Everyone knows by now that some triviality always has to occur in my work, but this time it goes beyond all bounds.' Thus wrote Gustav Mahler, in the summer of 1896, gleefully looking forward to the consternation that his new Third Symphony was going to cause the critics.

[…] Mahler had created a successor to the Second that was even Ionger and more bizarrely structured. This time there were six movements, one (the first) almost as long as the other five put together, mixing elements of symp...