Mahler's Love Letter to Nature

Come enjoy a pre-concert talk covering highlights and backstories of this program, one hour before concert-time.

Guest speaker for this weekend: Alex Greenbaum, Hausmann Quartet & SDSU Cello / Chamber Music Lecturer.

For this classical music concert, drinks purchased inside Jacobs Music Center should only be enjoyed in the lobbies pre-concert or during intermission, and should not be brought inside the concert hall.

Composer Gustav Mahler

GUSTAV MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN D MINOR

Composed: 1896
Length: 100 minutes
Orchestration: flutes, oboes, clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bassoons, horns, trumpets, flügelhorn, trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, chimes, cymbals, glockenspiel, rute, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, triangle), harps, strings, women’s chorus, children’s chorus, and mezzo-soprano soloist

In the summer of 1896, the young German conductor Bruno Walter went to visit Gustav Mahler at the composer’s summer retreat at Steinbach-am-Attersee in the Salzburg Alps. As Walter stepped off the boat, Mahler greeted him and took his bag. Around them stretched magnificent scenery: the brilliant blue lake and bright meadows, huge mountains and towering cliffs. Walter gazed around him, but Mahler quickly said: “You don’t need to look – I have composed all this already!”

The music was Mahler’s Third Symphony, completed that summer. When Mahler played it through on the piano for Walter, the young man was stunned: the massive symphony (100 minutes long) seemed to be “nature itself . . . transformed into sound.” Mahler would have agreed, but in his Third Symphony he had in mind a very specific sense of nature. To a friend he wrote: “It always strikes me as odd that most people, when they speak of ‘nature,’ think only of flowers, little birds and woodsy smells. No one knows the god Dionysus, the great Pan.” In his Third Symphony, Mahler sets out to encompass all of nature, from the delicate and beautiful to the wild and terrifying.

“I could almost call the [finale] movement ‘What God tells me!’"

- Gustav Mahler

The longest symphony every written, Mahler’s Third is in six movements: two massive outer movements (each about half an hour long) frame four shorter ones. Mahler originally had an elaborate program for the symphony. Eventually he dropped the program, preferring to let the music stand on its own, but the program tells us a great deal about the music.

- Excerpt of program notes by Eric Bromberger

For Jacobs Masterworks concerts, only children ages five years and older will be allowed into the concert hall. These children must have a ticket and be able to sit in an un-accompanied seat.

Ace Parking has provided a DEDICATED JACOBS MUSIC CENTER PARKING PRE-PURCHASE PAGE for upcoming events at JMC.