When Gustav Mahler arrived on vacation at Steinbach am Attersee in the summer of 1895, he was accompanied by Natalie Bauer-lechner, his faithtul friend, companion and confidante before the advent at Alma Schindler. Bauer-Lechner kept a diary in which she recorded her conversations with Mahler about the progress of his current compositions, and especially the Third Symphony. Already that summer he had tinally established the order and titles of the individual movements that came to comprise the work:
1. Der Sommer marschiert ein [Summer marches in.]

2. Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen [What the flowers in the meadow tell me.]
3. Was mir die Tiere im Walde erzählen [What the animals in the forest tell me]
4. Was mir die Nacht erzählt (Der Mensch) [What night tells me (Man.)]
5. Was mir die Morgenglocken erzählen (Die Engel) [What the morning bells tell me (the Angels).]
6. Was mir die Liebe erzählt [What love tells me.]

These are the six movements that we know, but at the time when Mahler was spelling out this list to Bauer-Lechner, there was also a seventh:

7. Was mir das Kind erzählt [What the child tells me.]

At this early stage in the shaping ot his new symphony, he was contemplating the use of a Wunderhorn setting for voice and orchestra that he had composed in 1892 "Das himmlische Leben", the song we know today as the tinale of the Fourth Symphony. Early sketched material for the first movement clearly shows that it was intended to be the Third Symphony's long-term objective. Although most of the melodic anticipations of the sang in other movements did not survive beyond the sketch stage, some crucial motivic references do remain in the first movement, as evidence of Mahler's original scheme. For example, the clarinets' shrill repeated-note motive, followed by a descending arpeggio, unmistakably outlines the "himmlische Leben" melody, and the fifth movement, Mahler's angelic "Morning Bells", shares some of its materials with the movement that was finally diverted to his next symphony.
When working on such a massive scale, naturally enough, Mahler's concept changed as the composition progressed. The sequence of five movements that makes up Part II was actually completed before the gigantic first movement that comprises Part I. However, tram the very start he had a clear idea in his head about the layout, character and content of the vast first movement. That it should include contrast and conflict was already uppermost in his mind. In the summer of 1895, when describing the concept of Summer marching in, he said: "I need a regimental band to give the rough and crude effect of [Summer's] arrival. It will be just like the military band on parade. Such a mob is milling around, you never saw anything like it! Naturally, it doesn't come off without a struggle with the opponent, Winter, but he is easily dispatched, and Summer, in his strength and superior power, soon gains undisputed mastery!"
Mahler was to remain faithful to this scenario in outline, but as time and work themselves marched on, the notion of "Winter" evolved into something much closer to a sound-picture of the world before it was animated by life. A year later, he told Natalie:

It has almost ceased to be music; it is hardly anything but sounds ot Nature. It's eerie, the way life gradually breaks through, aut of soulless, petrified matter. [...] And, as this life rises from stage to stage, it takes on ever more highly developed forms: flowers, beasts, man, up to the sphere of the spirits, the "angels". Once again, an atmosphere of brooding summer midday heat hangs over the introduction to this movement; not a breath stirs, all life is suspended, and the sun-drenched air trembles and vibrates, At intervals there come the moans of the youth, of captive life struggling for release from the clutches of lifeless, rigid Nature. In the [March], which follows the introduction, attacca, he finally breaks through and triumphs.

What we hear first in this remarkable soundscape is not "soulless, petrified, matter" but an epic unison statement (eight horns!) of the great marching song that will eventually carry the movement to its triumphant conclusion in F major. But the introduction proper, in D minor, is what Mahler, with only slight exaggeration, called music "that has almost ceased to be music" - music without a human dimension, suggestive of the pre-history of Man.
In finding the music to match this vision of a world that has not yet been stirred into life, Mahler introduces all manner of innovations, above all the liberation of wind and brass, which play a much more important role than the strings throughout. In this slow introduction he reverses the traditional balance between wind instruments and strings (the latter typically associated vvith such human preoccupations as passion, lyricism and exalted love). Nothing as virtuosic for brass, the trombones especially, had been heard in a symphony before this passage, with the possible exception of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, which Mahler admired and often conducted.
When the main body of the movement is finally announced, we are back to the vibrant marching song that opened the symphony. It is not easy to describe music as idiosyncratic as this huge march, in which the strings now have a great deal to do. Perhaps it we respond to it as an expression of the "Life Force" - Henri Bergson's "élan vital", the creative urge at the heart of evolution which carries all before it - we come near to what Mahler, consciously or (more probably) unconsciously, had in mind. What is not speculative is the absolute novelty of the musical materials that he incorporates, expanding the very vocabulary and resources ot music as a "language". He makes use ot the vernacular, the "pop" music of the day - marching songs, military signals and fanfares, the very sonorities and gestures of a regimental band on the street - in a context, the first movement of a symphony, in which such "vulgar" materials normally had no place. There had been a precedent for this in Mahler's earlier works, but nothing on this scale. This is the movement of Mahler's that, perhaps more than any other, changed the history of the symphony.
The first of the sequence of five movements that follows is - most unusually - a minuet, which, with its orchestration of exceptional refinement, looks back to a vanished classical past and provides contrast and relaxation after the exertion and monumentality of the march. In her diary, Natalie Bauer-Lechner wrote about the Minuet: "This is the movement that Mahler composed last summer [1895] directly after his arrival at Steinbach. On the very first afternoon, as he was gazing out of his summer-house that nestles amidst grass and flowers in the meadow, the music came to him. He sketched it quickly, completing the draft at one sitting. 'You can't imagine how it will sound!" [Mahler said] 'It is the most carefree thing that I have ever written - as carefree as only flowers are. It all sways and waves in the air, as light and graceful as can be, like the flowers bending on their stems in the wind. [...] As you might imagine, the mood doesn't remain one of innocent, flower-like serenity, but suddenly becomes serious and oppressive. A stormy wind blows across the meadow and shakes the leaves and blossoms, which groan and whimper on their stems, as if imploring release into a higher realm'."
Particularly significant here is Mahler's reference to a "higher realm". In his original list of movements, he entitled the Minuet "What the flowers in the meadow tell me": it is as if we were moving up the evolutionary ladder, i.e. from inert matter (introduction) to life-creating energy, to flowers, and then in the Scherzo, to the life of the forest, the sounds of Nature, of birds and beasts. Here again is Mahler's own description, from the summer of 1899:

The Scherzo in particular, the animal piece, is at once the most scurrilous and most tragic that ever was - in the way that music alone can mystically take us from one extreme to the other in the twinkling of an eye. In this piece it is as if Nature herself were pulling faces and putting out her tongue. There is such a gruesome, Panic humour in it that one is more likely to be overcome by horror than laughter

like the "fish sermon" Scherzo in the Second, the "animal" Scherzo in the third represents a radical transformation of an early Wunderhorn song, this time one for voice and piano, composed between 1887 and 1890, which tells how the nightingale will remain to beguile us when the cuckoo is silenced by death. To begin with, the movement adheres to the relative simplicity of the song, but soon it begins to incorporate all kinds of new materials and dramatic and poetic incidents. Most important of these, not only for the movement itself but in the whole symphony's evolutionary scheme, is the introduction for the first time of a human dimension, in the posthorn solo which forms the Scherzo's trio and is recollected again before the end of the movement. The bewitching sound of the postilion blowing his horn from the post-coach comes not from the world of animals but from the world of human beings.
Just after the posthorn's reappearance, not long before the end of the movement, there is one of those menacing "interruptions" that were a feature of the first movement and even of the elegant Minuet, when the music, as Mahler remarked to Natalie, "suddenly becomes serious and oppressive". Exactly the same abrupt change of mood overtakes the Scherzo, and here again Mahler's words are appropriate: "One is more likely to be overcome by horror than laughter." He elaborates on this in a description that must refer to this passage towards the end of the movement: there falls, he said, once more "the heavy shadow of lifeless Nature, of as yet uncrystallized, inorganic matter. But here it represents a relapse into the lower forms of animal creation before the mighty leap towards consciousness in the highest earthly creature, Man."
In the fourth movement Man is revealed. This slow movement, a meditation for contralto soloist and orchestra that takes as its text Nietzsche's "Midnight Song" from Also sprach Zarathustra, is a consummate expression of absolute stillness at the heart of the symphony. It is also an extraordinary technical achievement: music that moves, of course, as it must, and yet creates an impression of immobility, until its final pages - "Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit" ("All Joys want eternity") - when it magically flowers into a brief anticipation of the ecstatic rhapsody of Das lied von der Erde.
In fact, every parameter of the song is dedicated to realizing in sound a long-sustained contemplation of the universe as it slumbers, with questioning Man (Zarathustra) at its centre. "Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?" ("What does the deep midnight say?") asks the poem; and the answer is returned, "Die Welt ist tief!... Tief ist ihr Weh!" ("The world is deep!... Deep is its suffering!") Mahler emphasizes the prime significance of these words and the sequence of pitches to which they are set by repeating the motive: "Tief ist ihr Weh! Tief ist ihr Weh!". We have heard this phrase before, in wordless form, twice thundered out by the horns in the opening movement - first at an early stage of the slow introduction and later as the climax of one of those dramatic "interruptions" of the march referred to earlier - and it will emerge once again during the concluding Adagio. But the verbal identification of this motive with grief and sorrow comes at the centre of the symphony in this vocal movement, which, focused on D, both minor and major, outlines the work's tonal progression from its D minor opening to the final D major Adagio. In many respects, this slow movement for voice and orchestra holds the key to understanding the entire symphony.
The fifth movement is the angelic song accompanied by morning bells that was adumbrated in Mhler's programmatic list. In a four-minute childlike depiction of heaven, penitent sinners are forgiven and granted eternal bliss. To realize this extraordinary vision Mahler summons up a range of fresh sounds and timbres that have not yet played a role in the symphony. He adds a boys' chorus to colour the orchestral bell strokes with a repeated pair of onomatopoeic syllables, "bimm, bamm". The poem itself is given to the contralto soloist and women's chorus, although at the very end of the movement, the boys' voices, for Mahler an image of trenchant "innocence", also join in the crucial lines promising "the heavenly joy [that] knows no end!".
The bright sound of "Es sungen drei Engel" is achieved by the predominance in the orchestra of wind, percussion and two harps; only the lower strings participate, another example of his ceaselessly inventive orchestral imagination. But orchestration is more than colour, it is also architecture. And it is with a supreme stroke of form-building logic that Mahler, having presented the orchestra in multiple guises across the span of the preceding five movements, rebuilds it in totality for the finale. Having altered the traditional balance between wind and strings in the first movement, in the great Adagio he restores the strings' full splendour. Indeed, for the first 50 bars of the movement, it is a string orchestra alone that we hear. Thereafter, the textures fill out and the dynamics gradually increase, until, in the movement's final pages the entire orchestra is assembled in asserting D major.
That overwhelming release of D major brings us to the end of the epic journey we have travelled from the first movement to this final great hymn to Love, a journey that has encompassed the evolutionary process from the "heavy shadow of lifeless Nature" to "the mighty leap towards consciousness in the highest earthly creature, Man", That "heavy shadow" of which Mahler spoke recurs again near the end of the Adagio; and just before it, we are reminded once more, by all eight horns in unison, of the "Tief ist ihr Weh!" motive from the "Midnight Song".
Mahler had originally thought of calling his Third Symphony "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" ("Joyful Science" after Nietzsche), another alternative was "Das glückliche leben" ("Happy life"). But as he came to compose the work in the summers of 1895 and 1896, the concept of "suffering" became more prominent, as if it were an inescapable component of the evolution of Life on earth and, above all, inherent in the very act of creation that is the purpose of an artist's life. Mahler touched on this in a revealing comment to Natalie Bauer-Lechner:

As sometimes a personal experience will illuminate and fully bring home to one the significance of something long known, so today it came to me in a flash: Christ on the Mount of Olives, compelled to drain the cup of sorrow to the dregs - and willing it to be so. No one for whom this cup is destined can or will refuse it, but at times a deathly fear must overcome him when he thinks of what is before him. I have the ssme feeling when I think of this first movement, in anticipation of what I shall have to suffer because of it, without even living to see it recognized and appreciated for what it is.

In a letter of 1896, he remarked that the Adagio represents the "highest level of the structure", then adding, "God! Or if you like, The Superman", that is, Nietzsche's "Übermensch". But not Heaven, or at least not yet. To attain that final objective he had to embark on an entirely new symphonic journey - the Fourth - during which the state of innocence and grace achieved would allow ”Das himmlische Leben" ("Heavenly Life") to take its rightful place at the top of the evolutionary ladder. It was thus only in writing his Fourth Symphony that Mahler finally realized his mighty conception for the Third. Heaven could at last be revealed and confirmed as Man's ultimate goal.