Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 3
I. Kräftig. Entschieden
II. Tempo di Menuetto
III. Comodo (Scherzando)
IV. Sehr langsam — Misterioso
V. Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck
VI. Langsam — Ruhevoll — Empfunden
“A dream on a summer’s afternoon” – this is how Mahler described – in a letter – his ‘Symphony No. 3’. This composition is the middle and most monumental of his three symphonies inspired by the folk poetry collection entitled ‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’. The piece was completed in 1896, towards the end of Mahler’s years in Hamburg, but the first complete performance of the work did not take place until 1902 in Krefeld on the River Rhine. This is hardly surprising as the work’s enormous scale, extraordinary length of over an hour and a half and its musical heterogeneity, which has given rise to six very contrasting movements, make the performance of the musical work an extraordinary task. The subject of the composition is the universe itself: nature conceived as a soul. Composer and conductor Pierre Boulez once wrote: “Mahler’s world is by no means a homogeneous universe. He takes the risk of contrasting styles, uses quotation and parody as legitimate tools, and re-teaches us how to listen to music: how to listen in a more varied, ambiguous and richer way.” While composing his Symphony No. 3 Mahler wrote to a friend, almost rapturously, that “there is always something trivial in my works, but this time I am going beyond all limits.”
Following the example of Symphony No. 2, the six-movement work ‘Symphony No. 3’ is organised into a single large two-part structure: the first part, a kind of prelude, consists of the first movement entitled Kräftig, Entschieden (powerful, determined) – which is symphonic in scale in itself – while the second part consists of all the other movements. Mahler noted down several poetic programmes during the composition of the piece but when the score was published in 1906, he provided no literary explanation to the work. Nevertheless, it is worth examining the images Mahler associated with each movement.
1. Introduction. Pan’s awakening – Summer marches in – Procession of Bacchus
2. What the Flowers of the Field Tell Me – minuet
3. What the Animals of the Forest Tell Me – scherzando
4. What Man Tells Me – very slowly
5. What the Angels Tell Me – cheerfully
6. What Love (God) Tells Me – slowly
The basic tone of this grandiose composition, which offers a catalogue of the universe in its “programme”, is fundamentally cheerful. “Humour and cheerfulness – a joyful, roaring laugh at the whole world. This cheerfulness hovers above the struggles and sufferings of Symphonies No. 1 and 2, and it could only be born as a result of such struggles and sufferings,” wrote Mahler at the beginning of his compositional work.
The world of symphony is extremely heterogeneous not only in musical terms but also in philosophical and conceptual terms. In Mahler’s symphonies, elements of Nietzsche’s masterpiece ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ suddenly appear, and likewise philosophical atheism, Nietzsche’s radical concept of antiquity and a kind of naive, folk mysticism, which can be traced back primarily to one of Mahler’s main sources of inspiration, the folk poetry collection ‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’ also surface. In the scherzo, Mahler refers to one of his own ‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’ songs (entitled ‘The Changing of the Summer Guard’), and the text of the fifth movement also comes from this folk poetry collection. As does the planned seventh movement of the Symphony entitled ‘The Heavenly Life’, which ultimately found its place not in ‘Symphony No. 3’ but in the finale of ‘Symphony No. 4’.