This Saturday at Symphony Hall, Benjamin Zander will be leading the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, Chorus pro Musica, the Radcliffe Choral Society, and the choristers of Saint Paul’s Choir School in Gustav Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 3. Next season, 2026–2027, will be the final one for Zander, the Boston Philharmonic, and the Boston Youth Philharmonic Orchestra [Read full press release HERE]. The offerings announced so far include the Beethoven Ninth and Mahler Ninth from the BPO and the Mahler Second, the “Resurrection,” from the BPYO. But Saturday will see the last ever performance of the Mahler Third from these forces. Here are a few things you might not know about the symphony.

The Third is Mahler’s longest symphony, and the longest symphony in the repertoire. Most interpretations run between 90 and 100 minutes. The last time the BPO played the Third, in 2022, Zander took about 102 minutes. Lorin Maazel’s 1985 recording with the Vienna Philharmonic runs just over 110 minutes.

What Mahler’s drafts tell us. The symphony could have been longer still. At one point Mahler envisioned seven movements. This is what one draft looked like:

1. Summer marches in.
2. What the flowers in the meadow tell me.

III. What the animals in the forest tell me

1. What night tells me.
2. What the morning bells tell me.
3. What love tells me.

VII. Heavenly life.

Eventually he decided that six movements would suffice. “Das himmlische Leben,” the song he planned to recycle as the seventh movement, would become the fourth and final movement of Symphony No. 4.

What the eight French horns tell us. The Dorian-mode fanfare that the horns play to start the symphony [HERE]—Mahler called it “Der Weckruf!” (“The Waking Call!”)—traces back to August Binzer’s 1819 student song “Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus,” which defiant members of the German-nationalist Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens sang in December 1878 after the government dissolved their organization. Some of those members were part of Mahler’s student circle. So the theme has a political aspect. (In 1905, Mahler would march with workers on Vienna’s Ringstraße.) But it has a musical legacy as well. Brahms used it, in one form or another, in his Academic Festival Overture [at 00:45 HERE] and the finale of his First Symphony [at 36:45 HERE]. Hans Rott used it in the finale of his E-major symphony [at 40:02 HERE]. Mahler used it for the discarded “Blumine” movement of his First Symphony [at 0:12 HERE]. To what extent Mahler was aware of this history is hard to say. “Blumine” repeats the first six notes of the Brahms symphony and in the same C-major key, so that particular borrowing was surely unintentional.

What sonata form tells us. Mahler experts largely agree that the symphony’s first movement is in sonata form. What they don’t agree on are the details. The various discrepancies can include a difference of some 400 bars on where the development starts. If analyses by the likes of Theodor Adorno seem too, well, analytical, try listening to the movement as a dialogue between winter and summer. They alternate, each appearing four times, and it’s easy to tell which is which. Winter’s sections get gradually shorter as summer’s get longer. Mahler himself said, “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.” Even the “Weckruf,” which originally belonged to winter, gets drawn into summer’s cheerful orbit.

What Disney tells us. When summer enters for the first time (at rehearsal number 11, about six minutes in), a solo oboe plays a trivial tune that sounds suspiciously like something from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast [at 5:50 HERE]. We hear this tune throughout the summer sections of the movement, until finally, just before the end, it takes a form that leaves no doubt [at 28:45 HERE]. Who knew “Be Our Guest” had Mahler to thank? 

What the cuckoo and the nightingale tell us. For the principal theme of “What the animals in the forest tell me” [at 42:40 HERE], Mahler recycled one of his Wunderhorn songs, “Ablösung im Sommer” (“The Changing of the Guard in Summer”) [HERE]. The cuckoo has sung himself to death on a green willow, and we’re left to look for his replacement. That turns out to be the always joyous Lady Nightingale, who sings when other birds are silent. Mahler’s cheeky symphonic version features cuckoo calls from the clarinet, a brief nightingale burst from the flute, and no unrest among the animals until the distant posthorn serenade begins.

What Lenau tells us. At those points in the score of “What the animals in the forest tell me” when the posthorn enters, Mahler wrote on the manuscript, “Der Postillon!” In Nikolaus Lenau’s poem “Der Postillon,” the postilion stops the coach near a churchyard and blows a salute to a comrade who lies buried there. The critic Ernst Decsey recalled having suggested to Mahler that the posthorn serenades should be understood in light of Lenau’s poem. Mahler, Decsey says, was amazed: “That’s precisely what I had in mind. I was thinking of the same poem, the same mood—how did you know?” As we’ll see, the “comrade” Mahler had in mind was probably Hans Rott.

What Glinka tells us. At rehearsal number 4, about two and a half minutes into Glinka’s Spanish Overture No. 1, or “Jota Aragonesca,” four solo winds pass around a pair of phrases [at 2:32 HERE]. Mahler’s posthorn recalls the first phrase when it enters some five and a half minutes into the movement (just after rehearsal number 14) [at 48:44 HERE]. A couple of minutes later, the posthorn reproduces the second phrase note for note [at 50:22 HERE]. The posthorn will repeat this second phrase and eventually the first violins will take up what becomes a major element of the movement. This reference too was doubtless unconscious on Mahler’s part.

What the tawny owl tells us. In his manuscript of “What night tells me,” Mahler wrote “Der Vogel der Nacht!” at the points when solo oboe (four times) and English horn (once) sound birdlike [oboe at 1:03:44 HERE]. Mahler may have been thinking of the Hölderlin poem “Die Kurze,” where the bird of night flies so close that you have to shield your eyes. The score says simply, “Wie ein Naturlaut” (“Like a sound of nature”). It’s thought that Mahler might have had Europe’s tawny owl in mind [actual tawny owl HERE], and in Zander’s 2022 performance, Peggy Pearson’s oboe and Andrew van der Paardt’s English horn gave support to that idea.

What the mezzo-soprano tells us. In “Summer marches in,” we hear an anguished upward three-note cry from the French horns, first a few bars before rehearsal number 5 [at 3:00 HERE] and then again at rehearsal number 29 [at 14:02 HERE]. Those are both winter sections; it sounds as if winter were trying to free itself. When we arrive at “What night tells me” and Mahler’s setting of the “Midnight Song” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, we discover the meaning of this motif, for the mezzo-sporano sings it to the words “Tief ist ihr Weh” (“Deep is its [the world’s] woe”) [at 1:05:10 HERE].

What Rott tells us. Hans Rott was a student friend of Mahler and briefly his roommate in the late 1870s. Mahler called Rott “a musician of genius” and Bruckner praised his organ improvising; Brahms, on the other hand, told him he had no talent and should give up music. Rott died in a Viennese asylum in 1884, just a month short of his 26^th birthday. He left behind, among other works, a symphony in E major. Perhaps in tribute, Mahler borrowed the Adagio theme from Rott’s symphony [at 9:15 HERE] for his own Adagio finale [at 1:12:10 HERE]. You’ve actually heard the theme already because in “What the morning bells tell me,” the mezzo-soprano sang it to the words “Ach komm’ und erbarme dich über mich!” (“Oh come and have mercy on me!”) [at 1:10:00 HERE]. (You might also detect a resemblance to the “Glaubensthema” from Parsifal [at 4:56 HERE].) On the manuscript of this finale movement, Mahler wrote, “Vater, sieh an die Wunden mein! Kein Wesen laß verloren sein!” (“Father, look upon these wounds of mine! Let there be lost no creature of Thine!”).

What Mahler’s composition process tells us. Mahler actually wrote “Summer marches in” last. He saw this first movement as a synopsis of the entire symphony, but in some ways it transcends the symphony. The Third begins in D minor and ends in D major; “Summer marches in,” however, ends in F major, as if it had chosen its own different destination. In his manuscript, at the end of the movement, Mahler wrote, “Dem der da kommen wird! / Denen die da sein werden!” (“To those who will arrive there! / To those who will be there!”). He may not have wanted any creature to be lost, but perhaps it was all right for some to lag behind.

Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.