By GERALD S. FOX

When the young musicians of the Juilliard Orchestra mount the stage of Carnegie Hall on December 11 (and again two days later at the Kennedy Center in Washington), they will face a daunting task, even for orchestral musicians with many more years of experience: a performance of Mahler's Third Symphony, a gargantuan work—not only in length (it's about 100 minutes long), but in musical concept as well.

Leading the student players in the performances is conductor and alumnus James Conlon, a frequent guest artist at Juilliard. Mr. Conlon is no stranger to Mahler, having conducted more than 200 performances of the composer's symphonies since his first Juilliard days.

Gustav Mahler (Photo courtesy of Karadar)

"I am struck by the cyclical nature of conducting Mahler," Maestro Conlon said in a recent interview. "I have just started my third Mahler cycle, this time with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival. I come back to each symphony with a sense of life's cycle … my own and that of all of nature. And nature is the subject of the Third Symphony. The movements are like the seasons. They will recur in later symphonies in different guises and forms."

Leading the orchestra in the Mahler is particularly meaningful, Mr. Conlon said. "I return to Juilliard as if it were a part of my own life's cycle. I cut my teeth here on the Mahler symphonies in the 1970s—with my first performances of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh. In my mind the musical and spiritual challenge of playing Mahler is ideal for student orchestras. Performing them obliges the young musician to go way beyond just playing the notes. They must surrender themselves to the enormous emotionality, as well as the metaphysical and spiritual quest that this composer demands, while remaining sufficiently lucid to render its purely musical elements clearly."

The history of Mahler's Third is as fascinating as the music contained within it. It took several forms before the composer gave it his final stamp of approval. In early July 1896, he wrote to Bruno Walter, inviting him to Steinbach on Lake Atter to see the score of the then almost completed Third Symphony. When Walter arrived, Mahler met him, and on the way to his house, as Walter looked up at the magnificent Höllengebirge Mountains, Mahler said; "No use staring up there—I've already composed it all away into my symphony!"

Indeed, Mahler considered the Third his "nature" symphony. He wrote: "My symphony will be unlike anything the world has ever heard! All nature speaks in it, telling deep secrets that one might guess only in a dream!" However, from the start, the symphony was about more than nature. Mahler described it to the soprano Anna von Mildenburg as "a musical poem embracing all the stages of development in progressive order, beginning with inanimate nature and rising to the love of God!" While the symphony was still in progress and had seven movements, each bore an explanatory heading. Ultimately, Mahler deleted the seventh movement, a setting for soprano of the poem, Das himmlische Leben ("Heavenly Life"), from the famous collection of folk poetry, Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn"), whose poems Mahler often set. He later made this movement the finale of the Fourth Symphony.

Mahler gave the work a subtitle ("A Midsummer Noon's Dream"), a superscription ("Father, look upon my wounds! Let no creature be lost"), and originally, titled each movement as such:

1. Pan awakes — Summer comes marching in (Bacchic Procession)
2. What the flowers in the meadow tell me
3. What the animals in the forest tell me
4. What humanity tells me
5. What the angels tell me
6. What love tells me

James Conlon will lead the Juilliard Orchestra in Mahler's Third Symphony at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. (Photo by Nan Melville)

Evidently the titles served merely as a scaffold to help Mahler organize his prodigal musical ideas, for he deleted them all before publishing the symphony. Commenting on the titles, Mr. Conlon said: "Most composers have had ambivalent feelings about expressing the 'program' of their symphonies, Mahler no less than others. But I think the most coherent 'explanation' is that the Third is Mahler's 'Creation Symphony'. How different from Haydn! The six movements can be considered the development from Earth, Plant Life, Animals, Human, Angelic, and Divine ... It is his own particular Genesis story."

Mahler himself described his experience in writing the enormous first movement: "It is frightening, the way this music keeps growing and expanding so far beyond anything I have ever composed before. I am seized with horror when I realize where all this is leading ..." Despite the length to which the first movement had grown, Mahler was delighted to realize that it was not an amorphous indulgence, and that he had merely extended the classical rules without breaking them. He declared, "To my surprise, and also to my delight, I see that in this movement ... there is the same structure and the same foundation (without my having wanted it or even thought about it) which is found in Beethoven. It was really devised by old Haydn, and must, I think, be determined by profound and eternal laws." Mahler was surely referring to the free sonata-form of the first movement. Whether it was unintentional, as he suggests, must be taken with a grain of salt, inasmuch as virtually all Mahler symphonies have a first movement in free sonata-form.

The movement begins with a startling call to attention, an open, majestic theme for eight horns in unison, which has been compared to the main theme of the finale of Brahms' Symphony No. 1. Its origin seems to be an Austrian children's marching song which Brahms also suggested in his Academic Festival Overture. The movement is characterized by its many marches, ranging from noble and heroic to vulgar (Mahler called the latter das Gesindel, 'The rabble'). The influence of the military music that Mahler heard and loved so much as a child was never so manifest as in this symphony, particularly in the first movement, with its many trumpet flourishes, snare drum tattoos, and flams.

The coda is staggering in its impact. It is a quick march in "a tempo that sweeps everything before it, getting nearer and nearer, louder and louder, growing like an avalanche, until the din and jubilation break out over our very heads."

Jane Gilbert is the mezzo-soprano soloist for the Third Symphony by Mahler. (Photo by Lisa Kohler)

The second movement is in complete contrast: a delicate minuet of moderate length, full of grace and lightness. It bears much the same relationship to the first as the Andante moderato second movement of the Second Symphony does to its highly dramatic, extensive first movement. Perhaps Mahler recommended an interval after the Third Symphony's first movement for the same reason that he asked for "a pause of at least five minutes" after the Second Symphony's first movement, believing it inappropriate to follow the dramatically charged, lengthy first movement immediately with such a light one. The second movement, with the title, "What the flowers in the meadow tell me," was described by Mahler as "carefree, as only flowers are. Everything floats on the height with lightness and suppleness, like flowers waving on their stems in the breeze." Again, as in the second movement of Symphony No. 2, there are darker pages. Mahler continued: "It all turns suddenly dark and threatening as a wind-storm blows across the field … They groan and whimper on their stems, as if pleading with a higher power for deliverance." Much as Mahler assured the childlike innocence of the Fourth Symphony by omitting trombones and tuba from its orchestration, so he lightened the orchestration of this delicate movement, but here he did it subconsciously. He wrote: "Today I noticed with no little surprise that the contrabasses play only pizzicato in this movement—not a single bowed line or figure! and that the deeper, heavier percussion is not used at all." Triangle, rute (a switch of birch twigs usually struck against the wooden side of the bass drum), glockenspiel, tambourine, and suspended cymbal are used softly, but neither timpani nor bass drum appear.

In the third movement, scherzando, there are two main elements. The first draws on Mahler's earlier Wunderhorn song with piano accompaniment, Ablösung im Sommer ("Relief in Summer"). The second element is Mahler's use of an offstage posthorn in many of the trio sections. The posthorn solo includes a large fragment of a popular Spanish tune that is the main theme of Glinka's Jota Aragonesa, and also appears in Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody. The coda of the movement is apocalyptic.

Deep isolation characterizes the fourth movement, in which the contralto sings lines from Das trunkene Lied of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra (coincidentally, Mahler's friend, Richard Strauss, was working on his symphonic poem at about the same time). The movement grips the listener with its dark mystery, despite the occasional ecstatic shafts of light.

Juilliard Orchestra James Conlon, Conductor Carnegie Hall Sunday, Dec. 11, 3 p.m. Kennedy Center Tuesday, Dec. 13, 8 p.m. For ticket information, please see the calendar.

The fifth movement follows without pause, and is a sprightly setting of a poem, Es sungen drei Engel, from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. It is sung by all the vocal forces: contralto, boys' choir and women's chorus (for these performances, Jane Gilbert is the soloist, with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and women of the Juilliard Choral Union at Carnegie Hall, and the Cathedral Choral Society and Children's Choir from the National Cathedral Schools at the Kennedy Center). It opens with the boys' choir brightly singing, "bimm, bamm, bimm, bamm…" in onomatopoeic imitation of matins bells. The effect of cheerful, bright, and tingling bells abruptly dispersing the dark shadows of the previous movement is startling. A darker mid-section exhorts sinners to repent. At about four minutes in length, the movement vies with the Purgatorio of the Tenth Symphony as Mahler's shortest. As befits the music's light and playful nature, timpani (and violins) are silent.

Again following without pause is the first of Mahler's sublime Adagios; its opening theme a near quotation from the Lento assai of Beethoven's 16th String Quartet, Op. 135. It is amusing to note that a moment later, the second theme seems to have inspired the World War II popular song, "I'll Be Seeing You." The movement has both sensual and religious fervor, not surprising when we remember that Mahler once titled it, What love tells me, and at another time, What God tells me. Mindful that the symphony is a glorification of all nature and all creation, Mahler ends it with a D-major, fortissimo apotheosis.

After Mahler completed the Third Symphony, he said: "Some parts of it seem so uncanny to me that I can hardly recognize them as my own work!"

Maestro Conlon summed it up in this way: "The first and last movements are almost works within themselves. The first, Life emerging from stasis, and the last, a summation of Life … one's own and all of it together. The enormous impact of the finale, the first in a series of great slow movements, touches every emotional chord imaginable."

Gerald S. Fox is president of the Gustav Mahler Society of New York and is a staff reviewer for American Record Guide.