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Anton von Webern's Funf Satze, Five Movements for String Quartet
written in 1909, is the case of a composer rebelling
against length itself. For example, against such works as
Mahler's 9th Symphony lasting an hour and twenty minutes,
or a Wagner opera four hours in duration.
Webern's Five Movements boil everything he had to say down to mere seconds
or minutes rather than hours. This was a new and highly evocative world
of expression in which bits and pieces of sound scream or whisper and
violent extremes of time and space envelope the listener.
And all of this set in the new Schoenbergian suspension
insisted that his pupils have an intimate knowledge
of traditional harmony and structure, as he did, before embarking on their
own paths as composers. Yet, to Schoenberg's credit, neither Webern
nor Alban Berg, his most renowned students, composed works sounding remotely like his.
Webern's Five Movements shrink music into miniature gasps and sighs, strange effects,
violent outbursts, and evocative whispers. In the first movement, Heftigt bewegt,
strongly moved, Webern asks for extremes of loudness and softness, quirky rhythms,
and bizarre effects- yet in a carefully controlled world.
The second movement, Sehr langsam, very slow, is muted and as if seen
through a semi-transparent veil, with instructions such as "especially tender"
and "hardly audible". The third movement, Sehr bewegt, "very moving", begins with
restless, almost frantic heartbeats in the cello, abrupt
hissing sounds from the other instruments, and manic outbursts of sound that
get louder and faster before exploding in a single
last note. All the movements are short but this one tells a fascinating story
in hardly more than 30 seconds. By contrast, the fourth movement,
Sehr langsm, "very slow", creates an eerie and
intimate atmosphere before ending with seven fleeting
notes in the second violin that disappear into thin air. Poof.
The last movement, In zarter bewegung, in tender movement, begins slowly,
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Not only had we in the Guarneri Quartet never played Webern's Five Movements before,
but also never anything remotely like it. This was music that defied traditional
length and structure but also customary string technique.
There was col legno- playing with the wood
rather than the hair of the bow in order to produce a ghostly sound,
playing close to the bridge for a hoarse, whistling effect, pizzicato- the plucking
of strings rather than bowing, and muting the bridge to create a more covered
and atmospheric effect. We had to learn how to dole out expression
in minute amounts, explode for an instant when necessary, create bizarre effects
and unexpected rhythms, and just as quickly express the most tender and soft
sounds imaginable. This was Webern's strange world in miniature- dazzling,
moving, transparent- and reminiscent of the Swiss painter Paul Klee's
implausible abstract figures inhabiting a space that can only
exist in our dreams.
Webern's Five Movements, Op. 5,
reveal a uniquely different concept for a string quartet.
Significantly impacted by his mother's death in 1906, Webern relates this music
to his loss. Instead of the traditional notion of four or even five sizable movements,
Webern takes us into the world of the miniature,
where the listener experiences emotional extremes in about 8 minutes, according to his estimate.
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Also composed without a key, Webern takes texture into a realm
of distilled and concentrated order. For example, a dramatic flourish of many notes
by another composer, would take the form of only a few
for Webern - the beginning, middle and end notes.
The spaces in between the sparsely displayed notes
would be laden with expressive intent. As the writer Lucy Miller once described
this piece, "It is as though the genre of the
string quartet had imploded to its very minimum,
as though form and structure had been so condensed that only
the essences remained." As for classical form, there are only
remnants of association, hence the more generic title
"Five Movements". In the first movement, there is a compressed sonata form
architecture at work, in which a contrast of first and second themes is no
longer achieved by key area or emotion, but rather by the extreme contrast of
dynamics, register, and tempo. The second movement has an "adagio"
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with only one momentary outburst. Like other famous quartet finales
in cyclical form, this last movement also recalls materials
from previous movements, while presenting
its own hushed chords and melodic bits, but the references to past movements
are extraordinarily concise. The music simply dissolves away into tiny
expressive wisps. As Arnold previously shared, Webern
was known for his use of "extended techniques". He used a sound palette that includes
playing at the bridge, indicated by the words "am steg",
the use of the wood part of the bow,
which is called "col legno", and plucked strings,
or pizzicatos. Let's listen to Movement 3,
the most concise of the set, where you can hear these techniques
as well as the concentrated nature
of the writing on display.
[MUSIC]
Arnold SteinhardtPerformance Faculty
Dr. Mia ChungInstructor of Interpretive Analysis
