Program Notes: Mahler Symphony No. 3

CLASSICS 2023/24

MAHLER’S THIRD SYMPHONY WITH PETER OUNDJIAN PERFORMED BY YOUR COLORADO SYMPHONY PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor MICHELLE D e YOUNG, mezzo-soprano

WOMEN OF THE COLORADO SYMPHONY CHORUS, DUAIN WOLFE, director

COLORADO CHILDREN’S CHORALE, EMILY CRILE, director

Friday, April 12, 2024 at 7:30pm

Saturday, April 13, 2024 at 7:30pm

Sunday, April 14, 2024 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

MAHLER Symphony No. 3 in D minor Part I

I. Kräftig. Entschieden (Strong and decisive) Part II

II. Tempo di Menuetto Sehr mässig (In the tempo of a minuet, very moderate)

III. Comodo, Scherzando Ohne Hast (Comfortable, Scherzo, without haste)

IV. Sehr langsam—Misterioso (Very slowly, mysteriously)

V. Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck (Cheerful in tempo and cheeky in expression)

VI. Langsam—Ruhevoll—Empfunden (Slowly, tranquil, deeply felt)

CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 45 MINUTES. CONCERT DOES NOT INCLUDE AN INTERMISSION.

Friday’s concert is dedicated in memory oF dr mary Krugman sunday’s concert is dedicated to robert montgomery

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor

Recognized as a masterful and dynamic presence in the conducting world, Peter Oundjian has developed a multi-faceted portfolio as a conductor, violinist, professor and artistic advisor. He has been celebrated for his musicality, an eye towards collaboration, innovative programming, leadership and training with students and an engaging personality. Strengthening his ties to Colorado, Oundjian is now Principal Conductor of the Colorado Symphony in addition to Music Director of the Colorado Music Festival, which successfully pivoted to a virtual format during the pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021.

Now carrying the title Conductor Emeritus, Oundjian’s fourteen-year tenure as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony served as a major creative force for the city of Toronto and was marked by a reimagining of the TSO’s programming, international stature, audience development, touring and a number of outstanding recordings, garnering a Grammy nomination in 2018 and a Juno award for Vaughan Williams’ Orchestral Works in 2019. He led the orchestra on several international tours to Europe and the USA, conducting the first performance by a North American orchestra at Reykjavik’s Harpa Hall in 2014.

From 2012-2018, Oundjian served as Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra during which time he implemented the kind of collaborative programming that has become a staple of his directorship. Oundjian led the RSNO on several international tours, including North America, China, and a European festival tour with performances at the Bregenz Festival, the Dresden Festival as well as in Innsbruck, Bergamo, Ljubljana, and others. His final appearance with the orchestra as their Music Director was at the 2018 BBC Proms where he conducted Britten’s epic War Requiem.

Highlights of past seasons include appearances with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Iceland Symphony, the Detroit, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Baltimore, Dallas, Seattle, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. With the onset of world-wide concert cancellations, support for students at Yale and Juilliard became a priority. In the 2022/2023 season, Oundjian conducted the opening weekend of Atlanta Symphony, followed by return engagements with Baltimore, Indianapolis, Dallas, Colorado and Toronto symphonies, as well as a visit to New World Symphony.

Oundjian has been a visiting professor at Yale University’s School of Music since 1981, and in 2013 was awarded the school’s Sanford Medal for Distinguished Service to Music. A dedicated educator, Oundjian regularly conducts the Yale, Juilliard, Curtis and New World symphony orchestras.

An outstanding violinist, Oundjian spent fourteen years as the first violinist for the renowned Tokyo String Quartet before he turned his energy towards conducting.

PHOTO: DALE WILCOX

PHOTO: MICHAL NOVAK

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MICHELLE DeYOUNG, mezzo-soprano

Mezzo-Soprano Michelle DeYoung continues to be in demand throughout the world, appearing regularly with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, and the Concertgebouworkest. She has also performed at the prestigious festivals of Ravinia, Tanglewood, Saito Kinen, Edinburgh, and Lucerne. In Australia she has appeared multiple times with Sydney Symphony and recently sang Kundry in concert performances of Parsifal at Opera Australia.

Equally at home on the opera stage, Ms. DeYoung has appeared with the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Teatro alla Scala, Bayreuth Festival, Berliner Staatsoper, and the Paris Opera. Her many roles include Fricka, Sieglinde and Waltraute in The Ring Cycle; Kundry in Parsifal, Venus in Tannhäuser, Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde, Eboli in Don Carlos, Amneris in Aida, Santuzza in Cavellaria Rusticana, Ježibaba in Rusalka, Marguerite in Le Damnation de Faust, Dido in Les Troyens, Judith in Bluebeard’s Castle, and Jocaste in Oedipus Rex. She also created the role of the Shaman in Tan Dun’s The First Emperor at the Metropolitan Opera.

A multi-Grammy award winning recording artist, Ms. DeYoung’s impressive discography includes Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Götterdämmerung with the Jaap van Zweden and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra (Naxos), Kindertotenlieder, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, and Das Klagende Lied with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony (SFS Media), Les Troyens with Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO Live!), and Mahler Symphony No 3 with both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Bernard Haitink (CSO Resound) and the Pittsburgh Symphony and Manfred Honeck (Challenge Records International). Her most recent recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon) was released in July 2021.

DeYoung recently launched Ensemble Charité, an organization which aims to support various charities while also fostering young, emerging musicians through community performances of chamber concerts with seasoned professional musicians, conducted by Ms. DeYoung.

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

DUAIN WOLFE, founder and director, Colorado Symphony Chorus

Three-time Grammy winner for Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Recording, and Best Opera Performance, Duain Wolfe is Founder and Director of the Colorado Symphony Chorus.

This year marks Wolfe’s 40th season with the Colorado Symphony Chorus. The Chorus has been featured at the Aspen Music Festival for nearly three decades. Wolfe recently retired as Director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus after 28 years. He has collaborated with Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Muti, and Sir George Solti on numerous recordings including Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which won the 1998 GRAMMY® for Best Opera Recording. Wolfe’s extensive musical accomplishments have resulted in numerous awards, including the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the University of Denver, the Bonfils Stanton Award in the Arts and Humanities, the Mayor’s Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline, and the Michael Korn Award for the Development of the Professional Choral Art. Wolfe is Founder of the Colorado Children’s Chorale, from which he retired in 1999 after 25 years. For 20 years, Wolfe also worked with the Central City Opera Festival as chorus director and conductor, founding and directing the company’s young artist residence program, as well as its education and outreach programs. Wolfe’s other accomplishments include directing and preparing choruses for Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, the Bravo! Vail Festival, the Berkshire Choral Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Grand Teton Music Festival. He has worked with Pinchas Zuckerman and Alexander Shelly as Chorus Director for the Canadian National Arts Centre Orchestra for the past 20 years.

COLORADO SYMPHONY CHORUS

The 2023/24 Colorado Symphony concert season marks the 40th season of the Colorado Symphony Chorus. Founded in 1984 by Duain Wolfe at the request of Gaetano Delogu, then the Music Director of the Symphony, the chorus has grown into a nationally respected ensemble. This outstanding chorus of volunteers joins the Colorado Symphony for numerous performances each year, to repeated critical acclaim.

The Chorus has performed at noted music festivals in the Rocky Mountain region, including the Colorado Music Festival, the Grand Teton Music Festival, and the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, where it has performed with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Dallas Symphony, under conductors Alan Gilbert, Hans Graf, Jaap van Zweden, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Fabio Luisi. For over twenty five years, the Chorus was featured at the world-renowned Aspen Music Festival, performing many great masterworks under the baton of conductors Lawrence Foster, James Levine, Murry Sidlin, Leonard Slatkin, David Zinman, and Robert Spano.

Among the eight recordings the Colorado Symphony Chorus has made is a NAXOS release of Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 4. The Chorus is also featured on a Hyperion release of the Vaughan Williams Dona Nobis Pacem and Stephen Hough’s Missa Mirabilis. Most recently, the Colorado Symphony and Chorus released a world-premiere recording of William Hill’s The Raven.

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

In 2009, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the chorus, Duain Wolfe conducted the chorus on a three-country, two-week concert tour of Europe, presenting the Verdi Requiem in Budapest, Vienna, Litomysl and Prague; in 2016 the chorus returned to Europe for concerts in Paris, Strasbourg and Munich featuring the Fauré Requiem. In the summer of 2022, the Chorus toured Austria, performing to great acclaim in Vienna, Graz and Salzburg.

COLORADO SYMPHONY CHORUS

Duain Wolfe, Founding Director and Conductor

Mary Louise Burke, Principal Associate Director and Conductor

Taylor Martin, Associate Director and Conductor

Jared Joseph, Conducting Intern

Hsiao-Ling Lin and ShaoChun Tsai, pianists

Eric Israelson, Chorus Manager

Barbara Porter, Associate Chorus Manager

WOMEN OF THE COLORADO SYMPHONY CHORUS

SOPRANO

Andrews, Lottie

Ascani, Lori

Atchison, René

Black, Kimberly Blum, Jude

Bowen, Alex

Brauchli, Margot

Burns, Jeremy

Burr, Emily

Causey, Denelda

Coberly, Ruth Coberly, Sarah Collins, Elizabeth Collins, Suzanne Collums, Angie

Cote, Kerry

Dakkouri, Claudia Day, April

Dobreff, Mary

Eck, Emily

Emerich, Kate Ewert, Gracie

Gaskill, Andria

Gile, Jenifer

Gill, Lori

Glazier, Taylor

Graber, Susan

Harston, Rachel

Headrick, Alaina

Hittle, Erin

Jones, Kaitlyn

Jorden, Cameron

Kennedy, Lauren

Kermgard, Lindsey

Kinnischtzke, Meghan

Kraft, Lisa

Kushnir, Marina

Lang, Leanne

Look, Cathy

Linder, Dana

Machusko, Rebecca

Mattingly, Isabella

Maupin, Anne

Montigne, Erin

Moraskie, Wendy O’Nan, Jeannette

Peterson, Jodie

Pflug, Kim

Porter, Barbara

Rae, Donneve

Ropa, Lori

Ruff, Mahli

Sladovnik, Roberta

Stegink, Nicole

Tate, Judy

Timme, Sydney

Von Roedern, Sue

Walker, Marcia

Wall, Alison

Wise, Rebecca

Wuertz, Karen

Young, Cara

Zisler, Joan

ALTO

Adams, Priscilla

Arthur, Liz

Berganza, Brenda Chatfield, Cass Clauson, Clair

Conrad, Jayne

Cox, Martha

Darone, Janie

Davies, Debbie

Deck, Barbara Dobson, Kezia

Dutcher, Valerie

Fairchild, Raleigh

Friedman, Anna

Gayley, Sharon

Golden, Daniela

Groom, Gabriella

Guittar, Pat

Haxton, Sheri

Hoopes, Kaia

Hoskins, Hansi

Isaac, Olivia

Jackson, Brandy

Janasko, Ellen

Kaminske, Christine

Kern, Charlotte

Kim, Annette

Kolstad, Annie

LeBaron, Andrea

Levy, Juliet

London, Carole

Long, Tinsley

Maltzahn, Joanna

McWaters, Susan

Nordenholz, Kristen

Nyholm, Christine

Owens, Sheri

Parsons, Jill

Pringle, Jennifer

Rehme, Leanne

Rudolph, Kathi

Scarselli, Elizabeth

Schnell, Wendy

Stevenson, Melanie

Thaler, Deanna

Thayer, Mary

Tiggelaar, Clara

Trubetskoy, Kimberly

Virtue, Pat

Wandel, Benita

Worthington, Evin

York, Beth

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

EMILY CRILE, artistic director, Colorado Children’s Chorale

Emily Crile exhibits her passion and enthusiasm for choral music through developing and conducting singers of all ages. She currently directs Tour Choir, a premier treble ensemble. During the past 23 years with the Chorale, she has worked with all choir levels, established Transitions, prepared children for appearances with the Colorado Symphony, Central City Opera, Opera Colorado, and Colorado Ballet, and toured throughout Australia, China, Costa Rica, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. With a commitment to equitable access for high quality music education, she crafted, led, and administered School Partnership and Community Choir programs across the Denver Metro area and earned a certification in Facilitating Effective DEI Discussions from Dena Samuels Consulting.

Emily is the Past President of the Colorado American Choral Directors Association and is an active choral clinician and presenter throughout the United States. Prior to joining the Chorale in 2000, she served as an Assistant Conductor with the Northern Iowa Children’s Choir. She holds a Master of Music degree in Choral Conducting from the University of Colorado Boulder.

COLORADO CHILDREN’S CHORALE

Celebrating their 50th Anniversary Season, the Colorado Children’s Chorale has been performing with the Colorado Symphony for more than 40 seasons. With a diverse repertoire ranging from fully staged opera and musical theater to standard choral compositions in classical, folk, and popular traditions, the Chorale performs with an innovative stage presentation and a unique theatrical spirit. In recognition of its artistic quality, the Chorale was awarded the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and the prestigious El Pomar Award for Excellence in Arts and Humanities. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Emily Crile and Executive Director Meg Steitz, the Colorado Children’s Chorale annually trains 400 members between the ages of 7 and 14 from all ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds representing more than 150 schools in the Denver metro area and beyond. Since its founding, the Chorale has sung countless performances with some of the world’s finest performing arts organizations, performed for numerous dignitaries, and appeared in television and radio broadcasts. The Performance Program includes a series of self-produced concerts, numerous performances with other Colorado arts organizations and touring around the world. This season the Chorale presents Merry and Bright and 50 Years of Brilliance at Boettcher Concert Hall, as well as So Many Voices, Performing Small Miracles, and Spring Fling Sing! in venues across the metro area. Chorale children will also appear in Amahl and the Night Visitors and Street Scene with Central City Opera, A Colorado Christmas with the Colorado Symphony, La bohéme with Bravo! Vail, and Hansel and Gretel with the Aspen Music Festival.

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COLORADO CHILDREN’S CHORALE ROSTER

TOUR CHOIR

Tre Appleton

Keaton Bau

Soren Baugher

Alice Britton

Maddi Burm

Reilly Butler

Annon Camero

Cordelia Cheever

Nelle Collier

Anika Dande

Savannah Davenport

Nick Diamond

Finn Donahue

Ellie Eckstine

Brian Erickson

Havi Flores

Camilla Franklin

Leah Gomez

Junah Graf

Olivia Gramlich

Portia Hansen

Silas Helton

Hannah Hoffman

Ethan Horner

Mayura Iyengar

Norma Jackson

Addie Jewell

Vivi Kowalski

Samuel Kraus

Jane Lanoha

Brooks Larson

Jack Lee

Cam Lewis

Evan Lewis

Kade Matsumoto

Carly Mehmen

Christina Mulryan

Abby Musser

Nick Nagle

Grace Neubeiser

Gwendolyn Nicholas

Aiana Ochoa

Parker Olson

Alex Osaka

McKenna Pardieck

Clara Paterson

Kaiden Patterson

Emmy Pouliot

Avie Powers

Riley Powers

Grayson Riek

Elijah Rosen

Rocco Rowekamp

Gabriel Salaz

Macy Sampson

Bella Sandoval

Juliette Schneider

Clara Seigle

Hari Shamos

Cora Shoup

Dale Southworth

Tori Southworth

Joshua Taylor

Gavin Ulmer

Madeline Walker

Davina Wang

Ava Williams

Colton Williams

Conor Winburn

Jonah Winburn

Bailey Winn

Caroline Wolfinger

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911)

Symphony No. 3 in D minor for Orchestra, Mezzo-Soprano, and Women’s and Children’s Choruses

Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860 in Kalist, Bohemia, and died on May 18, 1911 in Vienna. He composed the Symphony No. 3 in 1895-1896, and conducted its premiere on June 6, 1902 in Krefeld, Germany. The score calls for two piccolos, four flutes, four oboes, English horn, two E-flat clarinets, three B-flat clarinets, bass clarinet, four bassoons, contrabassoon, eight horns, four trumpets, posthorn (playable on flügelhorn), four trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings. A mezzo-soprano soloist and women’s and children’s choruses appear in the fourth and fifth movements. Duration is about 1 hour and 36 minutes. This piece was last performed by the orchestra May 19-21, 2017, with conductor Andrew Litton and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung.

On March 29, 1891, at the age of 37, Gustav Mahler arrived in Hamburg to become chief conductor of that city’s opera, a post he had earned by rising through a series of successively more important appointments in Cassel, Prague, Leipzig and Budapest which showed him to be one of the greatest interpretative musicians of his time. Despite his brilliance on the podium, then matched only by Bülow, Toscanini, Nikisch, Strauss and Weingartner, Mahler’s deepest ambition was to compose, to embody in tone the complexity, profundity and humanity of the world around him. Indeed, composition was for him an almost insatiable need. “I don’t choose what to compose,” he often said. “It chooses me.” The enormous pressure of his conducting and administrative duties (he sometimes led six performances a week!) prevented Mahler from composing during the winter, so that activity was relegated to the summer months, when the opera houses were closed. June, July and August were therefore not a time of relaxation for him but rather one of intense, often exhausting, creative work, a need that he could not meet with just the traditional Kapellmeister genres of song and piano pieces and chamber scores, but one that could only be satisfied by the ambitious public form of the symphony. “If I want to go down into posterity,” he confided to the critic Max Graf, “I have to write large works during my short holiday.”

Mahler’s favored place for his summertime retreats from the madding cities was among the hills and lakes of Austria’s Salzkammergut. In 1893, he found a villa in Steinbach on Lake Atter, thirty miles east of Salzburg, whose main attraction was a tiny, isolated cottage on the shore that provided him with the seclusion he demanded when composing, and he engaged the compound for several seasons. (He insisted on absolute quiet when he composed: the local children were bribed by Mahler’s sister and guests with toys and candy to play in silence; singing fieldhands were constantly admonished, and eventually told that the eccentric musician had lost his presence of mind and might be aroused to terrible acts by even the slightest disturbance; overly noisy chickens and livestock were bought and roasted for supper.) Mahler furnished his composing hut sparsely with a table, wooden chairs, a sofa and a piano shipped from Vienna; the infrequent visitors he allowed into this sanctum complained that they were showered with beetles when the door was thrown open.

When Mahler took up this daily regimen following his arrival at Steinbach on June 5, 1895, he had already formulated a plan for the successor to the “Resurrection” Symphony, whose partial performance just three months earlier in Berlin under his direction marked the first wide public recognition as a composer. The new work was to be a grand, musical evocation of the forces and creations of Nature with, he wrote to his friend Friedrich Löhr, “the emphasis on my

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

personal life (in the form of ‘what things tell me.’)” At the beginning of the summer, the piece was called “The Happy Life, a Midsummer Night’s Dream (not after Shakespeare)”; by August it had become “The Joyful Science” [after the title of the book by Nietzsche], A Summer Morning’s Dream.” There were originally to be seven movements divided into two parts. The first part, which Mahler called an “introduction” though it eventually grew to a length of forty minutes, was titled “The Awakening of Pan; Summer marches in (procession of Bacchus).” Comprising the second part of the Symphony were a succession of shorter movements: “What the flowers of the meadow tell me”; “What the animals in the forest tell me”; “What the night tells me”; “What the angels tell me”; “What love tells me”; and “Life in Heaven”. Incorporated into this giant musical panorama were settings of poems by Nietzsche and from Des Knaben Wunderhorn for contralto soloist and choruses of women and children.

Work progressed quickly on the symphony. By the end of June 1895, Mahler had drafted all seven movements except for the first one, and he confided to friends that together they comprised what was “probably the ripest and most individual work I have yet composed.” Composition on the second through seventh movements was largely finished by the time he left Steinbach in August; their orchestration and thoughts about the music that would precede them occupied him during the following winter.

Mahler returned to Steinbach in June 1896, impatient to resume work on the symphony. He had been making notes and sketches for the first movement for several months, but discovered to his horror when he arrived that he had left them in his office in Hamburg. His friend and correspondent Natalie Bauer-Lechner reported that he was like a caged tiger, growling and pacing, until they were delivered a week later. The first movement grew quickly thereafter. Sometime before it was completed, he told Bauer-Lechner, “It has almost ceased to be music; it is hardly anything but sounds of nature. ‘Summer marches in’ will be the prelude.... Naturally enough, it doesn’t come off without a struggle with the opponent, Winter; but Winter is easily defeated, and Summer, with his strength and superior power, soon gains undisputed mastery.” Mahler also decided during the summer of 1896 to remove the final, vocal movement, “Life in Heaven,” from the symphony. That lovely music was not wasted, however, since it became the seed from which grew the Fourth Symphony, where it was used as the finale. The Third Symphony was completed in short score on August 6th.

Mahler finished the orchestration of the Third Symphony during the winter of 18961897, but he was unable to arrange for its full performance, so he reluctantly allowed Felix Weingartner to extract the second, third and sixth movements from the complete work and conduct them in Berlin during March 1897. They were received with little enthusiasm. When Mahler finally performed the work complete, however, on June 6, 1902 at the Tonkünstlerfest of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in the city of Krefeld, on the west bank of the Rhine north of Cologne, the composer’s sister, Justine, reported that it “made an enormous sensation, especially among the musicians.”

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

Of Mahler’s Third Symphony, Deryck Cooke wrote, “The idea behind the work was a conception of existence in its totality. The vast first movement was to represent the summoning of Nature out of non-existence by the god Pan, symbolized by the emergence of summer out of winter; and after this, the five shorter movements were to represent the ‘stages of being’ (as Mahler expressed it in a letter), from vegetable and animal life, through mankind and the angels, to the love of God.”

Cooke called the opening movement (“Pan awakes; Summer marches in”), which solely occupies Part I of the Symphony, “the most original and flabbergasting thing Mahler ever conceived.” Though there are some vestigial connections with traditional formal types, this movement is better understood philosophically, as the musical evocation of powerful forces, than analytically. A long introduction, blown into being by an awesome opening blast from massed horns, is filled with what Mahler called “nature sounds.” There follows the struggle between dark Winter, with its sinister march theme, and life-giving Summer, first portrayed by a dancing strain cheerfully introduced by the winds. Other themes arise on both sides and are drawn into the conflict, but Summer prevails. This is music, in the mold of Beethoven, that is uplifting and fructifying, another evidence of Mahler’s underlying belief in the resiliency of good and its ultimate triumph over evil. “A pessimist does not think and feel like this,” noted Guido Adler.

After calling up gargantuan cosmic forces in the opening movement, Mahler turned in the Symphony’s second part to evoking Nature’s bounties, or, more accurately, his musico/ emotional responses to them. Mahler called the second movement (“What the flowers of the meadow tell me”) a “minuet,” though it is really more a country dance than a recreation of the Mozartian model. In its deliberate naïveté, it provides a startling contrast to the overwhelming music that precedes it, a quality Mahler employed throughout his works to heighten their drama and intensify their expression. (Mahler requested a pause of a few minutes between the first and second movements.)

The third movement (“What the animals in the woods tell me”) is a reworking of a song with a cheeky text from Das Knaben Wunderhorn, Ablösung im Sommer (“Changing of the Summer Guard”), that Mahler composed around 1890. Woven into the movement are episodes for solo posthorn, the traditional instrument used to announce the arrival of the mail coach and therefore associated with distant places and sentimental longing. The passages here entrusted to the posthorn are some of the most nostalgic and sweetly dreamy found in any of Mahler’s symphonies.

The last three movements are played without pause. The fourth movement (“What the night tells me”) is a setting for mezzo-soprano of the so-called “Drunken Song” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s novel Also sprach Zarathustra. (Richard Strauss’ tone poem on Zarathustra was completed in the same month as the Third Symphony — August 1896.) “The movement is one of the stillest things in all music,” wrote Deryck Cooke, “with its cry of a night-bird (oboe glissando) and its long-held mezzo-soprano notes backed by thirds on trombones echoed by piccolos.”

The chorus sings in the following movement (“What the angels tell me”) of a heavenly vision whose words Mahler borrowed from the Wunderhorn poems. This wondrous music of bells and brightness is briefly clouded in its central section by the thoughts of a repentant sinner, sung by the mezzo-soprano. Phrases from this music were recalled in the Fourth Symphony.

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Mahler called the last movement both “What love tells me” and “What God tells me,” and chose to end the Symphony not with the traditional, fast closing music, but rather with an instrumental Adagio of deep feeling and stirring optimism. “For Mahler, all quick music ... represented the flux of the world and human life,” assessed Burnett James, “while slow music, by contrast, enshrined the permanent, the eternal, the higher force.” Of this great finale, the esteemed conductor Bruno Walter, a protegé of Mahler, wrote, “In the last movement, words are stilled — for what language can utter heavenly love more powerfully and forcefully than music itself? The Adagio, with its broad, solemn melodic line, is, as a whole — and despite passages of burning pain — eloquent of comfort and grace. It is a single sound of heartfelt and exalted feelings, in which the whole giant structure finds its culmination.”

“What is best in music,” Mahler once said, “is not to be found in the notes.”

O Mensch! Gib Acht!

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?

Ich schlief!

Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht!

Die Welt ist tief!

Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht!

Tief ist ihr Weh!

Lust, tiefer noch als Herzeleid!

Weh spricht: Vergeh!

Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit!

@Oh Man, take heed!

What does the deep midnight say?

I slept!

From a deep dream I was wakened!

The world is deep!

And deeper than the day imagined!

Deep is its grief!

Joy, deeper still than heartache!

Grief speaks: Away!

But all longing craves eternity, Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit! craves deep, deep eternity. * * *

Es sungen drei Engel einen süssen Gesang; Three angels were singing a sweet song; mit Freuden es selig in dem Himmel klang, with joy it resounded blissfully in heaven; sie jauchzten fröhlich auch dabei, they cried out with joy dass Petrus sei von Sünden frei. that Peter was set free from sin.

Und als der Herr Jesus zu Tische sass, And as the Lord Jesus sat at the table mit seinem zwölf Jüngern das Abendmahl ass: with his twelve disciples and ate the Last Supper, Da sprach der Herr Jesus: the Lord Jesus said:

Was steht du denn hier?

Why then do you stand here?

Wenn ich dich anseh’, so weinest du mir! When I look at you, you weep before me.

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Und sollt’ ich nicht weinen, du gütiger Gott? And should I not weep, thou merciful God?

(Du sollst ja nicht weinen!) (No, you should not weep!)

Ich hab’ übertreten die zehn Gebot. I have broken the Ten Commandments.

Ich gehe und weine ja bitterlich. I go my way and weep bitterly.

(Du sollst ja nicht weinen!)

(No, you should not weep!)

Ach komm und erbarme dich über mich! Ah, come and have mercy on me!

Hast du denn übertreten die zehn Gebot, If you have broken the Ten Commandments, so fall auf die Knie und bete zu Gott! then fall on your knees and pray to God. Liebe nur Gott in alle Zeit! Love only God for all time!

So wirst du erlangen die himmlische Freud’. So will you attain heavenly joy!

Die himmlische Freud’ ist eine selige Stadt, Heavenly joy is a blessed estate, die himmlische Freud’, die kein Ende mehr hat! Heavenly joy, that knows no end!

Die himmlische Freude was Petro bereit’t Heavenly joy was granted to Peter durch Jesum und Allen zur Seligkeit. through Jesus, and for the blessedness of all.