Music: Haunting Viennese

During a performance some years ago of Anton Webern’s String Trio, the cellist of the London Philharmonic Trio rose abruptly and stalked off stage with the words: “I can’t play this thing.”

Few would guess that “this thing”—a craggily concentrated twelve-tone composition that the cellist called “a nightmare and not music at all, but mathematics” —was the work of a Viennese who grew to musical maturity when Johann Strauss had barely laid down his fiddle. Turn-of-the-century Austria led a double life: outwardly it was a gilded castle, but in the basement a fascinating and tormented crew of visionaries was at work, men who could see the era’s inner decay—Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud. In that company belonged Anton Webern, who led a double life too: popular as a first-rate conductor of Schubert and Strauss, he spent every minute of his spare time, as a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, destroying tonality.

Little known in the U.S., Webern is now being introduced to Americans in an ambitious four-LP Columbia album of his complete work: 33 compositions ranging in recorded length from one minute 45 seconds to eleven minutes 38 seconds.

Weird Death. Shy and scholarly, Anton von Webern (in his later years he dropped the prefix of nobility) lived most of his life in semi-retirement in Modling, a pretty, bourgeois suburb of Vienna. By the 1920s atonality had given rise to its own small cult, with Anton Webern as a leading prophet (another: his friend Alban Berg). Then the Nazis banned Webern’s work as “cultural Bolshevism,” and to support his family he took a job proofreading in a Viennese publishing house.

Long derided by the critics, ignored by the general public, he went his own way, carefully honing his spare music with excruciating attention to detail (once, when he was asked to conduct Berg’s Violin Concerto, he devoted two full rehearsals to preparing the first eight bars). His death was as weird as a note from his own music. One night in 1945, at the Austrian mountain resort of Mittersill, Webern stepped into the street for a cigarette, was staggered by a volley of shots and died a few hours later. Never officially explained, his death has generally been blamed on an unknown, trigger-itchy soldier of the U.S. occupation forces, who fired when Webern failed to respond to challenge.

Strange World. Even before his death, Webern earned the extravagant admiration of his more famous contemporaries (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ansermet), later became a model for a whole postwar generation of young Western European composers, e.g., Pierre Boulez. Olivier Messiaen. Conductor Robert Craft, a Stravinsky protege who made Columbia’s sonically brilliant album, concedes that Webern is often as difficult to listen to as he was to record—a single three-minute, 13-second piece took 50 hours of rehearsal time. Anxious to strip his music to the barest, unrhetorical essentials, Webern indulged in angular, jumping melodies, subtle scoring effects and impressionistic, unrelated bits and scraps of themes.

In his most concentrated works (e.g., Five Pieces for orchestra, Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Three Small Pieces for cello and piano), Webern pulverized melody, harmony and rhythm. Schoenberg said that these pieces packed the art of “a whole novel in a single sigh.” The result is music that drones at times with shrill insect insistence, rises to jagged, shrieking climaxes, lapses in midphrase into sudden silences that form a weird counterpoint to sound. Most listeners will be more attracted to Webern’s songs, based on such idyllic poems as Goethe’s The Perfect Match (“A flowerbell blossomed early from the ground in lovely bloom”).

This is no album to be listened to all at once, or to be judged on first hearing. But after a while there emerges from Webern’s works a kind of rhythmic logic all his own. There are the same echoes of a distorted reality that characterize Kafka —the sound of church bells (or is it thunder?), snatches of bugles and drums (but what living army ever marched to such a beat?), or a sudden hop and skip, as of a fragmented polka (but no belle ever danced to such measures).