Anton Webern



Anton Webern

Introduction

Anton Webern spent his formative years (1883-1902) in Klagenfurt, near the family's hereditary estate at Preglhof. He learned piano, cello, and some music theory from Edwin Komauer, a local composer and music teacher. In 1902 he enrolled in the Univ. of Vienna to study musicology with Guido Adler, earning his Ph.D. in 1906 with an edition of part 2 of the Choralis Constantinus by the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac. He also studied harmony with Hermann Graedener and counterpoint with Karl Navrátil, and he composed several songs, some chamber music, and an orchestral tone poem, Im Sommerwind (1904) (Moldenhauer, 2004).

Career

He was composing steadily, working his way, along with Schoenberg and Schoenberg's circle, toward a new musical language free from the constraints of tonality and key (Leeuw, 2005). His first efforts were a group of songs written in 1908 and 1909 on texts by Stefan George, of which 10 were eventually published as opp. 3 and 4. They are brief, enigmatic settings, free not only from tonality but from melodic and rhetorical gesture as well. They were followed by Five Movements, string quartet op. 5 (1909), and Six Pieces for Orchestra op. 6 (1909; rev. 1928).

The Six Pieces make great use of the coloristic possibilities of the large orchestra, often distributing a motif or a phrase among several instruments in what Schoenberg later termed Klangfarbenmelodie. The tendency toward brevity and concision becomes yet more pronounced in Webern's works of the period 1910-14, particularly the Four Pieces op. 7 (violin and piano, 1910), Six Bagatelles op. 9 (string quartet, 1913), and Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 10 (1913). The fourth of the orchestra pieces, for example, is only six measures long. Webern later tried to explain this brevity, which remained a hallmark of his works until the mid-20s, as the consequence of atonality: “With the abandoning of tonality the most important means of building up longer pieces was lost” (Malcolm, 1995).

Almost all Webern's works between 1914 and 1926 were songs, a genre in which the structure of the text could help give form and duration to the music. Four Songs op. 12 (1915-17) were for voice and piano. In the subsequent sets of opp. 13-19 the voice is accompanied by small, carefully chosen instrumental ensembles, for example, violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, and cello in the Trakl songs op. 14 (1917-21). The texts for many of these songs are devotional verses, either from folk sources, as in Five Sacred Songs op. 15 (1917-22), or from the liturgy, such as the setting of the Marian antiphon “Ave, Regina coelorum” (Three Songs op. 18, violin, E? clarinet, and guitar, 1925).

The simplicity of syntax and the directness of expression in the texts balance the compression and complexity of the musical language. Webern also uses contrapuntal devices to generate form. “Fahr hin, o Seel',” the last of the Five Sacred Songs, is a double canon in contrary motion (trumpet and clarinet play the same melody one measure apart and going in opposite directions while ...