The Concert At a Glance
Many a music lover would have envied the proverbial fly on the wall at the meeting between two great symphonists of the period around 1900. On that occasion, in contrast to Sibelius’s advocacy of rigorous musical logic as the foundation stone of symphonic style, Mahler declared that a symphony should be all-embracing, like the universe itself. There is nothing in his formidable output—not even the Eighth Symphony, known as the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of the gigantic performing apparatus it calls for—that fulfills this aim more comprehensively than the Third Symphony. Here the composer explores every corner of the world and every shade of human emotion, ranging from sheer physical exuberance and the enjoyment of nature to contemplation of ultimate mysteries and celebration of the delights of heaven.
Notes on the Program
By Bernard Jacobson
GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 3Born July 7, 1860, in Kalischt, Bohemia; died May 18, 1911, in Vienna.
Begun in 1895 and completed on August 5, 1896, at Steinbach-am-Attersee in Salzburg Province, the Third Symphony was first performed complete on June 9, 1902, in Crefeld, under the composer’s direction, with Luise Geller-Wolter as also soloist; in 1896 and 1897, individual movements had been performed separately under Arthur Nikisch and Felix Weingartner. The Third Symphony received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 2, 1922, with contralto Julia Claussen, the St. Cecilia Club, the Paulist Choristers Boys Chorus, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Willem Mengelberg.
Scoring: alto solo; women’s chorus, boys’ chorus; 4 flutes (3rd and 4th doubling piccolos), 4 oboes (4th doubling English horn), 3 B-flat clarinets (3rd doubling B-flat bass clarinet), E-flat clarinet, 4 bassoons (4th doubling contrabassoon), 8 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, timpani (2 players), percussion (glockenspiel, snare drum, triangle, tambourine, cymbals, tam-tam, bass drum with cymbals), 4 bells, 2 harps, strings
Through most of the 1890s Mahler was busy with a series of orchestral songs, based on a collection of folk poetry published by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano under the title
Des Knaben Wunderhorn (
The Youth’s Magic Horn). Mahler never made any sharp differentiation between the two genres of song and symphony that constitute all of his mature output. Of his 11 symphonies (including
Das Lied von der Erde and the unfinished Tenth), six include voice parts. Among these, Nos. 2, 3, and 4 are often referred to as the
Wunderhorn symphonies, because each of them includes a setting of a poem from the
Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection.
Originally, the vast scheme of the Third Symphony was to end with not one but two
Wunderhorn settings. Evidently Mahler became convinced that this would be too much of a good thing even by
his monumental standards, and when the Third Symphony was completed in 1896 it ended with a purely orchestral slow movement. (The discarded seventh movement was pressed into service instead as the finale of the Fourth Symphony, under the title “Das himmlische Leben,” or “Life in Heaven
.”) What has come down to us is still a six-movement work, laid out in two parts and lasting more than an hour and a half. Its sheer physical size, like its extraordinary expressive range, is no accident, but simply a realization of Mahler’s universe-encompassing conception of the symphonic medium. He planned it, he observed in a letter to the soprano Anna von Mildenburg, as a vast celebration of nature, life, and love:
Just imagine a work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the whole world—one is, so to speak, only an instrument, played on by the universe … My symphony will be something the like of which the world has never yet heard! … In it the whole of nature finds a voice … Some passages in it seem so uncanny to me that I can hardly recognize them as my own work.
The cosmic picture he was aiming at led Mahler at first to put in words a programmatic scheme for the whole symphony, which read as follows:
THE JOYFUL KNOWLEDGE
A Summer Morning’s Dream
I. Summer marches in
II. What the meadow flowers tell me
III. What the forest creatures tell me
IV. What night tells me (mankind)
V. What the morning bells tell me (the angels)
VI. What love tells me
VII. Life in Heaven (what the child tells me)
The last of these tableaux was, as we have seen, transferred to the Fourth Symphony. “A Summer Morning’s Dream” was changed in due course to “A Summer Noonday’s Dream,” “What the forest creatures tell me” became “What the twilight tells me,” and the phrase “Pan awakes” was added to the beginning of the scheme. But then Mahler decided, as he has done with the First and Second symphonies, to let the Third stand without an official program. The original headings nevertheless remain helpful as clues to the music’s expressive intent, even if they are also liable to some misunderstanding.
In particular, the “love” referred to in the title of the sixth movement needs clarification, which Mahler supplied when he told Anna von Mildenburg:
It’s a matter of a different kind of love from what you imagine. The motto to this movement reads:
Father, look at these wounds of mine!
Let not one creature of thine be lost!
… I could almost call the movement “What God tells me.” And truly in the sense that God can only be understood as love. And so my work is a musical poem embracing all stages of development in a stepwise ascent. It begins with inanimate nature and ascends to the love of God.
It is in this universal context that the role of the meadow flowers and the forest creatures must be understood. In a letter to Dr Richard Batka, Mahler remarked that separate performances of the “flowers” movement given before the symphony was complete
will doubtless present me to the public as the “sensuous,” perfumed “singer of nature.” That this nature hides within itself everything that is terrifying, great, and also lovely (which is exactly what I wanted to express in the entire work, in a sort of evolutionary development)—of course no one ever understands this. It always strikes me as odd that most people, when they speak of “nature,” think only of flowers, little birds, and woodsy smells. No one knows the god Dionysus, the great Pan.
Within the symphony’s dramatic arc, the element of Dionysian terror—of Panic in the etymological significance of the word—makes several awe-inspiring incursions. It is to be heard in the huge chords that punctuate the first movement, which the great Mahler scholar Deryck Cooke memorably described as
the most original and flabbergasting thing Mahler ever conceived. To express the primeval force of nature burgeoning out of winter into summer, he built an outsize, proliferating sonata structure out of a plethora of “primitive” material: a rugged … march tune for unison horns, like a great summons to awake; deep soft brass chords, eloquent of hidden power, sullen … growls on trombones, like primordial inertia; bayings of horns, upsurgings of basses, shrieks on woodwind, subterranean rumblings of percussion, and gross, uncouth trombone themes, like monstrous prehistoric voices.
It is implicit in the piccolo fanfares, played out of tempo, that suggest a kind of inimical birdsong (Alfred Hitchcock before his time), and it erupts again toward the end of the “forest creatures” movement, when the echoes of a long-drawn, shimmering offstage posthorn solo redolent of high summer in the deep woodland are brusquely thrust aside by the eruption of a fortissimo E-flat-minor chord that fills the orchestral landscape: so close, in Mahler’s conception, is the enchantment of nature to the visceral fear that lies beneath it.
The work’s remaining explicit
Knaben Wunderhorn movement is the setting of “Es sungen drei Engel einen süssen Gesang” (“Three angels were singing a sweet song”) for boys’ and women’s voices. Though purely instrumental, the “forest creatures” scherzo is based on the thematic material of one of Mahler’s earliest
Wunderhorn settings, “Ablösung im Sommer,” which tells the story of the cuckoo’s death. The other textual element in the symphony comes from a very different source: Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song,” which furnishes mankind’s nocturnal questionings in the fourth movement. Powerful out of all proportion to its brevity and dynamic restraint, this is (to quote Cooke’s unimprovable description once again) “one of the stillest things in all music, with its cry of a night bird (oboe glissando) and its long-held contralto notes backed by thirds on trombones echoed by piccolos.”
It is after such mysteries, and after the carol-like naivety of the succeeding angels’ song, that “love” presents its grand, unhurried apotheosis. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, played in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra’s previous concert three days ago, might well serve as an illustration of the musicologist Sir Donald Tovey’s axiom that, once the human voice has been introduced into a score, any return to purely instrumental writing will be anticlimactic. But every rule worthy of the name has an exception, and Mahler’s Third Symphony provides an utterly convincing one. Try to imagine the opening of this sumptuous finale following on the end, not of the two vocal movements, but of the orchestral scherzo, and it will surely be evident that the sense of haven-within-reach would in that scenario be sadly missing.
Following the dying vocal bell-syllables of the fifth movement without a break, this full-throated orchestral finale is at once reminiscent of traditional 19th-century religious styles, and prophetic of the equally expansive slow finale of Mahler’s own Ninth Symphony. Yet this conclusion, close to unique in the composer’s output, contains none of the emotional indirectness and underlying irony that render the Adagio of the Ninth—and indeed almost all of his music—so poignantly ambivalent. More than any other movement in Mahler, the finale of the Third Symphony lives its feelings without camouflage or self-defense, and thereby communicates them to the listener with an immediacy as consumingly vivid as any he ever achieved.
Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation
Bernard Jacobson writes frequently about classical music and is the author of A Polish Renaissance
, part of the 20th-Century Composers series published by Phaidon Press.
IV. O Mensch! Gib Acht!
Text: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
O Mensch! Gib Acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
Ich schlief!
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht!
Die Welt ist tief!
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht!
Tief ist ihr Weh!
Lust tiefer noch als Herzeleid!
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit!
Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!
Translation: Larry Rothe
Oh man, take heed!
What does deep midnight say?
I slept!
I have woken from a deep dream!
The world is deep—
Deeper than the day had thought!
Deep is the pain!
Joy deeper still than heart’s sorrow!
Pain says: Vanish!
Yet all joy aspires to eternity,
To deep, deep eternity.
V. Es sungen drei Engel
Translation: Larry Rothe
Es sungen drei Engel einen süssen Gesang,
Mit Freuden es selig im Himmel klang;
Sie jauchzten fröhlich auch dabei,
Dass Petrus sei von Sünden frei.
Denn als der Herr Jesus zu Tische sass,
Mit seinen zwölf Jüngern das Abendmal ass,
So sprach der Herr Jesus: “Was stehst du denn hier?
Wenn ich dich anseh’, so weinest du mir.”
“Und sollt ich nicht weinen, du gütiger Gott!”
Du sollst ja nicht weinen!
“Ich hab übertreten die Zehen Gebot;
Ich gehe and weine ja bitterlich.”
Du sollst ja nicht weinen!
“Ach komm und erbarme dich über mich!”
“Hast du denn übertreten die Zehen Gebot,
So fall auf die Knie und bete zu Gott,
Liebe nur Gott in alle Zeit,
So wirst du erlangen die himmlische Freud.”
Die himmlische Freud ist eine selige Stadt,
Die himmlische Freud, die kein End mehr hat;
Die himmlische Freud war Petro bereit
Durch Jesum und allen zur Seligkeit.
Three angels sang a sweet song.
It resounded throughout heaven;
They also rejoiced
That Peter was free of sin.
For as the Lord Jesus sat down at the table
And ate the evening meal with his twelve disciples,
The Lord Jesus said, “Why are you standing here?
When I look at you, you cry.”
“And shouldn’t I cry, you kind God?”
You shouldn’t cry!
“I have broken the Ten Commandments;
I go and cry bitterly.”
You shouldn’t cry!
“Oh come, and have mercy on me!”
“If you’ve broken the Ten Commandments,
Fall on your knees and pray to God.
Just love God always,
And you will have heavenly joy.”
Heavenly joy is a blessed city,
Heavenly joy, which has no end;
Heavenly joy was prepared for Peter
By Jesus, and for everyone’s salvation.
Translation copyright © 2003 by the San Francisco Symphony