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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.

“You must have had the experience of burying someone dear to you,” wrote Gustav Mahler in a letter explaining his Second Symphony to the music critic Max Marschalk, suggesting that the critic's own experiences with death might help him better understand the symphony. Inversely, if listeners bring personal losses to bear on the piece, Mahler's Second Symphony offers one possible model for coping with death. If we take the distinction that Sigmund Freud draws between two responses to loss—melancholia and mourning—as a discursive frame, Mahler's Second Symphony may be heard as an attempt to come to terms with the death of a loved one by moving gradually from melancholia to mourning. According to Freud, a melancholic subject cannot truly cope with the traumatic experience and instead reenacts it, but someone who mourns truly remembers the loss and thus commemorates the dead, allowing them to live on, if only in memory. Framed in such a way, the early movements of Mahler's Second Symphony—characterized by the alternation between halting sections that dissolve almost as soon as they begin and long-breathed melodies that seem to unfold effortlessly—suggest the melancholic subject's struggle between despair in the face of abject meaninglessness and a manic euphoria, neither of which addresses the loss. By contrast, the text in the symphony's final movement, adapted by Mahler from Friedrich Klopstock's chorale on the resurrection of the dead, encourages true remembrance of the deceased as a figure beyond death. Heard as a musical enactment of mourning, the final movement suggests that the dead who are mourned are resurrected through remembrance. Forcing us to acknowledge Mahler's death on some level, the final movement completes the work of mourning by engendering the composer's own resurrection in our memories as we witness each performance of his Second Symphony.

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.