Rattle Conducts Mahler’s Third Symphony

About the Work

Mahler’s Third is the longest symphony he wrote, and the longest that orchestras play with any regularity: six movements, around an hour and forty minutes, with a mezzo-soprano, a women’s chorus and a boys’ choir who sing for barely a quarter of an hour between them. He sketched ideas for it from 1893 and did the main work in the summers of 1895 and 1896 at Steinbach am Attersee, in the Austrian lake district where he spent his holidays. The rest of the year belonged to the opera house in Hamburg, where he was chief conductor.

He described what he was attempting to his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner. It was hardly right to call the piece a symphony, he told her, since it kept to none of the usual forms; but to him the word meant building a world with every technical means available. The world in question was the whole of nature, arranged as a ladder. While he was composing he gave each movement a title: ‘Pan Awakes, Summer Marches In’ for the first, then ‘What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me’, ‘What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me’, ‘What Man Tells Me’, ‘What the Angels Tell Me’ and ‘What Love Tells Me’. He toyed with calling the whole thing ‘Pan’, enjoying the fact that the word names a Greek god and also means ‘all’. A seventh movement, ‘What the Child Tells Me’, was planned as the conclusion: the song ‘Das himmlische Leben’ (‘The Heavenly Life’), written in 1892. In the end he held it back, and it became the finale of the Fourth Symphony instead. Traces of it remain in the Third’s fifth movement.

As with his earlier symphonies, Mahler shared these titles with friends and then withdrew them, wary of listeners following a story instead of the music. They are still the best short guide to a piece whose movements differ so much from one another: an enormous march, a minuet, a scherzo with a distant posthorn, a setting of Nietzsche, a carol-like chorus and a long slow finale without words.

Single movements were played first. Arthur Nikisch gave the second movement in Berlin in November 1896, and Felix Weingartner conducted three movements there the following March. The complete symphony had to wait until 9 June 1902, when Mahler conducted it at a music festival in Krefeld, on the Rhine. It was one of the greatest successes he had as a composer in his lifetime, and the final Adagio made the deepest impression.

What to Listen For

First movement. Eight horns in unison open the symphony with a striding tune that many listeners find close to the big theme in the finale of Brahms’s First. What follows takes more than half an hour, as long as the next four movements together. Two kinds of music alternate. One is heavy and slow, with growling brass, drum strokes and long recitatives for solo trombone: inert nature, in Mahler’s scheme, before life stirs. The other is a march that starts far off in the woodwind and comes nearer each time, picking up piccolos, side drums and brass-band swagger until summer arrives in a riot. Near the end of the central section, snare drums placed offstage rattle on their own before the eight horns bring back the opening. Mahler asks for a long pause when the movement is over.

Second movement. A minuet led off by the oboe, light and graceful, with quicker episodes that blow through it like gusts across a field.

Third movement. The scherzo is built on one of Mahler’s own early songs, ‘Ablösung im Sommer’, about the cuckoo’s death and the nightingale who takes over the singing. Twice the bustle stops and a posthorn, played from offstage, sings a slow and distant melody over hushed strings. Near the end something like panic breaks out before the music gathers itself and gallops to the close.

Fourth movement. The mezzo-soprano sings the ‘Midnight Song’ from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra: ‘O Mensch! Gib Acht!’ (‘O Man! Take heed!’). The orchestra barely moves, rocking between two notes, and the oboe keeps sliding upward in a cry like a night bird’s.

Fifth movement. It follows without a break, and the mood flips. The boys imitate bells (‘Bimm, bamm’) while the women sing a poem from the folk collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, ‘Es sungen drei Engel’ (‘Three angels were singing’), about Peter’s sins being forgiven. The soloist joins in as the penitent.

Sixth movement. Again there is no pause. The strings begin a broad, quiet melody in D major, and for some twenty-five minutes Mahler lets it grow, with interruptions that recall the anguish of the first movement. After the last of these a flute and piccolo are left almost alone; then the brass take up the theme as a soft chorale and the whole orchestra builds to an ending of repeated D major chords, with two timpanists pounding in step.