The result is music of tremendous surging energy, suggesting the earth’s primordial power and fertility. 

“My symphony will be something the like of which the world has never yet heard! ... In it all of nature finds a voice.” 

So wrote Gustav Mahler to a friend shortly before completing his monumental Symphony No. 3 in D minor. His words may seem immodest, but they hardly exaggerate the matter. In its tremendous scale, its unusual formal layout and its great range of expression, Mahler’s Third Symphony was indeed an unprecedented compositional achievement and it has rarely been equaled, even by the composer’s own subsequent works. As a musical reflection of nature, it is hardly less unique. 

Of course, composers have long been fascinated with the possibility of suggesting various aspects of the natural world through music. Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony (No. 6 in F major), with its flowing stream of melody, bird calls, dancing peasants, fierce storm and grateful shepherd, is one famous evocation of nature in the concert repertory. The sonic representations of wind, summer heat, thunderstorms, icy cold and other phenomena in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are also well known. And the musical tempest of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, the magnificent sunrise of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, the melodious waterfall in Strauss’ Alpensinfonie and the billowing waves of Debussy’s seascape La mer offer tonal impressions of nature hardly less evocative than those in the “Pastoral” Symphony. 

Mahler’s Third Symphony ranks among these compositions but also stands apart from them. For while the above-mentioned works, and many others, attempt to portray aspects of nature through the use of suggestive musical figuration — furious scales and sudden timpani strokes in the “Pastoral” Symphony’s storm movement, for example — Mahler’s music avoids such tone painting in favor of a more encompassing view of its subject. Instead of depicting nature through aural mimicry of wind or water or wildlife, Mahler conveys what might best be described as the soul of nature — or, perhaps more accurately, the response of his own soul to nature. 

Indeed, instrumental bird songs, melodic figures that rustle like leaves in the wind or murmur like a woodland stream, percussive thunderclaps and other onomatopoetic devices are so generally absent from this composition, and employed so subtly when used at all, that we might not guess the work’s intimate connection to the natural world had not Mahler spoken of it on numerous occasions. The statement quoted at the outset of this article is but one of the composer’s pronouncements on the subject. “Everywhere and always, it is only the voice of nature,” Mahler said of this symphony. “Nature in its totality, which is, so to speak, awakened from fathomless silence that it may ring and resound.” Bruno Walter, the great conductor who was Mahler’s disciple and later a leading advocate of his music, visited the composer at his summer retreat in the Austrian Alps in 1896 to hear the nearly finished symphony on the piano. When Walter, upon his arrival, stared admiringly at the mountain landscape about him, Mahler told him “You needn’t look. I have composed all that already.” 

Even more significant than these and other anecdotes evincing the connection that Mahler envisioned between his music and nature are the programmatic titles the composer gave to the symphony’s six movements. Mahler altered these explanatory headings slightly several times during 1895 and 1896, the years he composed the work, but a letter written in August 1896, when the piece was essentially complete, gives what may be considered their definitive form: 

   First Section 

          Introduction:    Pan awakes. 
          Movement I:    Summer marches in (Bacchanalian cortege). 

   Second Section      

          Movement II:   What the meadow flowers tell me. 
          Movement III:  What the forest creatures tell me. 

   Movement IV:  What man tells me. [In earlier drafts, Mahler titled this movement “What the night tells me.”] 

          Movement V:   What the angels tell me. 
          Movement VI:  What love tells me. 

As he did with each of his two previous symphonies, Mahler subsequently suppressed these titles, evidently out of concern that his listeners might try to read too much into the music. Yet he did not explicitly renounce them and the programmatic meaning they implied. His reluctance to do so seems understandable; for, taken as general guidelines, the titles serve to clarify not only the poetic foundation of the symphony but also its overall design. Moreover, Mahler could not erase the extra-musical messages of the fourth and fifth movements, with their allusions to man and angels, since these matters are made explicit in words sung during these portions of the symphony. 

Such a large theme as Mahler sought to address in this symphony called for a broad compositional canvas and rich palette of musical resources. He laid out the Third Symphony in six movements and scored it for a large orchestra augmented by solo alto voice, women’s chorus and boys’ chorus. He incorporated verses from Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical allegory Also sprach Zarathustra and the anthology of folk poetry Des Knaben Wunderhorn. And he devised music brimming with melodic, harmonic and contrapuntal invention. 

The importance of the two vocal movements goes beyond their expansion of the musical resources of which Mahler availed himself when composing this work, adding the sounds of the human voice to those of the orchestra. Rather, they bring mankind into the symphony’s contemplation of nature, enlarging its consideration of the living universe to include humanity — the first words sung are, in fact, “O Man!” — and, significantly, human spirituality. Mahler was not, Walter noted, “a ‘nature lover’ in the usual sense of the expression, a kind of garden friend, a friend to animals.” Ever concerned with religious questions, the composer evidently saw nature above all as the handiwork of God. And during the course of the Third Symphony, he presents three perspectives on the divine in nature. 

The first is pagan, expressed in the powerful opening movement as a hymn to the woodland god Pan, emblematic of an untamed life force. By the fifth movement, the reverence for nature has been transformed to a Christian viewpoint. (A Jew by birth, Mahler converted to Catholicism, though he never achieved security in his faith.) Finally, Mahler distills his spiritual feelings to their essence. Of the last movement, originally titled “What love tells me,” he told a friend: “I could almost call the movement ‘What God tells me.’ And truly in the sense that God can only be understood as love.” 

If nature seems inanimate in the quieter moments of the opening movement, the overall impression made by this initial portion of the symphony is anything but still or insensate. This long movement comprises almost half the symphony’s duration and the first of what Mahler conceived as the two major sections of the composition. It begins with an introduction that the composer originally conceived in connection with the rousing of Pan from his slumber. The main portion of the movement is essentially a march, one fit, as Mahler noted, for the Dionysian procession of summer.  

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this generally remarkable music is the great number and variety of thematic ideas Mahler employs. Horn calls, shrill woodwind fanfares, march tunes and a good deal more crowd each other in an almost unruly manner. Frequently Mahler sets two or more distinct figures against each other in counterpoint. The result is music of tremendous surging energy, suggesting the earth’s primordial power and fertility. “It always strikes me as odd,” Mahler wrote while at work on the symphony, “that most people, when they speak of ‘nature,’ think only of flowers, little birds and woodsy smells. No one knows the god Dionysius, the great Pan.” Mahler reveals him here through music of extraordinary power and invention. The ensuing two movements are pastoral interludes: a minuet inspired by the sight of meadow flowers followed by a robust scherzo that conjures up visions of the unspoiled forest. A setting for alto soloist of Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song,” from Also sprach Zarathustra, comprises the deep and quiet fourth movement.   

The text for the fifth movement is from Des Knaben Wunderhorn; the collection of folk poetry furnished the verses for many of Mahler’s songs. A children’s choir imitates the sound of bells while a chorus of women, later joined by the alto soloist, relates how Saint Peter repented his sins and found forgiveness and heavenly bliss. The final movement, whose scoring emphasizes the string choir, combines the feelings of hymn and love song, for it is both of these. Here, we can at last see the symphony’s complete plan, one that Mahler had explicitly in mind and described as “all stages of evolution in a stepwise ascent. It begins with inanimate nature and ascends to the love of God.” 

Paul Schiavo © 2024