• Source: Symphony (Webern)

Anton Webern's Symphony, Op. 21 (1927–1928), his first twelve-tone orchestral work, is 10–20-minute two-movement chamber or miniature symphony. It is known for its Alpine topics, abstraction, and intricate musical form, including some fixed register. The influence of Gustav Mahler is clear from the start. Alexander Smallens conducted the world premiere at New York's Town Hall on 18 December 1929.




Historical background


Webern, an alpinist, enjoyed the quiet otherworldliness of the high mountains, viewing these landscapes in spiritual or utopian terms ("up there" near "the heavens"). Such topics appear in many of his works. He drew on Mahler's portrayal of natural spaciousness and stillness in his own music.
During the years Webern wrote his symphony (1927–1928), he visited his childhood home and the mountains with friends and family. In November 1927, he and physician-patron Norbert Schwarzmann attempted a nighttime ascent of the Hochschwab but were turned back by weather. In May 1928, he and Rudolf Ploderer attempted the Schneealpe (his favorite mountain) in the snow. He reattempted it in July, reaching the summit with his wife Wilhelmine and their children. Then they celebrated his cousin Ernst Diez's birthday in Vordernberg and visited his sisters Maria and Rosa in Klagenfurt. He also visited their former country estate, the Preglhof, and family grave sites in Annabichl (near Klagenfurt) and in Schwabegg (within Neuhaus, Carinthia), collecting and pressing flowers from the cemetery grounds and taking photos as souvenirs. In August, he, his thirteen-year-old son Peter, and Ploderer climbed the Hochschwab, overnighting in the Schiestlhaus and spotting many mountain goats.
With his Symphony done, Webern wrote on 6 August 1928 to his friend, the poet and artist Hildegard Jone, who he had known for two years, and with whom he looked forward to collaborating, that he believed the essence of art was to distill a thought down to its purest form—making it as clear and simple as possible. He agreed with Jone that "progress is made ... inwards", an orientation that Julian Johnson contextualized with reference to Wilhelm Worringer's definition of expressionism as "an art in which the mind declares its autonomy over against the experience of nature". Webern added, "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 criticized neoclassicism for mimicking styles without proper understanding, asserting that Schoenberg's, Berg's, and his music was "most primary and personal". He explained that "[we] fulfill [what] remains ... the same through our means".




Orchestration


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 the League to give the world premiere of the symphony, but he wrote in his diary: "Better with multiple strings." The published score indicates solo and 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 and contemporaneous art and music. The clarinet and its antecedents were used prominently to evoke these associations in Viennese classical or popular music, as in Schrammelmusik, the minuet of Mozart's Symphony No. 39, or Schubert's Hirtenmelodien and 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.
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", with their history of natural, valveless fifths and octaves. 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 Più andante) 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.




Form and tone row


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:
"P→" signifies the forwards direction to read the row's prime form. "←R" signifies the backwards direction to read the row's retrograde form.

"I→" signifies the upside-down direction to read the row's inverted form. "RI→" signifies both the backwards and upside-down direction to read the row's retrograde inverted form.

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]:




Movements


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.




= I. Ruhig schreitend

=
The first movement consists of four lines in a double canon (by inversion) with frequent palindromes, demonstrating Webern's early music studies. Anne C. Shreffler noted Webern's reliance on linear, song-like writing, an observation sometimes made of Mahler. One canon features Ländler-like lilting melodic repetition on 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 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 ritardando (deceleration) or calando (deceleration and quieting).



Exposition, or 𝄆 A 𝄇

Brown described the opening as "almost strictly 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:

Opening fanfare, mm. 1–4, horn II only

First variant, mm. 6–8, clarinet only

Figure with acciaccatura, mm. 14–15, violin I only

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 A♮3, the first pitch of the symphony. Pitch class E♭ appears as E♭3 or 4 (enharmonically D♯3 or 4), revolving symmetrically around A♮3 as its tritone. (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.

Concentric conception of pitches fixed in register around A♮3 in intervals during mm. 1–25

Siegfried Borris (1966) conceived of this as "two symmetrically interlocking columns of sound" in fourths around A♮3. Borris emphasized that this rotation was audible in that A♮3 and F♯4, the first two pitches of the opening horn fanfare, are subsequently related to D major via recurring pitches D♮2, G♮2, and C♮3 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 D♮2 to E♮5), contributed to the sense of calm and stability in the exposition.

Symmetric conception of pitches fixed in register around A♮3 in fourths during mm. 1–25

In m. 13, Oliver Fürbeth heard a D-major sonority in the compound major third between the cellos' D♮2 and the violas' F♯4 (confirmed by the E♮4 harp harmonic and the second horn's and cellos' iterations of C♯4). 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 length of the exposition (m. 11–13): after a crescendo on E♮, it is approached by an F♮ on the preceding upbeat.

D-major sonority in context as described by Oliver Fürbeth, mm. 10.75–13, four-part reduction

Johnson and Derrick Puffett compared and contrasted this symmetrical, twelve-tone unified field, unfolding in perfect fourths from its D♮2 pedal point, with the slowly unfolded D-major triad that both opens and closes Webern's idyll Im Sommerwind. They also linked it to the open-octave pedal (marked "wie ein Naturlaut") at the opening of Mahler's Symphony No. 1, and to the elaborated tonic symbolizing nature in the Prelude to Wagner's Das Rheingold. Within sections of harmonically (vertically) fixed register, Webern's Symphony is melodically "bounded only by the horizon" in Johnson's conceptual metaphor for its horizontal elaboration, recalling Mahler's linear, lyrical counterpoint. (By contrast, Webern's Sommerwind traverses pitch space via chord progressions.)
Bailey Puffett acknowledged Webern's interest in "two-dimensional [horizontal and vertical, or melodic and harmonic] synthesis", but she viewed most of his twelve-tone music as essentially melodic, not merely in presentation. She formed this view partly from studying some of Webern's sketches. Therefore, she explained, she did not treat the harmonic element of Webern's twelve-tone music. For his part, Webern said that he and Schoenberg, in trying to save tonality, "broke its neck".
Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno's concept of "second nature", Johnson argued that Webern's œuvre demonstrated a transformation of the prior representation of nature found in earlier music by reinterpreting musical space and time. Besides the Symphony's fixed register, its long durations, frequent rests, and slow tempo also intensify the stillness of the music make its textures seem more open, Johnson wrote. In this way, Johnson explained, Webern continued to portray the "stilling of time" and "corresponding sense of spaciousness" of his beloved mountains, but only more abstractly than before. Enthralled by the world "up there", Webern expressed from a young age his desire for music to evoke similar feelings. He persisted in this aspiration, as he expressed to Berg in a letter from Oct. 1925.



Development – Recapitulation, or 𝄆 B A' 𝄇




= Development, or 𝄆 B –
=
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 he held that passages mm. 9–13 and mm. 25b–28 were motivically linked:

Additional variant, mm. 9–10, cello only

Development figure, mm. 25b–28, clarinet and cello only

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 ppp on the highest pitch of the entire movement.



= Recapitulation, or – A' 𝄇
=
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; for example, the reprise theme and the opening horn fanfare consist of a sequence of identical pitch classes:

Reprise theme, mm. 42b–45, viola only

In the stretto coda, the texture becomes leaner. There are quick, shifting eighth-note figures of three to five pitches each (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 diminuendo, like the morendo ending of many nineteenth-century slow movements.




= II. Variationen

=
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/Ländler double". In the fifth variation's cowbell-like harp octaves and close, stomping string dissonances, Adorno heard the "soulful sound" of the 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.




Tempo and total duration


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.




Reception






= Premieres

=
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. Josef Reitler 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 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.




= Composers

=
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 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).




Notes






References






Bibliography






Further reading


Pace, Ian. 2022. "New Music: Performance Institutions and Practices." In The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance, Vol. 1, ed. Gary E. McPherson, 396-455. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-190056-31-5 (online). ISBN 978-0-190056-28-5 (print). doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190056285.013.19.




External links


Symphony: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
Symphony at AllMusic

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• Symphony (Webern)
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