classical music - andante

Introduction | Chronology | Filmography

SYMPHONY NO. 3

Genesis

The composer who writes 'a major work, literally reflecting the whole world, is himself only, as it were, an instrument played by the whole universe'. This famous and oft-quoted phrase could have been uttered only by Mahler, and uttered, moreover, in a rare moment of exaltation such as the one that inspired one of his most imposing, ambitious and vast creations, his Third Symphony. What possessed him to conceive such monumental scores? The answer is not hard to find when we consider that Mahler's operatic activities took up the greater part of his time and energy and that only during the summer months was he able to seek refuge in composition. He had completed only two symphonies when he realised that he was already thirty-four years old and that he had still written very few works in comparison to the great composers of the past. From then on, he felt the need to justify his calling as a creative artist by devoting his summers not only to writing symphonies but to creating veritable symphonic worlds using 'all the technical means' at his disposal. Yet despite appearances, the huge score of the Third Symphony was not born of a desire to pile Pelion upon Ossia but sprang from a tremendous burst of inspiration of a kind that any creative artist—even one of the greatest geniuses—feels only rarely in his life.

Composition

During the early summer of 1895, Mahler returned to the tiny inn at Steinbach on the Attersee and resumed the daily ritual that had first been established two years before. At half past six each morning he would withdraw to the little studio that he had had built on the lakeside and spend the greater part of the day there, often until late in the afternoon. It was here that he wrote the minuet to which he later gave the name Blumenstück since it had been inspired by the flower-strewn meadow surrounding the hut. Even by this early date he had already conceived an overall plan that is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious ever designed by a writer of symphonies. Starting from inert matter—rocks and inanimate Nature—he could already glimpse the way in which the vast epic would proceed, one by one, through the stages of evolution—flowers, animals and mankind himself—before rising to universal love, which he imagined as a supremely transcendental force.

This programme passed through several different versions, but it must be stressed that, atypically, Mahler finalised it before embarking on the score. At no point did he ever disown it, even though he later forbade the publication of any explanatory text whenever his works were performed. The general title (which he insisted had nothing to do with Shakespeare's comedy) was A Midsummer Night's Dream (shortly to become A Midsummer Morning's Dream). Later, when he had immersed himself in Nietzsche, he replaced it with a title borrowed from one of the poet-philosopher's books, My Gay Science or The Gay Science. The opening movement was initially called 'The Arrival of Summer' or 'Pan's Awakening' and, later, 'Procession of Bacchus'. It appears that the initial Allegro, not written until the following year (1896), was not yet preceded by the long introduction in D minor that Mahler was later to say could have been subheaded: 'What the Rocks Tell Me.' The other movements already bore their definitive titles:

2. 'What the Flowers of the Fields Tell Me'
3. 'What the Animals of the Forest Tell Me'
4. 'What Night Tells Me' (later changed to 'What Man Tells Me')
5. 'What the Cuckoo Tells Me' (replaced by 'Morgenglocken' [Morning Bells] and, later, by 'What the Angels Tell Me')
6. 'What Love Tells Me'

To the title of the final movement Mahler later added, by way of a subtitle, 'Father, behold these wounds of mine! Let none of Thy creatures be lost!'. In Mahler's original plan, there was an additional seventh movement, 'What the Child Tells Me', which was none other than the song Das himmlische Leben, written three years earlier and subsequently incorporated into the Fourth Symphony.

There were times when so overweeningly arrogant a plan plunged Mahler into despair, for, in contrast to his two preceding symphonies, he no longer sought to depict the world 'from the point of view of struggling, suffering man', but 'this time went to the very heart of existence, where he must feel in complete awe of the world and of God'. Moreover, he realised that the first movement would last more than half an hour and wondered whether he would be dismissed as a madman or, at the very least, accused of being a megalomaniac bent on outdoing the gigantism of the Second Symphony. Carried along by the flood tide of his inspiration, however, Mahler had no choice but to continue.

The next four movements were written during this first summer of 1895. Although he hesitated briefly over their order, he finally stuck closely to the programme sketched out earlier that year. He was so proud of it that he showed it to all his friends in the course of the following months, with the result that at least eight different versions exist, albeit very similar to one another. For the opening movement, which was to be the longest of the six, Mahler merely noted down a few musical sketches in 1895, deferring the actual composition until the following summer.

When Mahler arrived at Steinbach on 11 June 1896 with the intention of resuming his work of the previous summer, he discovered that, in his haste to leave Hamburg, he had left the sketches of the first movement in a drawer of his desk. Although a friend in Hamburg agreed to forward them to him, he spent an anxious eight days awaiting their arrival, fretting over the time wasted and in a state of constant fear lest the parcel go astray. As always, it proved far more difficult to reimmerse himself in the score than he had envisioned, the transition from his life as a performing artist to that of a creative musician invariably causing him considerable anguish.

At that point, the introduction was still conceived as a separate movement, but it was gradually assuming a new significance: it would no longer depict soulless, lifeless Nature imprisoned beneath the winter ice but the stifling heat of summer, when 'not a breath stirs, all life is suspended, and the sun-drenched air trembles and vibrates. At intervals there come the moans [...] of captive life struggling for release from the clutches of lifeless, rigid Nature'. Enthralled by the 'mystery of Nature', Mahler believed that music alone could 'capture its essence'. To depict Bacchus's procession and its wild cavortings, Mahler thought of hiring a military band, with its repertory of military music of a kind familiar to him from his childhood, the characteristic sounds of which he always evoked so effectively. It may be added in passing that at the end of the nineteenth century when, under the influence of Romanticism, the use of original material had assumed the force of a quasi-religious dogma, it showed unheard-of temerity on a composer's part to introduce the insolent 'banality' of largely unmediated popular music into a symphonic work.

Thanks to the 'diary' kept by Natalie Bauer-Lechner and to Mahler's own correspondence, we are well informed about the genesis of the Third Symphony. A letter to his mistress of the moment, the soprano Anna von Mildenburg, finds him both lucid and elated: 'My symphony will be something the world has never heard before. In it Nature herself acquires a voice and tells secrets so profound that they are perhaps glimpsed only in dreams! I assure you, there are passages where I myself sometimes get an eerie feeling; it seems as though it were not I who composed them.' In spite of all his anxieties, Mahler remained convinced that 'one day the world will take good note of all this', while acknowledging that 'people will need time to crack the nuts I am shaking down from this tree for them'.

The first movement was completed in short score on 11 July 1896—in other words, in less than a month. Soon afterwards, Mahler was visited at Steinbach by his young disciple, Bruno Walter, whom he had previously warned in a letter to expect a work in which his 'savage and brutal nature reveals itself most starkly' and which, on this occasion, 'goes beyond all bounds' with its 'triviality' and 'furious din'. It must be added here that Mahler had been hurt by the almost unanimously hostile reception accorded to his Second Symphony in Berlin the previous December.

That the underlying conception and dominant ideology of the Third Symphony are coloured by pantheistic thought should come as no surprise, since Mahler's attitude toward the human condition, including all questions of life and death, owed more to Eastern philosophies than to the Judaism of his ancestors or the Christianity to which he would shortly be converted. This much is clear to us today from Das Lied von der Erde, the final farewell of which is transfigured by the consoling thought of Nature's eternal return each spring. A work so powerful yet so tender and so overwhelmingly moving in its acceptance of fate's decree expresses far more than any poetic idea, and expresses it, moreover, far better than words ever could: it affirms a literally mystic conviction and provides an answer to the questions on fate and the human condition that haunted Mahler throughout his life.

General plan

In an attempt to justify the unusual length of the opening movement, Mahler divided the Third Symphony into two Abteilungen or sections, the first of which comprises the initial Allegro, while the second includes the five movements that follow. Originally he planned to impose a sense of thematic unity on all six movements, and although this plan was not applied to the final version, he nonetheless used several motifs from the opening Allegro in the fourth and sixth movements. A more striking thematic relationship links the fifth movement with the final movement of the Fourth Symphony, in that both are Wunderhorn songs sharing several literary and poetic motifs. Moreover, Mahler himself later realised that his 1892 Wunderhorn song, Das himmlische Leben, was the origin or germ cell of both the Third and Fourth Symphonies.

Analysis

1. Kräftig. Entschieden (Powerfully. Decisively). At no time since he had first started to write symphonies did Mahler attempt to disown his links with the past or to abandon sonata form, and the opening movement of the Third Symphony is no exception. It, too, is cast in a form that had obsessed Romantic composers anxious to maintain the Beethovenian ideal. The only difference in this instance is that there are two expositions instead of only one. Stated fortissimo on eight horns in unison, the initial march-theme serves, as it were, as a gateway to the rest of the work and plays an essential role throughout the whole of this opening movement. It, too, refers to the past, in this case to the final movement of Brahms's First Symphony (which in turn harks back to the famous theme of Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode To Joy).

As we have already seen, the most striking feature of this opening movement is the stylistic contrast, not to say disparity, between the two main subject groups. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that there was evidence here of a conscious rebellion on Mahler's part against the notions of 'culture' and 'taste'. The first subject is the music of darkness and chaos, music that is noble, powerful and grandiose in the most Romantic and traditional sense of the term. Embodying motionless, imprisoned Nature, it takes its place in the grand symphonic tradition established by Beethoven and continued by Bruckner, while the second subject, which evokes the Bacchic procession, is distinguished by its blatantly populist character. As such, it belongs to the 'lower' world, the world of brass bands and military music. Yet it should not be thought that such 'popular' material is subjected to any less elaborate treatment than the remaining thematic material: that was not Mahler's method. For him, the most cheerful simplicity, candour and even naivety invariably concealed a musical and even intellectual mechanism that shaped and structured the musical discourse with conscious, unrelenting rigour. While the military music tends to accelerate in the course of the movement, the first subject never departs from its initial tempo or tragic character, even if innumerable variants incessantly affect its outline. In a series of great solo passages that count among the most difficult in the instrument's repertory, the trombone embodies the thunderous voice of the Earth and its elements.

2. Tempo di Menuetto. Sehr mäßig (Very moderate). The flowers of the meadow at Steinbach inspired Mahler to write a minuet whose tribute to the past has nothing ironic about it but which dances with a exquisite grace. The gossamer-like delicacy of the orchestration rivals that of Berlioz's Danse des Sylphes. Two episodes alternate in symmetrical fashion. Although they are identical in tempo, the second seems faster by virtue of its shorter note-values. In Hamburg Mahler once almost sprained his wrist while instinctively trying to copy out the rapid triplets of this second section at the speed at which they are played.

3. Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne Hast (Unhurriedly). Although binary rather than ternary, this movement is the symphony's Scherzo. With the exception of the Trio, all the thematic material is borrowed from the song Ablösung im Sommer (Relief of the Summer Guard), in which the spring cuckoo is replaced by the summer nightingale. The listener will have no difficulty in understanding why Mahler chose this evocation of the animal world for his Scherzo. The song's melodic material is repeatedly transformed and developed with the indispensable element of contrast being provided by one of the most magical moments in any of Mahler's works—namely, the passage for solo posthorn, which is played 'in the distance', i.e., off-stage. Twice the orchestra replies to it, first with a dreamy duet for two horns and later with eight-part writing for gently murmuring violins that seem to hover in their highest register. Although Mahler's contemporaries were scandalised by the alleged 'banality' of this long posthorn solo, which was inspired by memories of the composer's childhood, it delights us today as a moment of unalloyed poetry. No less notable are the great wave of impassioned anguish and 'cry of terror' that ring out towards the end of the movement in a powerful brass fanfare. It is in this way, Mahler suggests, that the animals react to mankind's intrusion upon their world, a phenomenon with devastating consequences of which we are more conscious than ever before.

4. Sehr langsam (Very slow). Misterioso. Nietzsche's 'Drunken Song' or 'Midnight Song' constitutes an important exception in Mahler's oeuvre at this time, inasmuch as all his other texts were borrowed from the Wunderhorn anthology. Its role differs little from that of Urlicht in the Second Symphony. In the middle of the night, at the darkest and deepest hour, Life makes Zarathustra feel ashamed at his anguish and doubts and bids him meditate between the twelve strokes of midnight on the secret of the worlds, their profound pain and even more mysterious joy, and on the ardour of that joy that, far from bewailing its ephemeral fragility, yearns for eternity. In the course of this meditation, man discovers the way of truth and accedes to a higher form of existence in the childlike purity of the fifth movement and the mystic contemplation of the sixth. The form here is very free, with intentionally indistinct rhythms and 'weak' degrees and harmonic progressions suggesting night's immobility. Everything revolves around contrasts of timbre and register.

5. Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck (Cheerful in tempo and cheeky in expression). The text of 'Es sungen drei Engel' is taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, where it appears under the title 'Armer Kinder Bettlerlied' (The Song of the Poor Beggar Children). For this briefest of the work's six movements, Mahler calls on its most elaborate forces, with double chorus of women and children in addition to the female soloist of the previous movement. No doubt there is something paradoxical about this recourse to such ample resources for a movement that is far from being the work's apotheosis. Even more paradoxical is the idea of entrusting a children's choir with the task of imitating morning bells. Yet the radiant luminosity of these fresh-sounding voices gives the scene the bright-toned colours that Mahler desired.

6. Langsam. Ruhevoll. Empfunden (Slow. Calm. Deeply felt). One would have to look very hard among nineteenth-century symphonies to find another slow movement of such vast dimensions placed, moreover, at the end of the work. A glance at the opening pages of the written score might suggest a simple exercise in polyphonic writing, but no listener can remain insensible to this movement's serenity and grandeur, to its powerful assertion of faith, to its hypnotic motionlessness that is mystical and contemplative rather than meditative. In a movement that renders analysis superfluous, we find Mahler donning the mantle of the legitimate heir of the great Baroque and Classical traditions, a heritage recognisable by its subtle art of variant and variation that untiringly transforms thematic elements which, always familiar, are always different. As usual, there are two alternating subject groups, one in the major, the other in the minor. But the rare moments when anxiety makes itself felt merely serve to underline the tranquil certainty of the movement as a whole.

This hymn to celestial love is wholly bathed in the light of eternity. 'In the Adagio', Mahler told Natalie, 'everything is resolved into peace and being; the Ixion wheel of appearances has at last been brought to a standstill.' The initial fourth is like a distant echo of the fanfare from the symphony's opening bars. Its final apotheosis is undoubtedly the most authentically optimistic of any by a composer so often described as 'morbid' and obsessed with anguish and death. All questions find an answer here, all anguish is assuaged. Almost certainly, this movement would never have been written without the precedent of Parsifal, and yet this fact in no way detracts from its greatness. As a final movement, this vast Adagio is a fitting counterpart to the opening movement, and Mahler would certainly have weakened the whole structure by attempting to duplicate the splendours of the choral ending of the Second Symphony. With this hymn of praise to the Creator of the World, conceived as the supreme force of Love, Mahler took the final step on the road to Eternal Light.

First performance

The first performance of the Third Symphony took place in Berlin on 9 March 1897, but it was incomplete, comprising, as it did, only the second, third and sixth movements. The booing did not quite drown the applause, but it was close. The following day the critics of the German capital outdid themselves, writing of the 'tragicomedy' of a composer lacking both imagination and talent, and of a work made up of 'banalities' and 'a thousand reminiscences'. Mahler was described as 'a musical comedian, a practical joker of the worst kind'. But it was the final movement that particularly exasperated critics; they wrote of its 'religious and mystic airs' and dismissed its main theme as 'a formless tapeworm that twisted and wriggled its way through the whole of the piece'.

Five years later, however, in June 1902, the work was performed complete for the first time at Krefeld in the Rhineland, and on this occasion it was the final Adagio whose contemplative power conquered the least prepared and even the most wilfully hostile listeners. In the view of one critic present on that occasion, it was 'the most beautiful slow movement since Beethoven'. The evening's triumph opened the doors to a new era in Mahler's life and career. Once again the audacity of genius had proved its worth.