2 CD's - 60C37-7828-29 - (p) 1986.2
GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911)







Symphony No. 3

98' 22"
Compact Disc 1 - 60C37-7828

32' 32"
I. Kräftig, Entschieden [IN:DEX 1-8] 32' 32"

Compact Disc 2 - 60C37-7829

65' 50"
II. Tempo di Menuetto. Sehr mäßig [IN:DEX 1-6] 9' 57"

III. Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne hast [IN:DEX 1-7] 18' 06"

IV. Sehr langsam. Misterioso. Durchaus PPP [IN:DEX 1-2] 9' 34"

V. Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck
4' 03"

VI. Langsam. Ruhevoll. Empfunden [IN:DEX 1-6] 23' 57"





 
Doris Soffel, alto
Limburger Domsingknaben / Christoph Denoix, Conductor
Women's Chorus of Frankfurter Kantorei / Wolfgang Schäfer, Conductor
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra
Eliahu INBAL
 





Luogo e data di registrazione
Alte Oper, Frankfurt (Germania) - 18/19 aprile 1985

Registrazione: live / studio
studio

Recording Direction
Yoshiharu Kawaguchi (DENON / Nippon Columbia), Clemens Müller (Hessischer Rndfunk)

Recording Engineer
Peter Willemoës (DENON / Nippon Columbia), Detlev Kittler (Hessischer Rundfunk)

Mixing Engineer
Norio Okada (DENON / Nippon Columbia)

Technology
Yukio Takahashi (DENON / Nippon Columbia)

Editing
Hideki Kukizaki

Edition
Universal Edition AG, Wien

Edizione CD
Denon | 60C37-7628-29 | (2 CD's) | durata 32' 32" - 65' 50" | (p) 1986.2 | DDD

Note
Special Thanks to: Brüel & Kjær.
Co-production with Hessischer Rundfunk.













"But I have written to you that I am writing on a very large work. Don`t you understand that this requires my whole being and how deeply one is inflicted with it so often, so that I seem dead to the outside world at times." Gustav Mahler wrote this in a letter to Anna von Mildenburg, who lived in Steinbach am Attersee, the place where Mahler composed his third symphony during the holidays of the Hamburg theatre between 1893 and 1896. On a meadow sited between the guest house and the banks of the sea he had put up a "Composing-lodge" with enough room for a table, chair, sofa and a piano from Vienna. In the greatest possible seclusion he worked there and disturbing him in his work meant the threatening of a death-sentence. The isolation Mahler required for his work did not only cover the outside world. Bruno Walter, who visited the composer in 1896 and had already talked about the word before he heard in a performance, explained that inspiration and the process of composing did not conform with Mahler's task of conducting. In order to he able to compose, Mahler had to separate himself from the outside world and even persons and matters that were close to him otherwise. In his letter to
Madam von Mildenburg he also says "The creator of such a work has to bear terrible labour-pains and before all this has its correct order in one’s head, a long period of seclusion, detraction. repose and even death for the outside world has to be lived through."
Before noon Mahler worked in his composing-lodge. In the afternoon he would often stroll on the meadow or make long walks into the mountains and keep himself busy with musical thoughts all the time. During a walk with the composer, Bruno Walter expressed his amazement about the impressive scenery of the mountains, but Mahler replied that it would not be necessary for Walter to look at it any longer, because he said to have already composed every little bit of the scenery. His statements become more concrete in the letters to Anna von Mildenburg: "My symphony is going to be something no one has ever composed before me! Every part of nature gets its own voice and tells so secret things that one could hardly guess it, even in a dream. I tell you, sometimes even I feel so incomfortable about some passages and it seems to me that anybody but me has written this work."
Mahler finds absolute satisfaction in his passionate love to nature, not only because of its beauty, but also because of its miraculous and strange appearance. Alma Mahler reports on a significant experience from later years: "When Mahler was in Mainegg in the summer, he once came out of hiss composing-lodge, bathed in perspiration and unable to utter a word. When he finally pulled himself together and cried: The heat! The silence! The panical fear! Horror has taken possession of him. This feeling of Pan's frightful eyes gave him new horrors and everytime this happened, he stopped working and came out of the seclusion into our house to find himself in the warmness of close human beings that were around him. Only then was he able to resume his work." One can hardly follow this sensitive and close relationship to nature, but it is nevertheless the background for Mahler's third symphony.
"I find it quite strange that people talking about nature only make mention of flowers, birds and fresh air. Nobody however seems to know Pan, the god Dionysos", he once said to a critic and went on: "It is all those nice and horrible phenomenons that nature is able to show and I wanted to put these things in a kind of evolutionary development in my work."
Still being in the stage of composing, Mahler developped titles and annotations to every movement. Those title sketches, as he called them, are handed down to us in different versions and they show the conceptional development of the symphony. After having finished the work with the composition of the first movement, Mahler, however, extracted the seventh movement called “The heavenly life". This movement later became the prime-cell of the fourth symphony and forms the final movement.
In their last revision those title sketches have the following form:
Section I
l) Pan awakes. The summer marches in.(Pan's procession)
Section II
2) What the flowers of the meadow tell me
3) What the animals in the forest tell me
4) What man tells me
5) What the angels tell me
6) What love tells me
Slogan: “Father, see my wounds and let no I being be lost!"
Later those title sketches became victims of Mahler’s red ink, as well as the programmes of his first two symphonies. In a time of an open conflict between fighters for absolute music and followers of programmatic music Mahler finally had to decide against any programme, for the danger of being mistaken for a programme-musician was too great. About the first, however, he wrote: "Summer marches in and it sings and sounds. And between that we have the contrast of a lifeless, dull nature and a new world coming to life." And about the second movement, which is the basis for the largely scaled gradation of the second section, Mahler says: "This is the most light-hearted I have ever written. It is so light-hearted as only flowers can be. This music sounds like flowers bending in the wind very lightly. But this cheerfulness changes into a very serious atmosphere; like a stormwind it sweeps over the meadow and shakes the flowers and blossoms that whimper on their stem as if to beg for redemption into a higher realm." As he already did in the second, Mahler refers to the collection of old German songs "The boy's magical horn" by Achim von Arnim and Clemens von Brentano in his third symphony, too. The third movement “What the animals in the forest tell me" has its origin in the vocalization of the poem "Discharge in summer" that is about a cuckoo that fell to death. The trio of the Scherzando is made up from the famous “Posthorn episode", a summer-idyll that is painted in beautiful Cantilenes and mild sounds of the horns.
Probably as a reminiscence to the romantic poem "The Postillon" by Nikolaus Lenau Mahler had originally used the same name for this part of the symphony. The fourth movement "What man tells me" is based on Friedrich Nietzsche's "Also sprach Zarathustra", the thoughts and ideas of whom have awoke strong interest among musicians: At about the same time Richard Strauss tried to transform this philosophical treatise into a symphonic poem. Mahler, however, was not familiar with the usual form of vocalisation. His excerpts from Nietzsche`s text do not really contain the basical ideas of the "Zarathustra", but reflect more or less his own pantheistic ideology, in which man is permanently inflicted with nature. Being performed by a "mysterious" alto-solo, the deeply philosophical character of the text contrasts strikingly to the realistically depicted paintings of the first three movements; Mahler intentionally wanted these three movements to be understood as humoresques. According to Mahler only the short fourth and the monumental final movement are meant very seriously. Also the joyful-naive and angel-like atmosphere of the final movement with its sound of bells and the "Bim-Bam" of the boys' choir are formed as a contrast to that. Again the text is taken from the collection of "The boys magical horn", which served as a source of inspiation for his symphonies again and again. Its basical statement is the assertion: "Have you not followed the Ten Commandments, fall down on your knees. You must love your only god for all time and you will receive the heavenly joy! The heavenly joy is a sacred thing, a joy that has no end." A naive and believing parable on god's love and goodness.
"In the Adagio, the final movement, everything is resolved into tranquility and being" said Mahler; and indeed, this Finale of half an hour radiates an unbelievable tranquility and depth. In it, the highly pantheistic view of life is concretized to the highest possible level; to Mahler it meant the quintessencw of his philosophy of life. In his title sketches Mahler has named it "What love tells me". An explanation to this can be found in a letter to Anna von Mildenburg, who interpreted this love as more "worldly". There he wrote: "But love in this symphony is quite different from your idea of love. The slogan to this movement reads: Father, see my wounds! Let no being be lost!
Do you understand now, what I meant by this? It is to signify the top and the highest level from which our world can be seen. One could also call this movement What God tells me, but only in the sense that god can he won by love only. And thus my work forms a musical poem that depicts all stages of the evolution in a step-by-step gradation. It begins
with lifeless nature and culminates in the love of god."
Andreas Maul