“When the hounds bay, we know we are in the saddle!”

Mahler’s Third Symphony was received with some hostility upon its first few hearings. After the second performance on 13 December 1895, Bruno Walter claimed, “To be sure, there was hostility, misunderstanding, belittlement, scorn. Yet the work left such a deep impression of greatness and originality of the force of Mahler’s personality, that one may date his rise to fame as a composer from that day.”

The hostility led Mahler to exclaim, “When the hounds bay, we know we are in the saddle!”

“And there I will give you a hundred hounds; No mightier creatures bay at the moon” – from W B Yeats ‘The Wanderings of Oisin.’