Composers: Pianissimo Prophet

Some composers challenge posterity with a roar. Others woo it with seductive languor or graceful wit. Austrian Composer Anton Webern conjured it with a whisper. A shy, intense man who physically shrank from noise, he wrote spare, slight pieces filled with directions like “scarcely audible” and “dying away.” Such was the understated economy of his scores that his life’s work amounts to a bare three hours of playing time. Nearly all of his compositions take less than ten minutes to perform. He turned out works containing as much silence as music, and that was how an indifferent world received them—with silence.

Yet, today, the man whom the Viennese called “the master of pianissimo” has a resounding worldwide reputation. “Probably,” says Conductor Robert Craft, “there isn’t a composer writing now, or hardly a composition written—even electronic—in which his influence can’t be traced.”

This year, Dartmouth College’s Congregation of the Arts, a summer program whose concerts normally concentrate on works of living composers, took the unusual step of devoting seven days to Webern. The performances demonstrated how much of Webern’s vocabulary has passed into the everyday musical language. As such, they sometimes sounded like a lexicon of contemporary clichés: jagged leaps of melody, pointillistic instrumental textures, dryly intellectual twelve-tone patterns. At other times they underlined qualities in Webern’s music that have remained fresh and inimitable to this day: delicacy, astringent lyricism, nearly inhuman purity of craftsmanship.

Logical Extremes. Born of a solid landowner family in 1883, Webern was trained as a musicologist at the University of Vienna. In 1904, while still a student, he met Arnold Schoenberg and became his lifelong friend and disciple in the cause of overthrowing tonal music. In many areas Webern took Schoenberg’s innovations and carried them to logical extremes. When Schoenberg dissolved traditional tonality but continued to work with late Romantic forms, Webern dissolved those too. He obliterated vertical harmonies, broke up melodies into one-or two-note fragments for each instrument and swept away all sense of development and climax. “Once stated,” he said, “a theme has expressed all it has to say.” In Five Pieces for orchestra and Six Bagatelles for string quartet (both 1913), his notes are scattered like stars in the night sky: tiny fire points in an icy black void.

When Schoenberg discovered how to organize atonal music by creating a new “scale” for each composition—an arbitrarily arranged series of the twelve chromatic tones—Webern extended the serial principle to such areas as rhythm and dynamics. Here he approached a state of total abstraction in which a piece would unfold entirely in accordance with the rules invented for it in advance by the composer, much as a computer responds to its mathematical programming.

After the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, Webern’s works were banned as “cultural bolshevism” and his activities were severely restricted. He withdrew more and more completely into mystical seclusion, poring over volumes of poetry and developing a passionate interest in that plant life around his suburban Vienna home. His calm perseverance as a composer in the face of ridicule and neglect gave him a saintly aura. To see him touch a single note on the piano, said Swiss Conductor Ernest Ansermet, was to see a man in an act of devotion.

His life ended in an explosion of violence. One night in 1945, while visiting his son-in-law at the Austrian resort of Mittersill, he stepped outdoors for a cigar, unaware that U.S. occupation forces were at that moment closing in on the house to arrest his son-in-law for black-market activities. Somehow he encountered a U.S. soldier in the dark. He was shot, staggered inside and died. He was 61.*

Atonality for Children. Within a decade of his death, Webern’s music was enthusiastically taken up not only by established masters like Igor Stravinsky but also by a whole generation of postwar avantgardists, particularly in Europe. Now the question that remains for the future is how well it will stand up in its own right. “His influence,” suggests U.S. Composer Aaron Copland, “may turn out to be far greater than the intrinsic value of his music, which may some day seem too mannered in style and too limited in scope.” Webern himself did not think so. “In fifty years at the most,” he told a friend shortly before his death, “everyone will experience this music as their innate music. Yes, even for children it will be accessible. People will sing it.”

*Oddly, composers as a group seem to be unusually prone to bizarre deaths. Among others: Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) died of gangrene after smashing his foot with a heavy, canelike conductor’s baton while leading an orchestra; Charles Valentin-Alkan (1813-1888) toppled a bookcase over on himself while reaching for a copy of the Talmud; Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) came down with cholera after drinking a glass of tap water; and Wallingford Riegger (1885-1961) suffered fatal brain damage when he became entangled in the leashes of two fighting dogs and fell on a sidewalk.