MAHLER SYMPHONY NO. 3
Peabody Children’s Chorus
The Peabody Children’s Chorus, founded
in 1990, brings children together to
rehearse and perform art and folk
music of multiple cultures, languages,
historical periods and styles. In nine
ensembles, more than 500 young people
gain invaluable experience rehearsing
and performing high quality music in
ensemble settings, as well as studying
ear-training and music-reading.
In addition to Mahler’s Third
Symphony, the Chorus has joined the
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under the
baton of Marin Alsop for performances
of Bernstein’s MASS, Honegger’s Jeanne
d’Arc au bûcher, Britten’s War Requiem,
Orff’s Carmina Burana and Adams’
On The Transmigration of Souls at the
Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore;
The Music Center at Strathmore, North
Bethesda; The Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.; and
Carnegie Hall, New York City.
The Peabody Children’s Chorus
has also performed with the Baltimore
Chamber Orchestra, the Baltimore
Choral Arts Society, Concert Artists of
Baltimore, Lyric Opera Baltimore, the
Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, the
Morgan State University Choir and the
Peabody Symphony Orchestra. The
Chorus has toured in the U.K., France,
Italy, Germany and Austria.
The Peabody Children's Chorus last
appeard with the BSO in October 2016,
performing Orff's Carmina Burana;
Marin Alsop, conductor.
About the Concert
SYMPHONY NO. 3
Gustav Mahler
Born in Kaliště, Czech Republic, July 7, 1860;
died in Vienna, Austria, May 18, 1911
In June 1895, Gustav Mahler happily
abandoned the pressures and politics
of the Hamburg State Opera, where he
was chief conductor, and headed for the
village of Steinbach on the Attersee, in
Austria’s Salzkammergut lake district,
for a summer of composing. Throughout
his career, Mahler pursued a double life:
for nine months of the year he was one
of Europe’s greatest conductors, driving
his orchestras and himself mercilessly
to achieve his musical ideals; during the
three summer months, he was an equally
driven composer, creating his songs and
symphonies. In the summer of 1895, he
was particularly eager to reach Steinbach
for a new symphony that was fermenting
inside—his Third—whose subject
would be nothing less than all of Nature:
from the rocks, flowers and animals to
mankind and God Himself.
Waiting for him at the edge of the
Attersee lake was a tiny white-washed
cottage, the first of three studios in rural
oases he would use over his composing
career. The cottage’s one room contained
only a wood-burning stove, a few chairs,
a writing table and a baby grand piano.
Windows on three sides gave views of
the lake and a lovely flowering meadow.
Every day Mahler would arrive at the
cottage about 6 or 7 in the morning
and be absorbed in composing till
mid-afternoon or later. There was an
unshakable rule that when the door was
closed, no one was to disturb him.
Mahler was an insatiable reader, and
in the 1890s he had been engrossed with
the philosophers Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche. The concept of nature behind
his Third Symphony related closely to
their concepts. “It always strikes me as
odd that most people, when they speak of
‘nature,’ think only of flowers, little birds
and woodsy smells,” he wrote. “No one
knows the god Dionysius, the great Pan.”
The Third, the longest of his
symphonies, grew from this mystical
vision of nature as a complex living
being, evolving upward from the rocks,
plants, animal life and man to the
divine. So powerful was this vision that
he composed movements two through
six of this unprecedented six-movement
symphony in under two months.
After another year in Hamburg,
Mahler returned to Steinbach in June
1896 to complete his symphony with
a massive introductory movement in
which sleeping nature is awakened from
the prison of Winter and the elemental
power of Summer transforms all things
into riotous life. This first movement—at
nearly 35 minutes, the length of a normal
symphony—poured from his pen in
just six weeks. When conductor Bruno
Walter arrived to visit and stood admiring
the craggy mountain looming over the
Attersee, an exultant Mahler told him,
“There’s no need to look at that, for it’s
all in my music.”
Mahler’s philosophical program for the
Symphony tended to shift somewhat over
time. In its final version, he subtitled the
work “A Midsummer Morning Dream”
and listed the six movements as follows:
FIRST PART:
No. 1: Introduction: Pan’s
Awakening and Summer Marches
in (procession of Bacchus)
SECOND PART:
No 2: What the flowers of the meadow
tell me
No. 3: What the animals of the forest
tell me
No. 4: What man (night) tells me
No. 5: What the angels (bells) tell me
No. 6: What (divine) love tells me
Mahler stipulated that there be a
long pause—10 minutes in his own
performances—between the first
movement and the rest of the symphony,
and that movements four through six be
played without pause.
In contrast to the speed of its
composition, the Third Symphony had
to wait nearly six years—until June 9,
1902— to be premiered in its entirety.
Finally, Richard Strauss invited Mahler
to present the symphony under his baton
at a festival of new German music in
Krefeld near Cologne in 1902. Despite
the composer’s gloomy predictions that no
one would understand the “comic” aspects
of a symphony, the premiere was the
greatest triumph of his career to date.
Listening to the Music
The musical forces required for this
work are immense: an orchestra with
eight horns, enlarged string sections,
two harps and two timpanists, as
M A R – A P R 2020 / OV E R T U R E
17