Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 3 in D minor Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 3 in D minor

In its dimensions, this symphony surpasses anything that had come before: Gustav Mahler’s Third runs to an impressive playing time of well over 90 minutes and offers not the usual four, but six movements. Around 200 performers – a large orchestra, a women’s chorus and a children’s chorus, as well as an alto soloist – gather on stage. In the Wilhelminian era, when the work was created, the term “colossal” was employed for such things. In terms of content, too, Mahler reached for the stars: the symphony tells a creation story, setting the whole world to music.

Mahler, then First Kapellmeister at the Hamburg Municipal Theatre, composed it during his holidays in the summers of 1895 and 1896, which he spent in Steinbach am Attersee. For his work, he had a small composing hut set up right on the shore, offering him an unobstructed view of the water and the Höllengebirge mountains. And it was this sight of rugged rock faces that inspired the symphony’s opening, which depicts inanimate nature – the world in its primeval state. Mahler initially wanted to call the first movement “What the mountains tell me”: “It is almost no longer music, it is nearly nothing but sounds of nature. And it is eerie how life gradually wrests itself free from rigid matter.” Mahler lets the implacable sounds of the beginning culminate in a march of provocatively exuberant cheerfulness. “Summer marches in,” he noted of this development, which clears the way for plants, animals, and human beings.

“What the flowers in the meadow tell me,” Mahler portrays in the delicate second movement, which he considered the most carefree thing he had ever written. The oboe introduces a dainty, rococo-like theme; the basses pluck; the heavy percussion falls silent. The plants are gently caressed by the wind – only now and then does Mahler let them be shaken by a stronger gust. The following Scherzo leads into folk-like territory, with quotations from Mahler’s Wunderhorn song Ablösung im Sommer. In it, the animals in the forest lament that the cuckoo has died, who always entertained them so well. But the nightingale soon provides a replacement … The endangered state of the animal world is underlined by Mahler with a huge trumpet solo in the middle of the movement, sounding into the action from afar. “The animals catch sight of the first human being and sense, although he passes by the terrified creatures calmly, future misfortune caused by him,” Mahler explained of this so-called “post-horn episode”.

And then, in the shadowy fourth movement, humankind takes centre stage. Human beings too are mortal, however much they may long for infinity. Mahler addresses this dilemma with a poem by Friedrich Nietzsche, to the lines “Yet all joy seeks eternity! – / Seeks deep, deep eternity”: they are sung by the alto soloist. Can religion, can faith offer a way out of the dilemma? Once again Mahler turns to a Wunderhorn song – this time the story of the sinner Peter who is saved. For it, he writes music of heavenly innocence: “Bim-bam,” sings the children’s chorus, and the bells begin to ring out.

Yet Mahler knows: religion is not the final word of wisdom. The highest form of life that he presents at the end of his creation story in the finale is, for him, love. Only in love did Mahler recognise God. To set this thought to music, he composed an Adagio with seemingly endless melodies that unfold in the greatest calm – as if transfigured. Time seems to stand still, finitude is overcome, human limitation suspended. Mahler builds his beguiling themes into a hymn-like, ecstatic song, turning the home key from D minor into a jubilant D major. Light has prevailed; goodness has won.