Composer Notes

By Deana Vassar
host of “Allegro”

Gustav Mahler has been described as the most unrelenting perfectionist in all of music. He was always seeking some hard won conformity to an ideal of beauty. The great ideal, the template for all that was good, for Mahler, could be found in the realm of nature. He felt Nature was the pure and primitive voice of the Creator; the voice that he yearned to hear clearly and the oracle that he strived to be faithful to in his work.

Mahler, like Beethoven, Brahms and so many of the great artists, could not imagine his creative life without all of the muses he found in the woods and by the water. Mahler said that when he was by the lake that the water talked to him and that “the compositions flowed fully formed” from his head.

One crystal clear afternoon, Gustav and his dear friend and confidante, composer and conductor Bruno Walter, were walking together outside of Mahler’s Steinbach home. Discussing Mahler’s latest symphonic creation, Bruno stopped for a moment and became quiet as he marveled at the astonishing mountain-scape before them, the Hollengebirge mountains. Gustav immediately informed him, “No use staring up there—I’ve already composed it all into my symphony!”

It’s a marvelous thought, the mountains being composed into a symphony! Mahler once said that a symphony should be like “the world, it must embrace everything!” The symphony that Gustav Mahler was referring to was his newly finished Symphony No. 3, which, indeed, captures and cradles all of the beauty of the world as Mahler saw it and understood it from his little composing hut by Lake Attersee.

The Third Symphony, titled A Summer Morning’s Dream, takes the listener on a monumental 90 minute journey (a Guinness Book record!) from a raw, naked Mother Nature to the most sublime communication of the divine. This unique orchestral work is arranged into six parts, all having their truth to communicate.

1. Pan Awakens –Summer Marches In. The first movement imagines the shock of creation. The first movement of life sets forth with rich and radiant horns. “Pan Awakens” was considered by many of Mahler’s contemporaries to be too rough, too harsh, but Mahler said that it took such fierceness to tell the story of the beginning of all things!

2. What the Flowers and Meadows Tell Me. The petals and flowing hills speak through an elegant minuet. Mahler imagines the fresh voice of the flowers through some of his most delicate music.

3. What the Animals of the Forest Tell Me. The animals joyfully trample across the rolling hills that Mahler has just created. This is the life of animals before man, a trumpet heralds the delirium!

4. What the Night (Man) Tells Me. In the fourth movement, based on Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, we hear the voice of man coming out of the void. Mahler speaks of man’s burgeoning intellect, and the human path of suffering through some of his darkest music.

5. What the Morning Bells (Angels) Tell Me. The composer lightens as the choir sings belllike to the strains of a setting of The Last Supper from Mahler’s beloved setting of German folk songs, The Youth’s Magic Horn.

6. What Love Tells Me. (Mahler also called the final movement What God Tells Me.) The composer tells of the great beauty of life through the ravishingly gorgeous thrumming of strings and drums—the final movement is a masterpiece on its own.