Listening Guide – Movement 5: Lied 2: Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck: Bimm bamm. Es sungen drei Engel einen Sussen Gesang
Transcript The juxtaposition of a Christian poem with the words of the most notable anti Christian philosopher in western history, Friedrich Nietzsche, is striking, but since Mahler conceived of a symphonies formal structure as a progressive development of being, the angels would certainly play an intermediate role between man and God, it would be inappropriate […]
Listening Guide – Movement 4: Lied 1: Sehr langsam! Misterioso: O Mensch! gib Acht!
Transcript In the progression of life forms that Mahler sought to characterize in the Third Symphony, man stands midway between inanimate nature and the Supreme Being. Although depicted as the animal’s antagonist in the third movement, man is portrayed in the fourth novel as the hero exerting dominant power over his domain, but as an […]
Listening Guide – Movement 3: Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne Hast
Transcript Taken together, the second and third movements are Mahler’s most fascinating symphonic representations of nature. They come close to descriptive, even cinematic tone painting. In the third movement, Mahler is especially creative, and his use of musical totals to replicate animal sounds such as cuckoo calls a Nightingale’s song, and the brain of a […]
Listening Guide – Movement 2: Tempo di minuetto. Sehr massig
Transcript Mahler asks for a pause between the first and second movements, as he had done between the first two movements of the Second Symphony. He realized the need for an interval of silence to enable the listener to come down from the monumental heights of the enormous first movement, before descending to the valleys […]