Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
Symphonies Nos. 3 and 10
The great Viennese symphonic tradition
found worthy successors in two composers of very different temperament and background,
Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler. The latter, indeed, extended the form in an
extraordinary way that has had a far-reaching effect on the course of Western music, among
other things creating a symphonic form that included in it the tradition of song in a
varied tapestry of sound particularly apt for a twentieth century that has found in
Mahler’s work a reflection of its own joys and sorrows.
Mahler was to express succinctly
enough his position in the world. He saw himself as three times homeless, a native of
Bohemia in Austria, an Austrian among Germans and a Jew throughout the whole world. The
second child, and the first of fourteen to survive, he was born in Kaliste in Bohemia in
1860. Soon after his birth his family moved to Jihlava, where his father, by his own very
considerable efforts, had raised himself from being little more than a pedlar, with a
desire for intellectual self-improvement, to the running of a tavern and distillery.
Mahler’s musical abilities were developed first in Jihlava, before a brief period of
schooling in Prague, which ended unhappily, and a later course of study at the
Conservatory in Vienna, where he turned from the piano to composition and, as a necessary
corollary, to conducting.
It was as a conductor that Mahler made
his career, at first at a series of provincial opera-houses, and later in the position of
the highest distinction of all, when, in 1897, he became Kapellmeister of the Vienna Court
Opera, two months after his baptism as a Catholic, a necessary preliminary. In Vienna he
effected significant reforms in the Court Opera, but made enough enemies, particularly
represented in the anti-semitic press, to lead to his resignation in 1907, followed by a
final period conducting in America and elsewhere, in a vain attempt to secure his family’s
future before his own imminent death, which took place on 18th May, 1911.
Although his career as a conductor
involved him most closely with opera, Mahler attempted little composition in this field.
His work as a composer consists chiefly of his songs and of his ten symphonies, the last
left unfinished at his death, and his monumental setting of poems from the Chinese in Das Lied von der Erde. The greater part of his music
was written during summer holidays away from the business of the opera-house.
Mahler began work on his third
symphony in the summer of 1893 and completed it in the summer-house, named the
Schnützelputz-Häusel after lines in Des Knaben
Wunderhorn, of the house he rented at Steinbach am Attersee in the summer of
1896. The first complete performance took place six years later, in June 1902 at Krefeld.
Mahler himself was unusually explicit about the symphony, which was to contain all nature
and expound deeply mysterious matters, as he w rote in 1896 to the singer Anna von
Mildenburg. To Natalie Bauer-Lechner he explained the first movement, originally entitled Der Sommer marschiert ein (Summer marches in) as more
than this, now preceded by the procession of Panand his rough satyrs, Pan erwacht (Panawakes). The second movement had the
title Was mir die Blumen in der Wiese erzählen (What
the flowers in the meadow tell me), the third Was mir
die Tiere im Walde erzählen (What the animals in the forest tell me), the
fourth Was mir die Nacht erzählt (What the
night teIls me), the fifth > Was mir die Morgenglocken
erzählen (What the morning-bells tell me) and the sixth Was mir die Liebe erzählt (What love tells me). He
had earlier told Natalie Bauer-Lechner of a seventh movement, to be called Was das Kind mir erzählt (What the child tells me).
The symphony is scored for a large orchestra, with four flutes, all doubling on piccolo,
four oboes, the fourth doubling on cor anglais, three A or B flat clarinets, including
bass clarinet, two E flat clarinets, three bassoons and a double bassoon, eight French
horns, four trumpets, four trombones, tuba, timpani, two glockenspiels, tambourine,
tam-tam, triangle, suspended cymbal, side drum, bass drum, cymbals, switch, two harps and
strings, in addition to an alto soloist, a women’ s choir and a boys’ choir, a flugelhorn
and side drums off-stage and a set of tuned bells. The work is in two parts. Part I
includes the first movement only and Part II the remaining movements. >
The first movement, marked kräftig (vigoraus) and entschieden (decisive), starts with a march theme
played by all eight French horns, described by Mahler as Weckruf (Reveille). Soon three muted trumpets
introduce an element of conflict, as summer fights to overcome winter. An oboe melody
suggests the start of summer, followed by a solo violin, and final victory is inevitable,
as summer conquers, in an extended movement of complexity and variety, a success
celebrated by Pan and Dionysus. The second part starts with a Tempo di Menuetto, markedgrazioso. An oboe is
accompanied by the plucked strings of viola, cello and double bass. A livelier melody is
introduced by a flute and the two themes, in varied form, provide the thematic substance
of the movement. This idyllic music, chosen for separate performance by eminent
contemporary conductors, in spite of Mahler’s objections, is followed by a movement that
brings in the birds and beasts of the forest. The sound of a post-horn is heard,
announcing the approach of a stage-coach from the distance. A rougher mood intervenes in a
passage marked Grob! (coarse). The post-horn
(a flugelhorn) is heard once more and earlier themes and fragments of themes re-appear, as
the movement proceeds to a final dynamic climax.
The last three movements of the
symphony were to be played without a break. The fourth movement, slow and mysterious, is a
setting of words of the Mitternachtslied taken
from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, a
work in which Mahler had shown considerable interest, although he preferred to replace
Nietzsche’s Superman with Man, the subject of Was mir
die Nacht erzählt (What night tells me). The movement is at the still heart of
the symphony. It is followed by the message of the angels in the morning-be1ls of the
fifth movement, as the boys’ choir, accompanied by the bells, sings an accompaniment to
the simple song of the three angels, sung by the women’s choir. Complex in its subtle
scoring, this is, nevertheless music that reflects the naivety of the words from Brentano
and von Amim’s influential collection of traditional poems Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The symphony ends with a
tranquil Adagio, for which Mahler claimed
that he might almost have used the explanatory title "What God tells me". The
movement opens with the strings, leading on to an appropriately affirmative conclusion, as
what he described to Bauer-Lechner as the Ixion-wheel of appearances is resolved into
quiet being.
Mahler sketched his Tenth Symphony during the summer of 1910 at Toblach
and his work on the symphony reached a degree of completion, although none of it was
actually completed in full orchestration or would have represented the composer’s final
version, had he lived. The movement nearest to completion was the first, although even
this would perhaps have been extensively revised before performance. The English
musicologist Deryck Cooke has made what he has modestly described as a "practical
performing version" of Mahler’s sketches and this has been accepted by many as the
nearest approximation possible to the work as Mahler conceived it. The existing first
movement, in the key of F sharp major, starts with the violas in the key of B minor in an Andante introduction to the Adagio, where a violin theme, marked piano aber sehr warm, is heard over string and
trombone accompaniment. The viola theme and the theme of the Adagio dominate much of the movement, as the music
moves forward to a great climax. After this there is an extended coda, with oblique
references to earlier thematic material and a conclusion in a mood of quiet resignation.