Most people look forward to relaxing during their summer holidays, but when Gustav Mahler was free from his post as chief conductor of the Vienna State Opera, he devoted himself to composing his oeuvre. During the mid-1890s, his vacation destination of choice was the Austrian Attersee, where he had a special composer’s hut constructed. According to the man who built it, Mahler ‘needed to have the house right by the shore. When he listened to the lake, he composed more easily, and the compositions literally flowed out of his head.’

Mahler was far from the city, at his lakeside cottage, when he wrote his Third Symphony, a work of colossal dimensions with a massive programme, even by his standards. In six movements, Mahler used broad gestures to describe six ascending stages of Nature’s evolution in the term’s broadest sense. In the first and longest part, or ‘Abteilung’, we hear a story of creation, the birth of the world, or the creation of All out of Nothing.

In the second ‘Abteilung’ consisting of five movements, Mahler composed what he described respectively as ‘what the flowers tell me; what the animals tell me; what man tells me; what the angels tell me; and what love tells me.’ 

Mahler initially called this symphony ‘The Gay Science’, referring to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaftfrom 1882. In fact, Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-85) forms this symphony’s musical and philosophical framework. ‘Eternal recurrence’ is a central theme in both of these books by Nietzsche. 

Abteilung I (part 1)

Mahler used a massive orchestra – plus two choirs! – to depict the origins of the world. The brass section alone consists of eight horns, four trumpets, four trombones and a tuba. To maintain balance, the other orchestral sections also had to be augmented. The work opens with eight unison horns sounding austere and ominous. Soon afterwards, the music comes to a halt, at least melodically. The core of the earth slowly solidifies to rock. Mahler said, ‘It’s almost ceased to be music,’ and ‘It’s eerie, the way life gradually breaks through from this soulless, rigid matter.’ He went on to say, ‘I could equally well have called the movement: what the mountain tells me.’

Eventually, life emerges. In fact, this first part could be seen as a stand-alone symphonic poem. Mahler entitled it ‘Pan’, using the Greek word for ‘All,’ which is also the name of the musical woodland deity of fertility and abundance. In a reference to Pan’s flute, Mahler used woodwind and double reed instruments to awaken Pan from his deep slumber. This symbolizes the birth of organic nature and plant and animal life, ultimately leading to the creation of human beings, including all human suffering and the struggle for happiness.

But first, those human beings had to be born. To show that, Mahler revisited themes he had used to depict the origin of the earth. These sounds now represent humans being born into an inhospitable world. The awakening of Pan and humanity requires several attempts in the form of interrupted musical entrances; nothing happens by itself.

The arrival of the first summer helps; Mahler gave it the form of an ecstatic and glorious march, an exuberant fanfare. In Mahler’s creative hands, all these themes – the origin of the world, of Pan, of summer and humans – work together musically and harmoniously. That makes this movement difficult to classify using classical sonata form; however, it does align with Zarathustra’s cosmology.

Abteilung II (2nd to 6th movements)

Part 2 opens with, ‘What the flowers of the field tell me.’  This piece is in the tradition of such ‘flower music’ as Rosen aus dem Süden (‘Roses from the South’) by Johann Stra­uss, Jr. and Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers. Mahler also uses 3/4 time to paint his floral arrangement, but he opts for a minuet instead of a waltz, with contrasting trio sections – in which the winds dispense the fragrance.

The third movement, ‘What the animals of the forest tell me’, is a scherzo from Mahler’s song Ablösung im Sommer (‘The Changing of the Guard in Summer’), based on texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of folk poems. Here, the virtuoso nightingale takes the place of the repetitive cuckoo (‘Cuckoo is dead!’), and Mahler adds a series of free variations. But when the birds are joined by other animals, it’s clear how cruel nature can be. Then, out of the blue, Mahler introduces an off-stage trumpet solo, ‘like a distant post horn’, a so­rt of Last Post for the deceased animals, often played on a flügelhorn. Is the horn call announcing the arrival of humankind? This movement ends with the painful sounds of birth from Part 1.

The fourth movement exchanges the physical world for the spiritual one. ‘What man tells me,’ is an alto aria based on a text from Also sprach Zarathustra. The song seeks to comfort humankind’s existential panic, in another mention of Pan. But the question remains unanswered: does joy go deeper than so­rrow?

In the fifth movement, ‘What the angels tell me,’ Mahler returns to a Wunderhorn song, Es sungen Drei Engel. A children’s choir – the symbol of innocence – joins voices with a women’s choir. Although the original text deals with sinfulness, Mahler emphasizes forgiveness, redemption and the love of God, which ultimately leads to heavenly bliss – one final step along Mahler’s evolutionary ladder.

The title of the sixth movement hints at what ‘heavenly bliss’ might mean to the composer. According to Mahler, this is ‘what love tells me.’ Not an earthly love, but an eternal one. The movement, a monumental, purely instrumental hymn, is an ode to God and Love, which, for Mahler, are one and the same. The main theme in the strings, while hardly recognizable, is directly based on the horn theme that opens in the first movement, the birth of All. Mahler said, ‘What was lifeless has here grown to the highest consciousness. From unexpressed sound to the highest expression.’ That makes this piece a majestic, transfigured ‘recurrence of the same.’