Watch Now: Michael Tilson Thomas: Mahler 3rd. Verbier

The Verbier Festival Orchestra, under the baton of one of the greatest Mahlerians of our time, Michael Tilson Thomas, explores the Austrian composer’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor.

The Third, the longest of Mahler’s symphonies, is an ode to nature, but a nature from which many torrents emerge. “There’s no need to look at the landscape, all of it is in my symphony”. It is with these words that the composer greets the conductor Bruno Walter come to visit him in Steinbach-am-Attersee in 1896.

To close the 2016 edition of the Verbier Festival, two regional choirs and Nathalie Stutzmann, one of the most remarkable musical personalities of our time join the Verbier Festival Orchestra to perform this splendid ode to life.

Mahler, The 3rd Symphony, Schoenberg and Pan

Gustav Mahler was chronically superstitious and obsessed with omens, signs, voices, and wonders. His Third Symphony, composed in 1895-96, was, for example, based on a bizarre midsummer's dream. Mahler deeply loved nature. What he thought he found in nature was not simply nature, not simply the stuff of botany, biology, geology, and meteorology. In his hikes around Salzburg's hills, Mahler felt free; he felt touched by nature's eternal cycles; he felt the gaze of the transcendent. But whose gaze was that? Could it be the gaze not of a loving Father, but of some grotesque nature god? Could nature's god really be Pan, leering, violent, mocking? Mahler was fascinated by the horizons so powerfully visible in his summer mountains. He was convinced that there was something, or someone, just beyond that horizon. In the midst of working on the Third Symphony he was horrified to think that maybe just over the horizon squatted Pan. His wife, Alma, remembered that during the summer when he was working on the Third Symphony,

One day ... he came running down from his hut in perspiration, scarcely able to breathe. At last he came out with it: it was the heat, the stillness, the Pan-icy horror. He was overcome by this feeling of the goat-god's frightful and vivid eye upon him in his solitude, and he had to take refuge in the house among human beings, and go on with his work there.

Mahler's Third Symphony would prove to be one of the strangest things he ever composed. Critic Deryck Cooke writes of the symphony's first movement:

[It] is 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 F major-D minor march tune for unison horns, like a great summons to awake; deep soft brass chords, eloquent of hidden power; sullen D minor 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. In opposition appears murmurous pastoral music in D major (wind chords, trilling muted strings, solo violin) with shrill bird calls (piccolo "fanfares" out of tempo). The final basic element, most extraordinary of all, is Mahler's "popular" march style raised to a cosmic level: summer, approaching from afar, "marches in" gaudily with thumping military band music, clad in a stark, blaring polyphony of fanfares and counter-melodies.

Mahler: The Third Symphony

"...nature hides within itself everything that is frightful, great, and also lovely (which is exactly what I wanted to express in the entire work, in a sort of evolutionary development) … 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 .” Mahler

In the summer of 1894, Gustav Mahler hired Franz Lösch to build a 'composing hut' on the shore of the Attersee in Steinbach, Austria. Many years later, Lösch recalled to an interviewer why Mahler was so keen for his häuschen (little house):

"[Mahler] would always say: the lake had its own language, the lake talked to him. From up at the inn he couldn't hear it, so he needed to have a little house right by the shore. When he heard the lake, he composed more easily, and the compositions flowed fully formed from his head."

That Mahler listened to what the lake told him should come as no surprise to those familiar with the most expansive work he created in his hut on the shore. Mahler intended this opus, his third symphony, to contain no less than the totality of existence--from the world of nature to that of the spirit. And so, during the summers of 1895 - 96, Mahler sat by his lake and wrote something "the like of which the world has never yet heard."

Why The Mahlerian?

"... (With) Mahler it is different. It is true that much of his music can be enjoyed ‘innocently’, that the listener can simply revel in its sensuous beauty and imaginative brilliance. The exquisite floating strings and harp textures that open the famous Adagietto in the Fifth Symphony are simply captivating as sound – no explanation needed. But almost invariably in a Mahler work the listener will sooner or later be forced to ask: why does he do that? Why is a passage of rapt contemplation suddenly interrupted by a violent emotional outburst, or a trivial little tune, or something that sounds alarmingly like mockery? Why does Mahler seem to set out purposefully on a journey, only to change direction suddenly? At such moments, it is hard to resist the impression that there is something in particular that Mahler wants to tell us: that he has a message, something urgently personal or perhaps even philosophical, that he wants us to contemplate.

Mahler’s letters and recorded comments make it clear that he did, even if he found it difficult to put this message into words. When his first two symphonies appeared, he provided them with elaborate literary programmes to guide the listener towards what he felt their meaning was. The trouble here was that he could be taken rather literally; one woman even pressed him to tell her what the afterlife was like (he must know, she insisted, since he had portrayed it so movingly in his‘Resurrection’ Symphony). There were times when Mahler must have felt inclined to agree with the composer Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote that ‘the thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite’. In other words, musical thoughts are real enough, but they are musical thoughts. They express things and obey laws that are peculiar to music."

From: Mahler - his life and work. Stephen Johnson