Programme Guide

None of Gustav Mahler’s other symphonies have a longer playing time than the Third, in which the composer even surpassed the monumentality of the Resurrection Symphony that preceded it. “My symphony will be something that the world has never heard before! The whole of nature finds a voice in it and tells of the kind of profound secrets that might be sensed in a dream!” Mahler declared while he was working on it. The key already makes the composer’s high expectations for the work clear, since, like Beethoven’s and Bruckner’s last symphonies, it is in D minor. And as in Beethoven’s symphonic legacy, the orchestra is complemented here by vocal parts, and, like Bruckner’s (unfinished) Ninth, the composition ends with a slow movement.

The symphony, which is subdivided into two parts, begins with a movement lasting more than thirty minutes which is characterized by marching songs and sounds of nature as well as shocking moments breaking in “with tremendous force”, in the words of the composer. Like its sister symphonies Nos. 2 and 4, the Third also contains a setting of a text from the Romantic poetry and song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn): a children’s and women’s chorus sing of heavenly life in response to the preceding fourth movement, in which a mezzo-soprano quotes words from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra: “Woe says: Be gone! But all joy seeks eternity!” The closing Adagio is an endlessly flowing, world-embracing hymn, which according to a programme that the composer later withdrew was supposed to express the language of love itself.

This performance of the work with the Berliner Philharmoniker was conducted by Zubin Mehta, who, since his debut in 1961, has returned to the orchestra’s podium nearly every season. The soloist was mezzo-soprano Lioba Braun, who is well-known to international audiences from several concerts with Claudio Abbado and her benchmark performances as Brangäne at the Bayreuth Festival.