Mahler's Third Symphony: An Introduction.

These program notes, written by Phillip Huscher for the CSO, are rather good. In some ways better than most. Certainly, they provide a good first introduction to the symphony, its development, its "meaning(s)" and how easily it can be interpreted to mean whatever the listener requires of it, see Schoenberg below for example:

"When Arnold Schoenberg attended the Vienna premiere in 1904, he wrote to Mahler: “I think I have experienced your symphony. I felt the struggle for illusions; I felt the pain of one disillusioned; I saw the forces of evil and good contending; I saw a man in a torment of emotion exerting himself to gain inner harmony. I sensed a human being, a drama, truth, the most ruthless truth!”
Mahler, sadly, did not reply but did write, at the beginning of the summer of 1809, to Natalie Bauer-Lechner :

"It has almost ceased to be music; it is hardly anything but sounds of nature. I could equally well have called the movement “What the mountain tells me”—it's eerie, the way life gradually breaks through, out of soul-less, rigid 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.” Over the introduction to this movement, there lies again that atmosphere of brooding summer midday heat; 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—that is, captive life—struggling for release from the clutches of lifeless, rigid Nature. At last, he breaks through and triumphs"

A symphony about "man", a symphony about nature, gods, all of these or perhaps neither? Huscher notes," The first music he sketched in the hut on the Attersee, in June 1895, is the charming minute that is now the symphony's second movement. It was, as Mahler recognized, “the most carefree thing that I have ever written—as carefree as only flowers are. It all sways and waves in the air . . . like flowers bending on their stems in the wind.” But, as Mahler later realized, when this one movement was performed on its own—it was the first music from the symphony ever played in public—it gave people the wrong impression. “It always strikes me as odd that most people, when they speak of 'nature', think only of flowers, little birds, and woodsy smells. No one knows the god Dionysus, the great Pan.”

To read the full program notes, you may download the PDF HERE