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In the early summers of 1895 and 1896 Gustav Mahler left behind his obligations as an operatic conductor and traveled from Hamburg through Vienna to the countryside, where he composed his Third Symphony. By situating Mahler's Third Symphony in the context of his summer travels, this article proposes that the symphony's construction of natural spaces is thoroughly bound up with that of urban spaces, especially Vienna. Heeding Mahler's suggestion that the programs for his symphonies be used as “signposts and milestones” on the listener's journey, my hermeneutic method explores the resonances between the symphony, its programs, the preexisting material it references, and Mahler's personal experience of Vienna and the Austrian countryside. The use of marches and the programmatic reference to a mob in the first movement to depict the arrival of summer resonates with the political crisis surrounding Karl Lueger's struggle to be confirmed as mayor of Vienna. Similarly, the portrayal of birds as musical entertainers in “Ablösung im Sommer,” the song on which the third movement is based, paired with a posthorn signaling the arrival of mail echoes Mahler's frustration with the business of opera and his desire to be called to a new position in Vienna.

According to the critical consensus on Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony, Mahler seems, through both his orchestration and musical material, to be evoking both the composers who preceded him and childhood. Many scholars have claimed to hear specific allusions in the first movement to pieces composed in a classical style, and Mahler's use of simple themes with ornamented melodies in the Fourth Symphony also seems to suggest a classical style.At the same time, however, most writers hear a disparity in the movement between Mahler's nominal late romantic compositional style and his use of simpler or more naive-sounding materials. Nostalgia – defined here as a simultaneous acknowledgment of and rebellion against the irreversibility of time – offers one way of examining Mahler's juxtaposition of traits of music from the past and present. Using nostalgia as a theoretical frame, we can examine how music might be able to suggest a relation between the past and present akin to memory.In the first movement, Mahler's late romantic treatment of ‘classical’ materials seems to depict an unsuccessful attempt to recapture an idealized past, and the fourth movement‘s depiction of heaven in childlike terms set predominantly in the style of a lullaby suggests the irretrievable – perhaps even non-existent – past in which the soothing tones of a mother's voice hold the promise of calming all worry.