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 himself would write of this immense, hallucinatory work:

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 world of nature finds a voice.... Some passages of it seem so uncanny to me that I can hardly recognize them as my own work.

And Arnold Schoenberg would later write breathlessly to Mahler:

I think I have experienced your symphony. I felt the struggle for illusions; I felt the pain of one disillusioned; I saw the forces of evil and good contending; I saw a man in a torment of emotion exerting himself to gain inner harmony. I sensed a human being, a drama, truth, the most ruthless truth!

From:  Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siecle Vienna -
Robert Weldon Whalen