Mahler's Third Symphony was conceived as a musical picture of the natural world. This handbook describes the composition of Mahler's grandiose piece of philosophical programme music in the context of the ideas that inspired it and the artistic debates and social conflicts that it reflects. In this original and wide ranging account, Peter Franklin takes the Third Symphony as a representative modern European symphony of its period and evaluates it as the culmination of Mahler's early symphonic style and a as work whose contradictory effects mirror the complexity of contemporary social and musical manners. The music is described in detail, movement by movement, with chapters on the genesis, early performance and subsequent reception of the work.