| Symphony, Op. 21 | |
| Type: | Symphony (or chamber or miniature symphony) |
| Composer: | Anton Webern |
| Opus: | 21 |
| Period: | German: die [[Neue Musik]] (20th-century music) |
| Language: | German |
| Composed: | 1927–1928 |
| Dedication: | Webern's youngest daughter Christine Mattl (née Webern) |
| Duration: | 10–20 minutes |
| Movements: | I. German: Ruhig schreitend|italics=no II. German: Variationen|italics=no |
| Scoring: | 1 clarinet 1 bass clarinet 2 horns 1 harp strings Italian: senza bassi |
| Premiere Date: | (world premiere) |
| Premiere Conductor: | Alexander Smallens |
| Premiere Location: | Town Hall, New York |
| Premiere Performers: | Orchestra of the League of Composers |
Anton Webern's Symphony, Op. 21 was his first twelve-tone orchestral work. Written between 1927 and 1928, the work is noted for its intricate structure, abstraction, and Alpine topics. It is a two-movement chamber or miniature symphony of 10–20 minutes, and the influence of Gustav Mahler is audible from the very beginning. Alexander Smallens conducted the world premiere at New York's Town Hall on 18 December 1929.
Webern enjoyed escaping to the quiet otherworldliness of the high mountains as an alpinist, and he saw these landscapes in distinctly spiritual or utopian terms ("up there" near "the heavens"). Such topics are present in many of his works. He drew on Mahler's prior representation of natural spaciousness and stillness in his own music.
The years Webern wrote his symphony (1927–1928), he visited his childhood home and mountains with friends and family. In November 1927 he and Norbert Schwarzmann, a physician and patron, attempted the Hochschwab starting at night, but weather turned them back. In May 1928, he and Rudolf Ploderer attempted the Schneealpe (his favorite mountain) in the snow. He revisited in July, reaching the summit with his wife Wilhelmine and their children. Then they celebrated his cousin 's birthday in Vordernberg and visited his sisters Maria and Rosa in Klagenfurt. He visited their former country estate, the Preglhof, and family grave sites in Schwabegg and . From the cemetery grounds he collected and kept flowers along with photos as souvenirs. In August he, his thirteen-year-old son Peter, and Ploderer climbed the Hochschwab; they overnighted in the and saw many mountain goats.
With his Symphony done, Webern wrote on 6 August 1928 to his friend, the poet Hildegard Jone, who he had known for two years, and with whom he looked forward to collaborating, that he understood art to mean "bringing a thought into the clearest, simplest, i.e. 'most comprehensible' form." He agreed with Jone that "progress is made ... inwards.""I have never placed myself in opposition to ... masters ... [and] have always ... endeavored ... as they did: to represent ... [what] is given to me to say", he continued. He criticized then neoclassicism as such, which he said mimicked styles without a proper understanding. Schoenberg's, Berg's, and his music was "most primary and personal", he emphasized. "[We] fulfill [what] remains ... the same through our means", he explained.
Webern's symphony was part of a turn to more economic orchestration compared to his early works. Its composition partly coincided with his August–September 1928 revision of his Op. 6 orchestral pieces (1909, arr. 1920), in which he substantially reduced the "extravagant" wind instrument section, hoping for performances. The same summer, he also began to arrange his Five Movements for string quartet, Op. 5, for string orchestra (including double basses), using octave doublings in the upper strings. Once Webern finished his Symphony, the League of Composers asked him for a chamber orchestra work. He wrote Claire Raphael Reis that the strings could be reduced to solo parts for them to give the world premiere of the symphony, but he wrote in his diary: "Better with multiple strings." The published score indicates Italian: solo and Italian: [[tutti]] string parts.
Among the winds, Webern used only clarinets and horns, both featuring relatively wide ranges and each with some folk, pastoral, or rustic topicality. Both instruments had long been associated with these topics and with one another in prior art and music. The clarinet and its antecedents were used prominently to evoke these associations in Viennese classical or popular music, as in German: [[Schrammelmusik]]|italics=no, the minuet of Mozart's Symphony No. 39, or Schubert's German: Hirtenmelodien and German: Hirtenchor from his incidental music to Rosamunde. In depicting the "awakening of Nature" (as though from the furthest reaches of audibility), Mahler ultimately scored the faint opening hunting calls of his Symphony No. 1 for pianissimo clarinets (in their chalumeau register) instead of (possibly off-stage) horns.
Julian Johnson, while cautioning against making too much of it, noted that the horns opening Webern's Symphony were "the archetypal musical symbol of distance and wide alpine spaces". For Charles Rosen, horn calls were symbols of memory, distance, absence, or regret. Brahms thus exploited them in the Alphorn calls of his Symphony No. 1 (at the Italian: Più andante|italics=no) to summon the idea of nature and to express a sense of transcendence. Mahler used them to open his Symphony No. 9, where (along with other instruments) they contribute to the sense of an alpine landscape. He used them earlier to evoke distance.
A. Peter Brown called Webern's the most formally unified symphony in the genre, alluding to its parsimonious treatment of musical elements or parameters. Webern conceived of it as such, saying in his 1933 lecture series The Path to the New Music that "the same law applies to everything" and that variation was "the primeval form", resulting in "the most comprehensive unity". "All the masters of the past", he said, felt this "urge to create unity". For example, in a canon, he said, "everyone sings the same thing". Some of the "old methods", like canon cancrizans (with retrograde motion) or mirror canon (with inverted motion), became development techniques in tonal music, he explained, leading to "refinement of the thematic network".
He used the same tone row in both movements:
This tone row comprises chromatic hexachords related by retrograde inversion at the tritone. Since row is divided into two symmetrical parts, and the second half is a mirror image of the first half, it has only 24 permutations, not the usual maximum of 48. Webern often used this derived row structure.
It comprises the tetrachords [0,1,2,3] and [0,1,6,7]:
It comprises the trichords [0,1,3] and [0,1,4]:
The symphony is in two movements. Webern initially outlined his plan:
Then he considered:
Webern's first sketch (for what he was then uncertain about calling a symphony) is dated November–December 1927, and he was initially considering including at least one double bass. He finished the "variation movement" during or after March 1928. In June or July 1928, he finished what he described to Berg as "an Adagio in canonic form throughout", deciding it would be the center movement (of what he had now decided to call a symphony). Webern began an apparent third movement in August 1928 but decided against it, citing the example of Beethoven's two-movement piano sonatas and Bach's two-movement (overture–dance suite) orchestral suites. Finally he decided to reverse the prior order of the movements; thus his final plan became:
In the final score, Universal Edition published Webern's Symphony as follows.
Demonstrating Webern's early music studies, the first movement consists of four lines in a double canon (by inversion) with frequent palindromes. Anne C. Shreffler noted Webern's reliance on linear, song-like writing, an observation sometimes made of Mahler. One canon features German: [[Ländler]]-like lilting melodic repetition on Italian: [[legato]] strings and winds, representing an orderly pastoral topic. The other canon is more percussive, even accompanimental in texture, qualities which Webern crafted after drafting the canon's melody. To this end, he used ornaments like acciaccature; articulations like staccati; instrumentation with the harp's plucked timbre; and musical techniques like double stops, mutes, pizzicati, string harmonics, and Italian: [[sul ponticello]].
Brown noted that this canonic structure may be difficult for most listeners to perceive. Michael Spitzer emphasized Webern's treatment of the second canon as contributory. Webern's orchestration and interlacing of the voices, as well as his use of rests and fixed (or "frozen") register, Friedhelm Döhl considered, are the factors that make the canonic writing difficult to hear, particularly after the opening. The register of each pitch is fixed in the exposition and recapitulation.
The first movement is arguably in a concise, quasi-sonata form with superimposed elements and a rounded binary appearance. In the traditional Classical manner, its exposition (mm. 1–26) is repeated, as is the combined whole of both the development (mm. 25–44b) and recapitulation (mm. 42–66b), before ending in what Kathryn Bailey Puffett called a stretto and what Wolfgang Martin Stroh called a stretto coda (mm. 61–66). Webern articulated each of these sonata-form functions and some of their subsections with a brief Italian: ritardando (deceleration) or Italian: calando (deceleration and quieting).
Brown described the opening as "almost strictly German: [[Klangfarbenmelodie]] ... pitch and color". Webern sketched the first several bars painstakingly through many successive iterations, and the opening has been compared to that of Mahler's Symphony No. 9. Though Webern had been unable to attend the Ninth's 1912 premiere, he played through it with Alban Berg and Heinrich Jalowetz, and he wrote Arnold Schoenberg that it was "inexpressibly beautiful". Spitzer noted similarities of timbre and rhythm, describing the music of each, for horn duet, harp, and "rumbling" lower strings, as "evocative of natural expanse". Julian Johnson agreed with Spitzer, noting their similar tempo indications—Webern's Ruhig schreitend (Calmly paced) and Mahler's Andante comodo—as well as the allusion to walking. Though Webern often used the indication ruhig (or its variants), he frequently did so in music he associated with personal loss and landscapes.
In terms of motives, Stroh argued that the opening horn fanfare undergoes diminution (partly by acciaccature), transposition, and further transformation:
Dora A. Hanninen noted Webern's fairly plain realization of tone-row structure here in tetrachords. She wagered that these tetrachords would be heard, at least in the main (melodic) canon, by almost anyone listening for them (notwithstanding Webern's pitch inversions, timbral changes, and repeated rhythms and articulations, she noted). For Brown, Webern's tetrachordal writing here seemed "almost ... to contradict the row's underlying [trichordal] structure".
Döhl (1967) followed Wallace C. McKenzie (1960) in noting that the pitch space of Webern's entire exposition has fixed register. The twelve pitch classes are fixed on thirteen pitches with an axis of symmetry at A3, the first pitch of the symphony. As the tritone of A, pitch class E appears as E4 or E3, revolving symmetrically around A3. (In the music, Webern does not double E at the octave.) The intervals generally narrow in the middle register of this space. In this sense, Webern's use of fixed register departs from the convention of voicing tones high above the bass (like overtones above the fundamental tone in the harmonic series, from which Döhl held such conventional voicing derives). Döhl mused that Webern's concentrically fixed pitches formed something of a "constellation" with its own internal relations, thus configured, whereas previously a given tonic would have exerted "gravitational" pull.
Siegfried Borris (1966) conceived of this as "two symmetrically interlocking columns of sound" in fourths around A3:
Borris emphasized that this rotation was audible in that A3 and F4, the first two pitches of the opening horn fanfare, are subsequently related to D major via recurring pitches D2, G2, and C3 as fixed in the bass. The repetition of the exposition in fixed register throughout only amplifies this, he continued. He argued that this "rotating sound space", i.e., the fixed rotation of pitches within a relatively narrow register (from D2 to E5), contributed to the sense of calm and stability in the exposition.
In m. 13, Oliver Fürbeth heard a D-major sonority in the compound major third between the cellos' D2 and the violas' F4 (confirmed by the E4 harp harmonic and the second horn's and cellos' iterations of C4). The major third stands out relative to its surrounding sevenths and ninths, Fürbeth wrote, and is further emphasized given the two-part texture and the higher position of the F relative to low position of the D. Moreover, he argued, the F on the downbeat of m. 13 is the last of three notes assigned to the violas in the longest phrase in the exposition (m. 11–13): after a crescendo on E, it is approached by an F on the preceding upbeat.
In the development, the registral range is expanded from three octaves and two semitones to four and a half octaves in the development, and the horns play only four notes. Brown noted that the melodic lines begin to arc more sharply and that dynamic markings increase. Bailey Puffett held that the development related less musically than conceptually to the exposition. But Stroh heard the transformation of an additional variant from the exposition in the clarinet figure opening the development, and held that passages mm. 9–13 and mm. 25b–28 were motivically linked:
Like Fürbeth, Stroh noticed "tonale Einschläge" ("tonal effects"), but only in the development (C-major sonority, mm. 27 ff). Though the end of a development was traditionally climactic in many nineteenth-century symphonies, Webern's ends merely with one eighth note (m. 45) scored for the harp at on the highest pitch of the entire movement.
Relative to that of the exposition, the music of the recapitulation is generally louder, quicker, and higher in pitch. It is more melodically fragmented, ornamented (with acciaccature), registrally expansive (by a tritone), rhythmically erratic, and timbrally varied (with harmonics and mutes) despite sharing the same tone-row structure. Webern's use of arching lines and more frequent dynamic markings in the development intensifies in the recapitulation, heightening the expressivity of the music. Stroh heard the recapitulation as thematically linked to the opening:
In the stretto coda, the texture becomes leaner. There are quick, shifting figures of five to three eighth notes (not including acciaccature), mostly in the violins and violas. The horns play one note each. The motivic material is reduced to a wisp of two notes and finally one muted tone marked with a Italian: diminuendo|italics=no, like the Italian: morendo ending of many nineteenth-century slow movements.
The second movement comprises nine small, continuous sections replete with palindromes:
Each of these is eleven measures long, for a total of 99 measures. The theme is fragmented into motives and the variation developmental. Bailey Puffett noted not only the use of dynamics, register, rhythm, tempi, texture, and timbre for Classical forms of surface-level variation, but also the use of more developmental devices like inversion and retrograde, augmentation and diminution, imitation, and some octave displacement. All of the variations are canons.
Danielle Hood described the fourth variation, identified by Webern as the midpoint, as a "waltz/German: Ländler double". In the fifth variation's cowbell-like harp octaves and close, stomping string dissonances, Theodor W. Adorno heard the "soulful sound" of the German: [[Almabtrieb]], delighting Webern. Fürbeth found Webern's solo violin melody and its retrograde response at the end of the symphony (mm. 91–97) not unlike Mahler's solo violin melody and its retrograde motion at the end of the Ninth's first movement (zögernd, mm. 444–446). Neither are merely palindromes, Fürbeth wrote, but gestures of interiority and closure, in that both melodies are texturally exposed by sparse accompaniment and foregrounded by pauses.
The reported duration of Webern's Symphony varies substantially from approximately ten to perhaps as many as twenty minutes. The published score gives a duration of ten minutes. Webern wrote Schoenberg in September 1928 estimating "almost a quarter of an hour" for the first movement and "about six minutes" for the second, or "about twenty minutes of music" in total. Conductors' approaches have varied significantly, but Webern's ideas about his music having a longer duration or slower tempi have generally not been realized in practice. This problem is not exclusive to the Symphony, as Webern gave conductor Edward Clark estimates of seventeen minutes for the Op. 5 arrangement and ten minutes for the Op. 10 orchestral pieces, total durations nearly twice as long as what is the case in most performances.
Alexander Smallens and the Orchestra of the League of Composers gave the world premiere at New York's Town Hall on 18 December 1929, meeting jeers. The same month, Webern wrote to Schoenberg that Otto Klemperer, Hermann Scherchen, and Leopold Stokowski had all expressed interest.
At the Vienna Konzerthaus (1930), Webern himself conducted an ensemble including the Kolisch Quartet and members of the Wiener Staatsoper, flanking his Symphony with Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 2 (Eduard Steuermann, piano) and Beethoven's Septet. wrote in the Neue Freie Presse that "barbaric ... soullessness is foreign [to Webern]", contrasting him with Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and the Ernst Krenek of German: [[Jonny spielt auf]].
Listeners laughed in Berlin (April 1931), where Klemperer conducted. He had only two weeks to prepare. Heinz Tietjen was defunding the Krolloper ostensibly for its poorly attended modernist repertoire.
Scherchen conducted the London premiere at the summer 1931 International Society for Contemporary Music Festival. Prompted by Schoenberg, Edward Clark had invited Webern to conduct. Webern declined, citing travel fatigue and his desire to focus on composition. There was also low remuneration, recent bad press, and as noted in his diary earlier that year: "Need for quiet and reflection."
Klemperer programmed the Symphony again in 1936 Vienna, likely on Schoenberg's advice, but did not adhere to Webern's desired performance practice.
Luigi Dallapiccola studied Schoenberg's and Webern's music especially after World War II. He carefully read and published a review of René Leibowitz's Schoenberg et son école, which described Webern's techniques in the Symphony, like its double-inverted canons and palindromes. Dallapiccola's subsequent music featured axial symmetry, canons, and four-part tone-row writing likely modeled in part on Webern's Symphony. The Goethe-Lieder (1953) have palindromes. An Mathilde (1954) features a tone-row form in each of four voices. Parole di San Paolo (1964) and the second movement of Webern's Symphony both deploy a rest or fermata at their center (m. 50 in both cases).
Karel Goeyvaerts noted proto-serial schemes of articulations, dynamics, and register, but not time (meter, rhythm, or tempo) in Webern's Symphony. George Rochberg noted the "objectified, mensural" relation of pitch and time in Webern's later instrumental French: œuvre as a whole. Karlheinz Stockhausen applied the Symphony's specific row in Klavierstücke VII (1954–1955), IX (1954, rev. 1961), and X (1954, rev. 1961).