Mahler's Universe (I): Symphony No. 3

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Image courtesy of Gran Teatre del Liceu

This second episode of the Liceu's review of Gustav Mahler's complete symphonies is dedicated to the Sixth, written between 1903 and 1904, and described by his wife Alma in the following terms:

“After [Gustav] had drafted the first movement, he came to tell me that he had tried to express me in one of the themes.  ‘I don't know if I've succeeded, but you'll have to put up with it.' This is the grandiose second theme of the first movement. In the third movement [the scherzo], he evoked the arrhythmic games of the two youngest children as they tottered in zigzags across the sand. The children's voices became increasingly tragic and ultimately faded into a whimper. In the last movement, he described himself and his downfall or, as he said later, that of his hero. ‘It's the hero, who receives three blows from destiny, and the last fells him as a tree is felled’: those were his words. None of his works rose so directly from his heart as this. We both cried that day. The music and what it forecast moved us deeply.”

Though written during a period of happiness and professional success, this is Mahler's most sombre, belligerent, anguishing, searing work (along with his Kindertotenlieder). The result is a score which is colossal in structure, but also eerily premonitory, for just a year after the premiere he lost his four-year-old daughter Marie.

Mahler was cruelly punished by fate: after his daughter's premature passing, his mother-in-law died during the child's funeral, he lost his post at the Vienna Staatsoper and developed the heart condition that was to end his life. His music is tinted with the deep hues of tragedy, which still resonate to this day.

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