A Universe in Sound: Mahler’s Third Symphony

About the Work

The Third Symphony is the longest in the standard orchestral repertoire, typically lasting around 100 minutes, and one of Mahler’s most personal statements. He composed it during the summers of 1895 and 1896 at his lakeside hut on the Attersee in Upper Austria, in a burst of staggering ambition. It was meant as a creation story, setting the whole world to music. Its working title was Pan, after the Greek god of nature; Mahler also gave its movements descriptive headings, which changed from draft to draft, linking them to a vast cosmic hierarchy. One version reads:

1. Pan awakens. Summer marches in.
2. What the flowers in the meadow tell me.
3. What the animals in the forest tell me.
4. What the night tells me. (Alto solo)
5. What the morning bells tell me. (Alto, women’s chorus, boys’ chorus)
6. What love tells me.

Mahler eventually withdrew these titles, before the score was published, fearing they would mislead audiences into hearing literal programme music. The cosmic ascent they outline remains the spiritual architecture of the work. Each movement climbs one rung higher up the great chain of being, from raw nature through plant and animal life to the night, the awakening of conscious religious feeling, and ultimately to divine love itself.

The symphony was finally premiered complete on 9 June 1902 in Krefeld, Germany, with the composer conducting. The Swiss critic William Ritter wrote that the closing Adagio was “perhaps the greatest Adagio written since Beethoven.”

The first movement is gigantic: a half-hour-long evocation of summer “marching in,” opening with a massive call from eight horns in unison and unfolding through chaotic primordial stirrings, brass-band marches, and visions of gods awakening. The second movement is, by deliberate contrast, a delicate minuet, Mahler’s vision of meadow flowers swaying in the breeze. The third movement is a sprawling scherzo built around a posthorn solo of unforgettable melancholy, played from offstage.

The fourth movement brings the human voice for the first time. The mezzo-soprano sings Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song” from Also sprach Zarathustra, “O Mensch! Gib acht!” (O Man! Take heed!), over a hushed orchestra of great spiritual weight. The fifth movement explodes into joy: women’s voices and boys’ choir sing of three angels with their famous “Bimm Bamm” refrain, music of unforgettable freshness. And then the great finale: a slow, hymn-like Adagio of the most exalted lyricism, building over more than twenty minutes to one of the most overwhelming climaxes in all music. Mahler acknowledged that the love he had in mind was the love of God.

What to listen for tonight: the sheer scale of the opening’s massed brass; the sudden tenderness of the second movement after that overwhelming opening; the offstage posthorn in the third movement, evoking distance, memory, longing; the metaphysical hush of the alto’s “Mensch” passage in the fourth; the joyful bell-imitations of the fifth; and, above all, the closing Adagio’s slow, inexorable journey from quiet faith to overwhelming affirmation. Mahler called it “what love tells me”, and few works in the literature mean it so completely.

Tonight’s Artists

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Conductor

Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, born in Montreal in 1975, is one of the most influential musicians in the world today, holding three of the most prestigious positions in classical music simultaneously: Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Artistic and Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of his hometown Orchestre Métropolitain of Montreal, where in 2019 he signed a contract for life.

Trained at the Quebec Conservatory in piano, conducting, composition, and chamber music, with further studies in choral conducting at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, Nézet-Séguin counts the legendary Italian maestro Carlo Maria Giulini among his most formative mentors. He took up the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2012 and the Metropolitan Opera in 2018, and both contracts now run to 2030. Beyond his core posts, he is a regular guest with the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. A small curiosity: he began as a pianist, studying the instrument from the age of five, and his spouse, Pierre Tourville, plays viola in the Orchestre Métropolitain.

Joyce DiDonato, Mezzo-Soprano

American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, born in Prairie Village, Kansas, in 1969, is among the most beloved singers of her generation. The sixth of seven children in an Irish-American family, she trained at Wichita State University and the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia before launching a career that has taken her to virtually every major opera house in the world: La Scala, Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, the Bayerische Staatsoper, and the Metropolitan Opera, where she made her debut as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro in the 2005–06 season.

A three-time Grammy Award winner (2012, 2016, 2020) for Best Classical Vocal Solo, DiDonato has built her core operatic repertoire on Handel, Mozart and Rossini; Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia has been one of her signature roles. She is also known for ambitious themed concert projects. Her album In War & Peace (2016) explored the human cost of conflict through Baroque opera arias; her 2022 project EDEN examined humanity’s relationship with the natural world.