Webern: Variations for Piano (1936)

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Webern: Variations for Piano (1936) To people at the time, Europe in 1936 was probably not so weighted with fear and foreboding as it might seem with hindsight.

1 Webern: Variations for Piano (1936) To people at the time, Europe in 1936 was probably not so weighted with fear and foreboding as it might seem with hindsight. Rather, the increasing political tension German remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and rising Nazism in depression-scarred Austria 1 coexisted with normal life, with sport and entertainment, and even with excitement and optimism over advances in science and new works of art. Two particularly notable musical masterpieces that appeared around this time were in the field of orchestral and large-ensemble music: Berg s violin concerto, premiered in April 1936, and Bartok s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, written in 1936 and premiered the following year. Both of these pieces inhabit very dark harmonic sound worlds for much of their length, but both have finales of great hope exuberance in the Bartok, in the Berg a harmonious reconciliation with death, and hope for the grieving that there can be life after bereavement. Works such as these represent a battle between tension and hope, between light and darkness, where light and hope win. Applied to the fate of 1930s Europe, to the aforementioned coexistence of political worries with human optimism, this becomes a beautiful dream not destined to be realised. Throughout this year of 1936, Anton Webern painstakingly and passionately worked on a very different masterpiece: the Variations for Piano. The piece is cast in three movements and is serial. The tone row is as follows: Interesting features of this row are a high frequency of semitones, leading to high harmonic tension, and the way in which the two halves of the row are each made up of a group of six consecutive notes. A row of such a simple hexachordal structure has the advantage that, when different forms of the row are contrapuntally combined, the degree of overlap between the corresponding halves of the row can be chosen with precision. * This is important in the second movement. 1 st movement sehr mäβig 14 mirror structures make up the movement, each created by a retrograde canon. Most of the mirrors are rhythmically strict, as in the following example, the first bars of the piece. la la chanson de la la la la la chanson de Ex. 1 Notice the smaller mirrors within the large one: in the first phrase, the right hand has a phrase from two notes to one, while the left hand mirrors the right by going from one note to two. In the next * Here are three canons by inversion with grouped hexachords: 1. No overlap: Voice 1 (A Bb B C C# D) (Eb E F F# G G#) Voice 2 (G# G F# F E Eb) (D C# C B Bb A) 2. Half overlap: Voice 1 (A Bb B C C# D) (Eb E F F# G G#) 3. Full overlap: Voice 1 (A Bb B C C# D) (Eb E F F# G G#) Voice 2 (F E Eb D C# C) (B Bb A G# G F#) Voice 2 (D C# C B Bb A) (G# G F# F E Eb) 1

phrase, the rhythms and numbers of notes played by each hand are exactly reversed. So in each quarter and each half of the horizontal mirror, there are vertical mirrors.

2 phrase, the rhythms and numbers of notes played by each hand are exactly reversed. So in each quarter and each half of the horizontal mirror, there are vertical mirrors. Four of the fourteen mirrors are not exact rhythmic mirrors, although the note order still follows a mirror pattern: Ex. 2 The special thing about these is that it is possible, without spoiling the construction, for the midway point of the tone row to come within a single chord (in strict canon, this would mean the chord were played on top of itself, resulting in octave doubling at odds with the sparse, distilled texture of the piece.) This results in more spread out chords, such as the last of bar 52 C, F, B, A which is suggestive of F major. These tantalising glimpses of tonal harmony, as opposed to its complete absence in the rest of the piece, make these moments very expressive. As well as in the phrase structure, mirror construction is evident in the ternary form of the piece. The A section is made of the slow semiquaver mirrors of the type shown in the examples. In the B section, demisemiquavers and more complex rhythmic patterns appear, while retaining the strictness of the canons. The tritone in the middle of the series is brought out in this section by longer note values and large leaps of two-and-a-half and then three-and-a-half octaves. The climax of this is a jump from F#2 to C6, which is followed by five frantic bars in which there is a note on every demisemiquaver division of the bar. This freneticism then seems to wear itself out, ending with a ritardando and diminuendo to pianissimo. The A section then returns, rhythmically and harmonically identical to its previous form, but with the role of the hands swapped (or perhaps reflected. ) This symmetry of the piece as a whole is a natural completion of the symmetrical patterns out of which it is made. The pianist who first premiered the Variations, Peter Stadlen, made in his publication Webern s ideas on the work s interpretation these comments: In the first and third sections of this Movement, the palindromes with their seemingly autark structures have often led to a neutral, and thus misleading, realisation (but in fact) a fervently lyrical mind bent on expressiveness has been at work. This is important: the movement is not beautiful in the manner of a well-cut crystal, hanging timeless in some artistic vacuum. Rather, the beauty suggested by the structures must be brought out and complemented by the pianist putting in real emotion, guided by the sighing of the two note phrases, and the anguished dissonances and harmonies which arise from the series. A dark beauty, certainly, but more effective than any attempt at a neutral realisation. The other moments which offer great expressive opportunity are those in the middle of the palindromes where a note or chord A Germanism meaning something like self-sufficient. 2

3 sounds twice in a row. In serialism with its rows of equal, different pitches, repeated notes attain a special expressive significance. This leads me to the middle movement: 2 nd movement - sehr schnell This short movement is based on canons by inversion. The transpositions of the row are chosen such that the two voices have the same note at the same time twice per canon: once near the middle, brought out by two accented, forte, three note chords of the type containing a tritone and a fourth (important in all the movements, being contained for instance within the CFBA chord mentioned earlier) and once with the second note of each voice, these two pitches being given delicate, piano staccati. The transpositions are also chosen such that these two staccato notes, which Webern reportedly instructed to be always a shade hesitant, 2 always fall on an A. Now, this might seem to contradict one of the firmest tenets of the dodecaphonism of Webern and Schoenberg: by its repetition, the note attains significance, so doesn t always giving this significance to the same note foster the creation of a tonal centre? In listening, this is not the effect, presumably because the repetitions occur within a strict serial framework. It seems that a motivic rather than a tonal centre is formed something recognisable around which the music can build itself. The rhythmic writing veers between playfulness and a brutal battering of the listener s attempt to make sense of it. The piece is written in 2/4, but because it consists entirely of groups of two quavers (the corresponding pitches in the two tone rows making up the canon), usually separated by one quaver rest, the immediate impression is of 3/8. But then occasionally, two note-pairs are separated by a crotchet rest, or by no rest, which throws the apparent pulse out of kilter. Combined with the sudden changes of dynamic between every pair, this gives an aggressive, unsettling effect, within which the hesitant repeated note is like a frail human connection trying to withstand the battering of extreme emotions. 3 rd movement flieβend The final movement was the first to be written, 3 and is the movement after which the whole piece might appear to be named: it is structured clearly as a set of variations. It seems to contain elements of both other movements: it uses some mirror structures, and similar sighing two note figures to the first movement, while the alternations from forte to piano, the tender (marked zart ) repeated notes of the second variation, and mad rhythmic play of the fourth are reminiscent of the second movement. The extended linear structure, however, distinguishes this movement from the others, and in complexity as well as length it emerges as the most important and most enigmatic of the work. The theme of the variations, though it should perhaps be called the first variation, as they are all variations on a tone row rather than any obvious motivic material, contains nevertheless the most important features for analysis of the piece. It consists of the exposition of the row three times, in the forms P 0, I 0, and R 0, forming a closed, mirror-like structure while at the same time feeling rhythmically freer and more linear than the short mirrors of the first movement, as implied by flieβend flowing. Although the serial structure is not polyphonic (see ex.3) the writing is The title of the work may, however, be a reference to what all serial music is variations on a tone row. 3

4 nevertheless in two parts, and primarily made up of two-note phrases. In music where considerations such as where notes fit into a tonal structure can be ignored, it could be argued that the most important harmony is that between just two notes the degree of tension in a single Ex. 3 interval. This is perhaps one reason why all the movements are composed primarily of two note phrases. The harmonic relationship between the notes in each phrase is mostly at the extreme of tension, the semitone (tones and minor thirds also appear.) Register is just as important as the relationship between pitch classes for how much tension an interval holds in general, for melodic intervals, the wider, the more powerful. 4 When sitting at the keyboard, it is quite easy to play the F6 and the D4 in bar 7 and think nothing of it. But the largest body of work by Webern is for the voice, 5 and even in his instrumental works I am sure he always felt, physically, the size of intervals, as one must when singing. With this in mind, a jump of over two octaves is clearly something quite extreme. And no phrase has a range of less than a major seventh. So, in both range and harmonic relation, intervallic tension is very high. There is a disparity between this tension and the beautiful purity of the single notes, which ring out alone and often uninterrupted. This purity is something no pianist can avoid, however much she or he makes the piano scream, or sigh. Each variation has one or two things that characterise it, motivically or in how it uses the series. The first is full of staccati, both soft and loud, and in it all the semitones from the series are put, as major sevenths, in the left hand, leading to frequent three-note chords of a major seventh with another note a tone or minor third away, creating a particular harmonic soundworld. The second variation alternates tender repeated notes and isolated staccati with spooky use of the chords containing a tritone and a fourth. These often invoke the ghost of tonality, most obviously in the chord F, Ab, Db, G, which occurs twice. The third variation is made up of two horizontal mirrors, in which quavers appear (previously the shortest note value is a crotchet) and the tritone-fourth chords continue to occur. This builds up with a dramatic accelerando which continues over a bar s rest to the climactic fourth variation, in which syncopation and rhythmic variation add to the high harmonic tension, building to a series of hammered, molto fortissimo staccato notes, mostly on offbeats, which end suddenly at the end of a bar, with a fermata over the bar line, leaving the listener mentally gasping for breath. The suddenly pianissimo final variation, marked wieder ruhig (calm again), uses the same transpositions of the row as the theme, along with an extra two. Unlike the theme, however, it uses mostly three-note chords, both the major-seventh and third type that characterised the first variation, and the tritone and fourth type introduced in the second. In fact, the last variation contains something from all the others it has mirror structures like the third, and, like the fourth, syncopation though at the crotchet rather than the quaver. This is a very beautiful structure. While each variation has uniqueness, there are enough connections to ensure unity and continuity, and the resulting shape when they are put together is the end- 4

5 weighted arch that is so satisfying, being found in many forms. Furthermore, the way that the final variation contains features of all the others gives a sense of completeness. The fascinating thing is that the harmonic tension is never resolved it is there in high levels in all the variations, forced to be by the tone row. The disparity between intervallic tension and the beauty of individual notes has already been mentioned. Combined with the disparity between constant harmonic tension and the beauty of both the small-scale serial structure and the macroscopic construction, this leads the listener to contradicting feelings of deep unease and strange satisfaction. This contradiction is a reflection on Webern himself. He was a man finding himself increasingly at odds with the musical world in October of 1936, he was deeply disappointed by a performance in Vienna of his symphony, opus 21, by a conductor who admitted he could find no way into the symphony. 6 He was uncomfortable with the Austrian politics of the time: he felt contradicting feelings about Nazism 7, being quite enthusiastic about pan-german nationalism and Hitler himself, 8 but disenchanted with propaganda and anti-semitism, from which he himself had suffered, having been (mistakenly) characterised as early as 1933 as a Jewish composer, 9 making it harder for him to hold down jobs or get commissions (by 1936 his conducting career was effectively over). 10 He even found his music hard to write the Variations took him a whole year for about 150 bars. 11 Admittedly this was on and off composition, but it is still a long way from the notes one imagines flowing from the pen of a great genius. But despite all this, in the serial method he found a pure beauty which allowed him to live with tension and disharmony and create out of them something complete, perfect, and deeply emotive. This is not the same as what Berg and Bartok did in their respective masterworks described in the first paragraph. With Webern, the completeness does not come from defeat of tension by some happier emotion. The tension is a constant, and around it all other emotions must find their way. Perhaps a reason why, after the war, a new generation of composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen and their contemporaries found such connections with Webern, 12, 13 rather than other composers more tonal, and perhaps more optimistic, is that this acceptance of unresolved tension as part of beautiful structure seemed prophetic of what an artist must do in post-war Europe, where the defeat of tension by naked hope or joy might have seemed like an unrealistic anachronism. Dan Gilchrist 1 Walsh, 1996, p Stadlen, Bailey, Brindle, 1966, p23 5 Wikipedia: list of works by Anton Webern 6 Stadlen, Krasner, Ross, Notley, Bailey, 1998, p Bailey, Boulez, 1991, p114 & 216 For example: concerto form, which leads towards the cadenza; or the halves of many baroque binary forms, where most time is spent reaching the desired key (the ascent) before a closing sequence rounds it off (the descent). 5

6 13 Hui-shan Cheng, n.d. Bibliography Kathryn Bailey, 1991 The twelve note music of Anton Webern: old forms in a new language. Kathryn Bailey, 1998 The Life of Anton Webern. Reginald Smith Brindle, 1966 Serial Composition. Pierre Boulez collection of essays, published 1991 Stephanie Hui-shan Cheng Webern s reception in the post-war era undated article on the website of the Taiwan National University of Arts. Louis Krasner interview in Fanfare magazine, 1987 Margaret Notley, 2010 Alban Berg and the Shadow of politics: documents of a troubled year. Alex Ross, 2007 The Rest is Noise: listening to the twentieth century. Peter Stadlen, 1979 Variationen fϋr Klavier: Weberns Interpretationsvorstellungen. Ben Walsh, 1996 Modern World History. Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia list of works by Anton Webern. 6

Observations and Thoughts on the Opening Phrase of Webern's Symphony Op.21. Mvt. I. by Glen Charles Halls. (for teaching purposes)

Observations and Thoughts on the Opening Phrase of Webern's Symphony Op.21. Mvt. I. by Glen Charles Halls. (for teaching purposes) This analysis is intended as a learning introduction to the work and is