I’m Listening to Everything by Anton Webern
September 15, 2013
On this day (September 15) in 1945, after a stressful day, Anton Webern stepped outside his home in Salzburg to smoke a cigar. At the time, American forces were occupying the city to keep the peace following the end of WWII. When Webern stepped out of his home to smoke it was 45 minutes before the evening curfew was to go into effect. Unfortunately an American soldier mistakenly thought the curfew had already started and shot Webern to death. Afterwards, the soldier, realizing his mistake, was overcome with grief and less than ten years later, died of alcoholism. To commemorate Webern’s death, I’d like to look at one of his earlier works.
TITLE: Passacaglia für großes Orchester, op. 1
DESCRIPTION OF THE PIECE:
The title of this piece indicates that it is using a somewhat restrictive Baroque form, that of the passacaglia. A passacaglia is almost the same thing as a ground bass, but with some more freedom (essentially). Any passacaglia has a bass line that repeats over and over again. So in this piece, there are eight notes stated at the beginning of the piece, then those eight notes are repeated over and over again throughout the piece. If you listen to the first eight notes a bunch of times before you listen to the rest of the piece, you’ll be able to hear that basic bass line woven into every single variation for the rest of the piece. Here is a clip of the first eight notes along with the score showing the first eight notes:
Through all the repetitions in this piece, you should be able to hear those eight notes. Here’s the second statement of those eight notes. You can already hear how interesting Webern’s orchestrations are.
I find it really awesome that Webern has taken a fairly conventional form (from the Baroque Era) and made it crazily interesting with enough dissonance to make it clearly “Modern” but not enough dissonance to offend listeners! I love it.
HIGHLIGHT: The last few variations—so inventive and wild, yet still identifiable!
Here’s one of them:
Here’s a YouTube link of the whole piece. Please listen to it and try to follow along with the numerous repetitions of the bass line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VMIhkU_XpQ
WHAT’S LEFT TO LISTEN TO BY WEBERN?: Not as much as a lot of other composers. Webern tended to bury/hide compositions he didn’t feel were near-perfect, so there are only 31 pieces of his that have opus numbers and less than that that do not have opus numbers. Plus, one of his compositional characteristics for much of his career was brevity. As a result, a lot of his pieces are extremely short. It would not take me too long to make my way through his entire compositional output. And I plan to do it!