"My time will come," Gustav Mahler is reported to have said, and indeed it has: his symphonies are performed everywhere, and the recordings number in the thousands. But he wasn’t the only composing Mahler. His wife, Alma Schindler, was a budding songwriter, but when at age 22 she wed the director of the Vienna State Opera, that career was nipped, since he forbade her to continue, saying that one composer in the family was enough. He relented after the crisis in their marriage, and Alma did write a few more songs, but after his death, in 1911, her time was taken up with Oskar Kokoschka and Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel, not to mention her memoirs. Sixteen of her compositions survive, and a week from Sunday, November 17, Jane Irwin will perform seven of them, in orchestrations by Colin and David Matthews, when she comes to Symphony Hall with Mariss Jansons (just named the new director of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw) and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, on a FleetBoston Celebrity Series program with Rodion Shchedrin’s Dialogues with Shostakovich and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10.

Alma’s time came — sort of — when we seemed to hear one of her songs in Ken Russell’s 1974 film Mahler. Actually the words to "How sweet I roamed from field to field" were written by William Blake, and the pop tune is not hers. Last year she got her own bio-pic, Bride of the Wind (the title of Kokoschka’s double portrait), but what Mahler music there was on the soundtrack was mostly Gustav’s.

So what about Alma’s music? Her compositions don’t have the originality of Gustav’s early cantata, Das klagende Lied, and it’s hard to say that she would ever have written anything to match his later song cycles. Still, this is serious work and well worth hearing, redolent of Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg and passionate to boot. She chose mostly contemporary writers to set. The couple (lovers?) of Rainer Maria Rilke’s "Bei dir ist es traut" ("With You I Feel Comfortable") sit quietly alone. The wanderer of "Die stille Stadt" ("The Quiet Town") comes upon a still, fog-shrouded town from which rises a children’s song of praise; in "Laue Sommernacht" ("Mild Summer Night"), two persons find each other. The yellow star of "Licht in der Nacht" ("Light in the Night") comforts the singer, whose lover wants to forsake her; in "Waldseligkeit" ("Woodland Bliss"), the trees touch each other gently, and she’s recovered her happiness. "In meinem Vaters Garten" ("In My Father’s Garden") is a strange fable of an apple tree and three blonde king’s daughters; "Erntelied" ("Harvest Song") brings a healing dawn and a call to the refreshed soul: "Look, the day has presented you with a kingdom/Up! Praise it with your deeds! Ah!"

Alma wrote these songs for piano accompaniment (she herself was an accomplished pianist). You can hear what that sounds like on the cpo-label release of her songs (various singers), or you can hear versions chamber-orchestrated by Julian Reynolds on a Globe CD with soprano Charlotte Margiono. It will be interesting to hear how these differ from what Gustav Mahler scholars Colin and David Matthews have done: Alma didn’t leave us any orchestrating of her own, so we don’t really know what — or who — she should sound like. But no matter how she’s dressed up, Alma Mahler is a lady who never ceases to fascinate.

It would also be interesting to hear Alma’s music on the same program with her husband’s, but at about 100 minutes, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 rarely has to share a bill, and it’ll be on its own when Benjamin Zander performs it with alto Jane Struss, the Chorus pro Musica, and the Boston Philharmonic November 21, 23, and 24. Written before he met Alma, the Third moves beyond the Christian Resurrection theme of the Second to embrace all of Creation. It opens with eight French horns blasting out a (probably unconscious) spoof of the First Symphony’s discarded "Blumine" movement, which itself echoes the big C-major theme from Brahms’s First Symphony. And when the proletariat of the first movement get marching, Mahler draws on the same student song Brahms used in his Academic Festival Overture.

But this symphony touches on philosophy as well as parody, with Apollo and Dionysos having it out, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The remaining five movements document the journey of the spirit upward from instinct through reason to love. It’s not an easy trip: the flowers in Mahler’s meadow are lashed by cold winds, and the forest animals are sent scattering, at the end, by the terrifying sight of Pan himself (there’s also a pre-lapsarian posthorn, perhaps a recollection from Mahler’s childhood, perhaps the end of innocence). In the ominous stillness of midnight, an alto solo introduces Nietzsche: "O humankind! Pay heed! . . . all joy wills eternity, wills deep, deep eternity."

The road to that eternity runs through remission: church bells ring out and a choir of women and children reminds us how St. Peter’s sins were forgiven. But love itself is not without pain, as the last-movement Adagio attests; the epigraph — "Father, look upon my wounds/Let no creature of Thine be lost" — is like a challenge, and after a flute solo releases the soul from its afflictions, the trumpet-saturated finale leaves it unclear whether Mahler has found God or made himself a deity.

Performances of this symphonic giant are few and not to be missed. Incoming BSO music director James Levine did it unforgettably with the orchestra in February of last year; a month later Pierre Boulez was equally memorable with the Vienna Philharmonic in New York. Ben Zander has established himself as one of the world’s leading conductors of Mahler, so these performances could reach that same level. And it could be years before you hear the Third live in Boston again.

The FleetBoston Celebrity Series presents Mariss Jansons and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra next Sunday, November 17, at 3 p.m. in Symphony Hall. Tickets are $35 to $58; call (617) 266-1200 or stop by the Symphony Hall box office. Benjamin Zander conducts the Boston Philharmonic, with Jane Struss and the Chorus pro Musica, in Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 November 21 in Sanders Theatre, November 23 in Jordan Hall, and November 24 in Sanders Theatre. Tickets are $17 to $60; call (617) 236-0999.