:
Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge. —
Igor Stravinsky
Webern was not a prolific composer; just thirty-one of his compositions were published in his lifetime, and when
Pierre Boulez oversaw a project to record all of his compositions, including those without opus numbers, the results fit on just six CDs. However, his influence on later composers, and particularly on the post-war avant garde, was immense. His mature works, using
Arnold Schoenberg's twelve tone technique, have a textural clarity and emotional coolness which greatly influenced composers such as
Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and
Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Like almost every composer who had a career of any length, Webern's music changed over time. However, it is typified by very spartan textures, in which every note can be clearly heard; carefully chosen
timbres, often resulting in very detailed instructions to the performers and use of extended instrumental techniques (
flutter tonguing, col legno, and so on); wide-ranging melodic lines, often with leaps greater than an octave; and brevity: the
Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913), for instance, last about three minutes in total.
Webern's earliest works are in a late
Romantic style. They were neither published nor performed in his lifetime, though they are sometimes performed today. They include the
orchestral tone poem Im Sommerwind (1904) and the
Langsamer Satz (1905) for
string quartet.
Webern's first piece after completing his studies with Schoenberg was the
Passacaglia for orchestra (1908).
Harmonically speaking, it is a step forward into a more advanced language, and the
orchestration is somewhat more distinctive than his earlier orchestral work. However, it bears little relation to the fully mature works he is best known for today. One element that is typical is the form itself: the passacaglia is a form which dates back to the
17th century, and a distinguishing feature of Webern's later work was to be the use of traditional compositional techniques (especially
canons) and forms (the
Symphony, the
Concerto, the
String Trio and
String Quartet, and the piano and orchestral
Variations) in a modern harmonic and melodic language.
For a number of years, Webern wrote pieces which were freely
atonal, much in the style of Schoenberg's early atonal works. With the
Drei Geistliche Volkslieder (1925) he used Schoenberg's
twelve tone technique for the first time, and all his subsequent works used this technique. The
String Trio (1927) was both the first purely instrumental work using the twelve tone technique (the other pieces were
songs) and the first cast in a traditional musical form.
Webern's
tone rows are often arranged to take advantage of internal symmetries; for example, a twelve-tone row may be divisible into four groups of three pitches which are variations, such as inversions and retrogrades, of each other, thus creating
invariance. This gives Webern's work considerable motivic unity, although this is often obscured by the fragmentation of the melodic lines. This fragmentation occurs through octave displacement (using intervals greater than an octave) and by moving the line rapidly from instrument to instrument (sometimes, and somewhat erroneously, called
Klangfarbenmelodie).
Webern's last pieces seem to indicate another development in style. The two late
Cantatas, for example, use larger
ensembles than earlier pieces, last longer (No. 1 around nine minutes; No. 2 around sixteen), and are texturally somewhat denser.
