Blown Away: Mahler’s Symphony No. 3
Graphic by Amelie Lima
“At the dress rehearsal, I say to the orchestra, ‘See you in church,’” Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, in his pre-concert lecture.
On the night of April 11, the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra performed Gustav Mahler’s colossal Symphony No. 3 on the gilded stage of Symphony Hall. Lasting over 100 minutes across six movements, the work was unprecedented in length at the time of its composition, and it remains a formidable feat to perform today. Over 100 musicians, an alto soloist, a women’s choir, and a boys’ choir are called for in the instrumentation. Each part is technically demanding—soaring runs in the strings, woodwind solos, and of course, the bold horn melodies.
The experience was, indeed, divine.
The first movement, lasting around 35 minutes, is named “Pan Awakens, Summer Marches In.” It begins with an eruption of eight French horns declaring that summer has arrived, violently attacking the last remnants of winter. The sheer force of nature, booming through the hall, is felt in every audience member’s bones.
This power is transformed into a sweet love duet between a solo violinist and a horn player as the ancient Greek god Pan emerges from his slumber. However, this peace does not last long as the music launches into a battle between darkness and light—militant drums, out-of-time piccolo echoes, the mournful cry of a trombone. The horn melody from the beginning of the movement returns in the recapitulation, but this time, to announce the triumph of summer. The sheer size of the orchestra is immensely tangible in these auditory scenes.
“There’s a huge cymbal crash, not with one cymbal, but with two cymbals … Why two cymbals? Why couldn’t one be enough? Because two is even bigger,” Zander explained, eliciting laughs from the audience.
A long pause follows the punctuated final note of the first movement. The chord rings out in the hall.
“Everybody’s silent and quiet like in church,” Zander said in his talk.
Photo credit: Paul Mardy
The second part of the symphony begins with the movement “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me.” It is a gentle, picturesque minuet with a brief summer storm in the middle. Mahler was inspired by his summer vacation in rural Austria; the music perfectly captures the feeling of running through tall grass among rolling green hills. The beautiful aerial shots of Salzburg meadows in the opening scene of the 1965 film “The Sound of Music” came to my mind, a more contemporary image that can help us relate to Mahler’s experiences.
“I had a smile come over my face automatically. And I said to myself, I wonder whether there’ll be 2,400 smiles, because you’re really listening and you’re feeling it,” Zander said.
Mahler then transports us to the forest in the third movement, “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me.” It is intended to be a light-hearted, humorous scherzo, with Mahler himself describing it as “all of nature making faces and sticking out its tongue.” With playful woodwinds mimicking bird calls and strings using the col legno (striking the stick of the bow against the strings) technique, the music is boisterous and at times inelegant and crude. The wilderness is interspersed with a sound distinctly human—a posthorn playing Austrian mail carrier tunes from the right balcony.
As Mahler moves up the chain of being to “What Man Tells Me,” Dame Sarah Connolly sings the alto solo in the fourth movement. The lyrics, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” contain the haunting line, “Deep is its pain—joy—deeper still than heartache.” The oboe and English horn play eerie glissandi; a solo violinist plays a mournful melody. It is meditative, strikingly quiet compared to the previous three movements.
However, all hope is not lost, as the boys’ and women’s choirs join to comfort the solo voice. They mimic the sound of church bells and remind her that God is there to save her. This fifth movement, titled “What the Angels Tell Me,” is bright and lively—but lasts all of four minutes.
The boys’ choir, The Choristers of Saint Paul’s Choir School, and the women’s choir, the Chorus pro Musica and Harvard’s very own Radcliffe Choral Society, are seated for the 75 minutes leading up to the fifth movement. With the youngest members of the Choristers being eight years old, the directors were worried that they would become restless and distracted from the performance. However, Zander had faith in the boys.
“I felt that this was such a special occasion, they shouldn’t miss it by being outside just because they were young. And the message of that is, if you treat young people, and I mean very young people, like eight-year-olds, if you treat them with tremendous respect and you tell them, you look for the best that they’re capable of doing,” he said in an interview with the “Harvard Independent.”
Notably, Zander decided that the choirs would stand up—and remain standing—while the orchestra was playing the third movement. He wanted audiences to savor and bask in the quiet, reserved final note of the fourth movement without being disrupted by the sound of singers starting to rise for the fifth movement. Near the end of the movement, on a dramatic and suspenseful E minor chord, nearly one hundred bodies rise in time with the music.
The effect was powerful. As the third movement alludes to mankind with the posthorn and transitions into the sorrowful fourth movement, seeing so many people move in unison enhanced the foreshadowing. Beyond the force of Mahler’s music, I was astounded by the physical staging of the symphony as well; I viscerally felt the divinity of this work.
The sixth movement is when we finally reach consolation—“What Love Tells Me.” It begins with a string orchestra (violins, violas, cellos, double basses), with the parts tensing and releasing in a gorgeous romantic melody. Ascending half-step lines pull on our heartstrings; another part sighs in return. After a nearly two-hour journey, the music overflows with feeling, culminating in a majestic, sublime ending. The timpani usher us into the acceptance of a long-awaited divine love.
Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 is revolutionary, in the unprecedented and slightly avant-garde techniques and forms used, but it is also a transformational experience for everyone involved. As I struggle to describe what this immense work sounds like, I keep finding myself at the boundary of language, where its effectiveness ends, and ineffability begins. During our conversation, I told Zander that I was “blown away” by the performance.
“That’s really what that music is about, in different ways. Blown away because it’s so loud, it’s so fast, it’s so energetic, but it’s also so tender, so elevating in its impression—one can be blown away by sensitive things,” he replied.
My evening at Symphony Hall ended with a moment of reflection on (surprisingly enough) the 1 Bus back to campus. Having played violin for most of my life, I have always been conscious of the power of music to transcend words and tangible experiences, but there is no better reminder of this than Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. I realized why music is so central to religion—it is the closest we will ever get to the divine.
Frankly, my attempts to describe Mahler’s music will not do it justice. I encourage you to listen to the video performance or visit the Boston Philharmonic website to learn more.
Ellie Guo ’29 (eguo@college.harvard.edu) admits to crying during the sixth movement.