Numerous versions of the programs for each of the first three symphonies were published and appeared in letters from Mahler to his friends and colleagues. The versions included here were those that accompanied each work's premiere.

Mahler divided his symphony into two parts and five movements. The first and second parts are divided by a deep chasm, covered with rosy clouds of perfume that lure, towards which everyone rushes, ultimately falling in, and which very few are able to wrestle through physically and mentally. In the first three sections of the symphony, different moods of illusion alternate: in the first the rush of spring, in the second (serenade motive) love's blissful rapture, in the third (wedding dance) the abundance of boundless joy and delight-- the fourth movement leaps suddenly with an unexpected, violent turn, into the tragic above and the tones of a poignant funeral march below: the ceremony of the burial of illusions begins. This alone is not one of the conventional mourning ceremonies. The poet buries the illusions in the same way as the animals of the forest bury the hunter in a well-known picture. The forest is green all around, the sun shines, the Heavens smile; the hares dance, the foxes frolic, the deer cheerfully pull the hearse on which the dead hunter is laid out. Everything is alive, everything is rejoicing, only the hunter is dead. It is as if hopes and illusions die out in the soul, but the world remains the same as it was; all around jubilation and joy; only the illusions of the soul lie on the stretcher.

This section of the symphony is one of the most daring and formidable concepts. In the tumult of the joys that want to live, the bells of the death knell fall eerily, no different than during the Plague in Florence when one tried to drown the horrors of the fear of death with the tumult of festivities. And finally, the fifth, the last movement, brings the solution.