Anton Webern - Symphony Op. 21 (1927-28)

Anton Webern (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor. Along with his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern comprised the core among those within and more peripheral to the circle of the Second Viennese School, including Ernst Krenek and Theodor W. Adorno. As an exponent of atonality and twelve-tone technique, Webern exerted influence on contemporaries Luigi Dallapiccola, Křenek, and even Schoenberg himself. As tutor Webern guided and variously influenced Arnold Elston, Frederick Dorian (Friederich Deutsch), Fré Focke, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Philipp Herschkowitz, René Leibowitz, Humphrey Searle, Leopold Spinner, and Stefan Wolpe.

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Symphony Op. 21 (1927-28)

1. Ruhig schreitend (0:00)
2. Variationen (6:03)

Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli

Description by Alexander Carpenter [-]
The Symphony, Op. 21, was the first large-scale orchestral work Webern had written since the Five Pieces, Op. 10, 15 years earlier. The work marks the beginning of a period of extreme compression in Webern's music. Dedicated to his daughter Christine, the Symphony is a work of severe economy and restrained expression. Its symmetrical structure and pointillistic texture are quintessential hallmarks of Webern's mature compositional style.

Scored for clarinet, bass clarinet, two horns, harp, first and second violins, viola, and cello, the Symphony is widely regarded as a masterpiece in miniature: Webern's teacher and mentor Arnold Schoenberg was astounded and moved by the work's concision. Like most of Webern's 12-tone works, the Symphony is based on a single series dominated by semitones. The work consists of two short movements. The first is in two parts -- statement and development -- and begins with a double canon in four parts; the second movement is a theme with seven variations and a coda, and also includes the use of canon.

The Symphony is perhaps most remarkable for its use of symmetry, which in some quarters has stirred accusations against Webern of a certain excessive pedantry. That symmetry takes several forms, from the work's palindromic series to the canonic variations that work in both directions from the exact center of the piece outwards. The astute listener can spend a lifetime hearing an intricate web of such structural correlations within the Symphony, which is a sort of super palindrome.

[tomfurgas]

This is the work that the NY Philharmonic performed at a concert after which John Cage and Morton Feldman met (in the lobby of the auditorium after the performance). They had both stepped out simultaneously to avoid hearing the Rachmaninoff work that was on the program after it. They met in the lobby and introduced themselves, becoming fast friends when they found they were both composers with similar interests.

[Giuseppe_Zampetti]

The more I grow older, the more I start to appreciate Webern. He is unrightfully treated as coldhearted one, and yet he's the only one who uses the twelve tone in a heartly manner.

[gastonarevalo]

Such a calm and mysterious expression, with hints of tension here and there. This is music to live in.

[postiepaul]

I love Webern. Unfortunately he doesn’t get much recognition. This is simply beautiful.

[stueystuey]

I have listened to this opus for many many years and still find it enthralling captivating etc. i dont have to know how it does what it does it just does and that's enough.

[NovicebutPassionate]

"The more binding art is to itself, the richer, denser, and more unified its works, the more it tends toward affirmation [of whatever stamp] by suggesting that its own qualities are those of a world existing in itself beyond art." Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno, Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, University of Minnesota Press, Ninth printing, 2020, P. 160.

[isaM]

So many feelings in one music. I am very "emotionaly influenced" by music and oh my god, wasn't this something. Loneliness, Agony, unsettlement, anxiety, fear, I almost cried in the last bit. This aching feeling in my heart, hard to breathe.
It's a very... weird, feeling. A very interesting experience. I loved it. Music that moves your soul is the best.

[udol.]

so schön, wohltuend, in dieser hyper-aufgeregten Zeit einmal etwas tragendes, solides, in sich geschlossenes und daher "stimmiges" zu hören. Was der Meister sich da vor 90 Jahren getraut hat... dem kommen viele zeitgenössische Komponisten nicht mal im Ansatz nach. Aus einer kompositorischen Beschränkung solch zauberhafte und verzaubernde Musik entwickeln zu können... grosse, ganz grosse Kunst.

[StephenGrew]

So beautiful! This is the thing I'm intensely pre occupied with, the varying combinations of austerity in music, otherworldly Ness in Nature, space, oblique Ness and the vague emotional movement toward lyricism. Been working with this all my life, now in my sixties.🎹☺️

[brunosipavicius]

It's like hearing Klee most abstract but still lyrical works made in Bauhaus....I'm loving Brazil

[patrickkeenan]

This joint is straight flames. It's a little known fact that after dropping Opus 21 on the clubs of Vienna, Webern started work on a Collab with Mobb Deep. A limited run of white labels was released with Webern spitting 12 tone rhymes under the pseudonym Spidah Webz. Unfortunately the mid 90s wasn't ready for retrograde rhymes.

[hvvryijjzdkk]

6:34 Meine liebste Stelle :)
Ich liebe das Stück insgesamt. Sehr erfrischend zwischendurch Webern zu hören und auf meinem Mozart der Jugend Schönberg zu verzichten.

[erroll]

Extremely elegant. For me, a pointillistic opium dream of shards of light piercing through pitch black darkness. The energy curves and "rhetorical traction" are masterful.

[benjamin]

Anton Webern's music feels crystalline, fragile to me. Shards and fragments appearing and disappearing again. I also think about what Thomas Pynchon wrote about him:

This rainy morning, in the quiet, it seems that Gustav's German Dialectic has come to its end. He has just had the word, all the way from Vienna along some musicians' grapevine, that Anton Webern is dead. 'Shot in May, by the Americans. Senseless, accidental if you believe in accidents — some mess cook from North Carolina, some late draftee with a.45 he hardly knew how to use, too late for WW II, but not for Webern. The excuse for raiding the house was that Webern's brother was in the black market. Who isn't? Do you know what kind of myth that's going to make in a thousand years? The young barbarians coming in to murder the Last European, standing at the far end of what'd been going on since Bach, an expansion of music's polymorphous perversity till all notes were truly equal at last....Where was there to go after Webern?'" (440-41)

[gerardbegni]

This piece is concdered by musicologists as the first one in which dodecaphonic serialism found a coherence betwwen the form and the writing. In the previous trio op; 20, Webern made use of sonata form, inherited from the tonal world. here, he uses a canonic form well in line with the serial handling.

[clarinetjo]

So beautiful, like a walk in an ethereal landscape near a small village in the german mountains !

[davidmfoxe]

Sinopoli has left us so many beautiful documents such as this.

[thanasis_milios]

Feels like Mahler's 9th being compressed to a nine minute piece, to its very skeleton.

[johnryskamp]

Bartok quotes this piece in the Concerto for Orchestra

[johnappleseed]

This piece is the perfect precursor to composers like Feldman, Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez and many more. You can hear everything from Gruppen, Marteau sans maitre to Cages number pieces and Feldman's For Phillip Guston! :)