By Lorin Maazel:
I don't believe in verbalising music. Music is a language of its own, which exists because you can express in it what cannot be expressed in words.
If you eliminate the sentimental, which I don't think has any place in his music, there are certainly elements that one can characterise. There is the material, the funereal, the bucolic, the insouciant, the light-hearted and hopeful. He was a hopeful person, and the end of this symphony (No. 3), in D major, is in a sense trying to say, " I, Gustav like everybody else, have looked into the abyss and what i see there is fritening, but now I must reaffirm my belief in life."