In connection with all highly creative people, the literature abounds with written material - biographies, reminiscences and anecdotes, folklore, and, unfortunately, much drivel. Jeanna Wearing's excellent notes on the Third Symphony (for the Program Book) also contain some background (and no drivel) about this Mahler symphony. I feel, however, that it is useful to provide additional material. I pay debt here to the extensive writings of Henry-Louis de La Grange and Donald Mitchell, and to Jack Diether's masterful notes (remember his key role in the Tenth?) for the widely acclaimed recording in 1970 of Jascha Horenstein (Diether's notes also are included in the CD release but are highly abridged). I must also thank Jerry Fox for his insights into the posthorn solo, which he will adumbrate in his pre-concert lecture, for an article by Morten Solvik on the Posthorn solo, and for information from Willem Smith, a Dutch colleague. Finally, I will do my best to keep my natural prolixity under control. A book could be written about this gigantic work, Mahler's longest symphony.

While most commentators write quite authoritatively that Mahler wrote this work in 1895-96, he actually may have started to compose some music for the Third while he was finishing the Second. The evidence is not concrete, but in the collection of sketches from the collection of Natalie Bauer-Lechner, now in the Stanford Library, some pages are dated 1895 while a few are dated (but not in Mahler's own hand) 1893. He was spending his summers at the time at a comfortable Gasthaus in the mountains near Salzburg on the shore of a beautiful mountain lake, Attersee. He had a composing Haüschen built by the shore itself, somewhat removed from the Gasthaus. Today, that establishment is still in the hands of the Föttinger family, the family that gave Mahler his summertime shelter for his composing work on Symphonies 2, 3 and 4.

Progress has come to this naturally beautiful spot in the form of extensive summer tourist development. In the 1950s the Haüschen came into use as a latrine and laundry room for the hordes of summer campers, mostly in caravans (read: trailers). Visitors to the site in the 1960s evidently reported these conditions to the Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft in Vienna and they set about working with the Föttingers to restore the Haüschen, move it to a spot closer to the Gasthaus, and construct a proper laundry and bath facility. Many Mahlerites from around the world, including the USA, contributed to this work.

The Häuschen is now a splendid little museum of Mahleriana and the entire camping area has been nicely redone by the Föttingers to be an attractive summer place for fixed summer cabins (most of them former caravans). Anyone who loves Mahler's Second and Third Symphonies and is in the area should make a visit, where you will enjoy comfortable lodging, fine cuisine, a modest collection of Mahleriana, and the genial hospitality of the Föttingers. You will also see the stunning beauty of the lake and surrounding mountains, and appreciate the cogency of Mahler's remark to Bruno Walter:

Without devoting a great deal of space explaining all the vicissitudes of Mahler's conception of his symphony, suffice it to remark that he first conceived of it as a work in seven movements and the following work, the Fourth, as a symphony in six movements, according to Diether's notes. The Wunderhorn song Himmlisches Leben, according to Mahler's original plan, was to be the concluding movement of the Third. That Mahler considered this song as elemental to his symphony is shown by the fact that in an early sketch he included some of its themes in the first movement, which he later removed, but kept very clear thematic material from the song in the fifth movement. Mahler then rethought the structure of the Third Symphony and concluded that the light-hearted song would not be a fitting end to such an involved paean to nature. Later he also revised his ideas of the Fourth Symphony and it became a symphony in four movements, culminating in the song originally composed in 1892, Das himmlisches Leben, describing a child's view of heaven.

As the scaffold upon which to base the thematic ideas for his Third, Mahler wrote extensive notes and gave fanciful titles to the movements. Later, he removed these notations and withdrew his descriptions but his ideas, having been published and widely circulated, survived. Mahler tried to avoid such programmatic descriptions from then on.

While Mahler finished the symphony in 1896, the first complete performance had to wait until 1902, which turned out to be an occasion that had remarkable consequences for Mahler's acceptance in part of Europe, as described below. But in the meanwhile, Felix Weingartner premièred three movements - II, III and VI - in Berlin in 1897. Mahler was present and wrote to his protégé and sometime lover Anna von Mildenburg:

Weingartner wrote that "he found in Mahler a musicality more authentic than that in the symphonic poems of Strauss" and "a strong profound nature that can and should express itself in its own way." Weingartner evidently was a strong follower and early champion of Mahler, but he had his own bitter experiences later with the Fourth.

While in Berlin, Mahler met Richard Strauss, another event that was to influence Mahler's career. Strauss, besides being a composer of rank, was a conductor and program organizer of note, and had organized many special concerts. Mahler and Strauss became friends and mutual supporters. One series of special concerts organized by Strauss was at the small Rhenish town Krefeld. Strauss arranged for Mahler to première there in 1902 his complete Third Symphony.

The reception at Krefeld was quite another story from the occasion at Berlin. Alma, his bride of 3 months, wrote:

This from the younger woman who had characterized Mahler's first symphony as a hodge-podge of styles and mostly noise. This was also the same young woman who was moved to bitter tears on receiving Mahler's letter, shortly after they were engaged, in which he enjoined her to cease her own composing, and suggesting that she devote her life to his music. She was advised by her mother to break the engagement but, after pondering the night through, as she wrote in her diaries (just now available in English), she wondered how it would be to devote her life to Mahler in true love. Her epiphany at Krefeld evidently led her to do just that, at least for some time, but read the notes for MahlerFest X in the CDissue of Symphony No. 10, to learn how she felt near the end of Mahler's life.

The Krefeld concert also had another quite unexpected bearing on Mahler and his musical life. Present in the audience was Willem Mengelberg, a young conductor who had taken over in 1895 the leadership of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra newly formed circa 1893. Mengelberg was, in a word, bowled over by Mahler's music and musicality. Mengelberg invited Mahler to Amsterdam to conduct and meet the Dutch musical community. Mahler visited Amsterdam three times, staying with Mengelberg in his lovely town house near the Concertgebouw. Mahler conducted many times there, in many locales, and was moved to say that after he retired he wanted to live in Amsterdam where he found the musical atmosphere so congenial.

As an aside, Mengelberg conducted Mahlers' music in some 450 concerts, a record that will probably never be equaled. Mengelberg organized the first Mahler Festival in 1920, at which he and his orchestra performed all of the symphonic works and most of the songs in a period of some 20 days, a Herculean task. In one concert, Mengelberg conducted two full-length symphonies, one of them being the formidable Sixth, the first time that such a feat was accomplished. To be sure, Mahler himself conducted in Amsterdam two performances of the Fourth, on the same program, but of course the rehearsals were therefore easier, dealing with but one work. To our best knowledge, Robert Olson was only the second conductor who had the temerity, or should we say the audacity, to program two full and different Mahler symphonic works on one program, that for MahlerFest XI. Mengelberg's Mahler legacy, alas, is sparse on records - we have only his wonderfully moving and romantic reading of the Adagietto of the Fifth, a most individualistic performance of the entire Fourth (which Mengelberg conducted over 150 times!), and a wonderful Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen which gives some idea of how Mengelberg might have done the First.

In his composing, Mahler usually tried to find new ways to express his feelings, new ways to obtain orchestral colorings, and new ways to organize his works. However, the one predictable aspect of Mahler's composing was that each new symphony would contain something new. His new twist for the Third was to use as a solo instrument a posthorn, an open trumpet-like instrument, sometimes long and straight, sometimes curled. This horn was a common instrument to signal the arrival/departure of the carriages (postillon) carrying the mail, or sometimes simply as a signaling device in mountainous areas (e.g., see last year's essay on the Alpenhorn). In an early version of the score, Mahler calls for a flügelhorn but later editions call for a trumpet played like a posthorn. Some players have used a trumpet with as flügelhorn mouthpiece. The tune Mahler assigns to this instrument greatly resembles a tune in Franz Liszt's piece Rhapsodie Espagnol (circa 1863) and a similar tune in a piece called Jota Aragonaise by Michael Glinka, composed later. According to Morten Solvik, Ferruccio Busoni, composer and great pianist, orchestrated the Liszt piece and proposed to Mahler that it be performed in a concert. Mahler and Busoni were frequent collaborators in Europe and in New York. In brief, the orchestrated Liszt work was played by Busoni with Mahler at a concert on October 22 1894, in Hamburg. in the very period in which Mahler was composing his Symphony No. 3. Draw your own conclusions!

However, we now have some evidence that Mahler possibly heard this melody much earlier. My Dutch friend, Willem Smith, has just informed me of his research on tunes postillon drivers played in the former Bohemia and Moravia. The drivers played their own favorite tune to identify their coach. The Spanish tune that Liszt and Glinka used was one of their favorites! It was noted by some travelers (documented in letters) that Mahler took a postillon at one time, the driver of which often played this Spanish tune. So, the Liszt-Busoni piece might have reinforced in Mahler's memory that tune, which then found its way into the Third Symphony. Another striking "similarity" in the Mahler 3 is the opening chorus of 8 horns in unison belting out a tune that bears a remarkable similarity to the great maestoso theme in the last movement of the Brahms Symphony No. 1. Perhaps they both came from an Austrian folk melody. Brahms himself retorted, when someone noted the similarity to a theme in his First to that of the main theme in the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth, "A fool can see that!" What goes around comes around.

Finally, on a lighter note, the great expressive theme of the last movement of Mahler's Third, upon which he builds for some twenty minutes, bears a remarkable similarity to an American popular tune of the war years circa 1942, I'll be Seeing You in all the old Familiar Places. And, Shostakovitch fans please note, his great and stunning coda for his Fifth Symphony is a child of Mahler's coda for his Third, except that Shostakovitch added bass drum to the thundering finale. Shostakovitch was an admitted Mahler admirer, so why not? Great composers absorb good ideas and keep them in their subconscious, to emerge when the time is ripe. As Brahms said, "A fool can see that!"

Enjoy Mahler's Great Ode to Nature!

Return