"In it, the whole of nature finds a voice."

Mahler grew up in an age when all music, not just program music, was invariably ‘about something’ and was typically interpreted via extra-musical associations, ideas, and images. “There is no modern music without its underlying program,” Mahler wrote to a colleague concerning the 1902 premiere of Symphony No. 3. Such thinking was woefully out of fashion for much of the 20th century. The commentarial class waxed eloquent on the virtues of symphonic development and dismissed the idea of an ‘underlying program’ as unenlightened, sentimental, or even foolish. Consider the eminent conductor Arturo Toscanini’s insistence that, for him, Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphonywas ‘allegro con brio’ and nothing more: no Napoleon, no battles, no heroes. Listeners committed to such a nuts-and-bolts mindset recoiled from Mahler’s symphonies, put off by their length, grandiosity, and apparent self-indulgence. Until the mid-20th century, the general consensus was that Mahler’s symphonies were oversized, dysfunctional relics. It wasn’t until audiences began returning to the idea that abstract music might be ‘about something’ that Mahler’s vast tapestries of ideas, moods, and impulses started becoming attractive, then compelling, then indispensable. Mahler’s posthumous elevation from oddball to master was swift.

If Mahler has a musical ancestor, then Robert Schumann makes an excellent candidate, particularly the Schumann of those aphoristic piano pieces assigned quasi-Freudian characters such as Eusebius, Florestan, and Master Raro, each piece a miniature cigar that is never merely a cigar. And if Mahler has musical progeny, we may find them more in the cinema than in the concert hall. Consider film composer Bernard Herrmann, who custom-tailored his instrumentation to match each film’s overall tone – screeching strings in Psycho, a slithering theremin in The Day the Earth Stood Still, guttural electric organs in Journey to the Center of the Earth, a wailing saxophone in Taxi Driver – thereby amplifying the movie’s overall impact. (Film music’s pervasive influence probably contributed to Mahler’s eventual acceptance by the general listening public.)

We should keep in mind that Mahler’s primary bailiwick was the theater, where he reigned supreme as an innovative operatic music director, first in small regional theaters then working his way up through Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, and eventually to the podium of the lordly Vienna Court Opera, not long after he had composed the Third Symphony. Nor did he limit himself to conducting. He was intensely involved in all aspects of his productions, from design to costumes to staging to lighting. Mahler the director informed Mahler the composer, resulting in orchestral works that are steeped in the theater, with the Third Symphony as a particularly epic instance.

Mahler originally envisioned the Third along a clearly defined story line and gave each of its six movements a programmatic title. Those titles evolved throughout the symphony’s gestation, but they made it all the way to the autograph manuscript before Mahler had a change of heart and removed them before publication. “Those titles were an attempt on my part to provide non-musicians with something to hold on to and with signposts for the intellectual, or better, the expressive content of the various movements,” he wrote to conductor Josef Krug-Waldsee. “That it didn’t work (as in fact it never could work) and that it led only to misinterpretations of the most horrendous sort became painfully clear all too quickly.”

But attitudes have changed, and today’s audiences are much more inclined to roll with Mahler’s programmatic fantasies. Those spurned titles are useful guides to this symphony’s grand unfolding, which begins with the god Pan welcoming in the summer and follows with five quasi-impressionistic scenarios, each retreating progressively further from everyday reality until the last movement ends the symphony with a fervent paean to love.

Pan Awakes. Summer Comes Marching In (I – Kräftig. Entschieden) runs for about 40 minutes in most performances, about the length of an entire Beethoven symphony. Yet it is actually quite economical in that Mahler employs a limited amount of material, organized via the time-honored procedures of classical sonata form. The powerful opening statement pays clear homage to the Brahms First Symphony via the noble main theme of its finale, itself an homage to the “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth – thus establishing the Third’s place in the symphonic lineage. What follows is a series of cyclic waves in which hushed sorrow gradually energizes itself, eventually to erupt in jolly swaggering marches. Sudden collapses back to quietude restart the process, until one final eruption ends the movement in a roar of elation.

Four evocative character pieces follow, starting with What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me (II – Tempo di Menuetto), a delicately nostalgic minuet. The first part of the symphony to be composed, it alternates lighter-than-air passages with others of a more sinister cast. Dedicated Mahlerians might recognize anticipatory chunks of the Fourth Symphony’s “Life in Heaven” finale, which Mahler originally planned for the Third but eventually repurposed as the Fourth’s conclusion.