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Webern
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Webern and the Austrian composer Alban Berg were Schoenberg’s most important disciples. Webern’s early works, such as the Passacaglia (1908) for orchestra, are richly scored, heavily chromatic works in the postromantic style. His music during the period between his Six Pieces (1910) for orchestra and the Five Canons (1924) for soprano and two clarinets was marked by sparse textures, small instrumental ensembles, and highly compact musical construction. With his 1924 work Drei geistliche Volkslieder (Three Spiritual Folksongs) he adopted Schoenberg’s newly formulated twelve-tone system. His subsequent works remain notable for their extreme condensation, brevity, great clarity and delicacy, and fragmentary melodic units. Webern extended the twelve-tone concept of serialization of pitch to serialization of rhythms, dynamics, and tone colors.
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During these years Webern was going from job to job as theater conductor. He worked in Bad Ischl, Vienna, Teplitz, Danzig, and Stettin. But these positions did not suit him. The introverted, sensitive composer was unhappy with the low standards of the opera houses in provincial towns, and he did not like theatrical life. His marriage to his cousin Wilhelmine Mörtl in 1911 brought a welcome stability to this rather frustrating existence. In 1915 he joined the Austrian army as a volunteer but was dismissed after a year because of poor eyesight.
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Webern had a decisive influence on the development of modern music by transforming Schönberg’s twelve-tone music into a concentrated form. The sparing world of atonality and twelve-ton music are considered symptoms of an ‘intensified expression in the shortest form’ The abstract, very constructive technique coupled with a subtle use of timbres made it at first difficult for the listeners to approach his music.
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Like his fellow student, Alban Berg, Webern quickly transformed his style from the rich language of postromanticism to the more sparing world of atonality and twelve-tone writing. Webern took two principal elements of the style, brevity and the focus on individual sounds, to their extremes. All of his works are short (his entire output, some thirty pieces, totals only about three hours' worth of music). His Symphony, for example, is only ten minutes long, and some of the movements of his pieces last less than thirty seconds. Because of this, each individual note, articulation, dynamic, and timbre takes on new significance. Ultimately, Webern took these other elements and applied the principles of twelve-tone procedure to them, creating a technique known as serialism (later composers, such as Pierre Boulez, would extend these ideas even further).
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The fourth piece ("Very moderate") is the funeral march, even though Webern was to delete the descriptive title from his revised version of the score. Again only some of the orchestra is used – the oboes and the entire string section are ignored – but the terrible sounds at the end of the piece compellingly evoke the anger Webern felt when confronted with his loss. The "bargaining" phase is omitted, perhaps because the composer wrote the piece a few years after the incident, by which time he recognized the futility of trying to negotiate with mortality. But the mourning character of the fifth piece ("Very slow") is perfectly clear, starting with a melancholy trombone solo and ending with sustained chords that, especially in the context of such a brief work, seem to last forever. Acceptance is achieved in the final piece ("Slow"), which is as intimate as the third without suggesting the earlier piece's paralysis, and which tentatively permits some more expressive melodic fragments to emerge. The loss is still painful, but life moves on.
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Webern was born into an aristocratic family. In addition to studying musicology (he wrote a doctoral thesis on Renaissance music), he composed a number of long, late Romantic tone poems which never saw the light of day. In 1904 he became a private pupil of Schoenberg's and pursued the course laid down by his mentor with uncompromising consistency. His highly concentrated style (many works are only a few bars in length) strives for emotional expression in its most distilled form, but it was often misunderstood and mistakenly dismissed as mathematically cold and calculating. In the wake of the Second World War many composers followed Webern's example but placed undue emphasis on his music's purely structural aspects rather than its emotional content. Forbidden by the Nazis to perform or publish his works, this intensely modest and retiring man withdrew to the country towards the end of the war.
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