Mahler symphony 1 movement 3 analysis

Third Movement: 'Funeral March in Callot's Manner'

The third movement acts as the slow movement of the symphony’s four movement structure. The extra-musical idea inspiring the movement is taken from The Hunter’s Funeral, an old Austrian folk story.
Mahler described the movement in a conversation with Bauer-Lechner in November 1900: "On the surface one might imagine this scenario: A funeral procession passes by our hero, and the misery, the whole distress of the world, with its cutting contrasts and horrible irony, grasps him.

The funeral march of "Brother Martin" one has to imagine as being played in a dull manner by a band of very bad musicians, as they usually follow such funeral processions. The roughness, gaiety, and banality of this world then appears in the sounds of some interfering Bohemian musicians, heard at the same time as the terribly painful lamentation of the hero.

It has a shocking effect in its sharp ir