3. Early aphoristic style, 1908–14.

On leaving Schoenberg's class Webern returned immediately to composing songs with piano accompaniment. He had set two poems by Richard Dehmel in 1906 and 1907; in 1908 he composed three more. He also turned his attention once more to the poetry of Stefan George. In 1908–9 he set 14 George poems, ten of which he would later publish as opp.3 and 4. Though his music had been increasingly atonal for some time prior to this, and key signatures had in several instances already been either absent or meaningless, in the George songs he finally abandoned them, and forever. These songs represent a new direction: they are quite different in many ways from the previous music (indeed, from even the roughly contemporary Dehmel songs) and are the first of a group of very short atonal works in what is usually referred to as Webern's ‘aphoristic style’. Although his earliest attempts at composition had produced relatively short pieces, 20 or 30 bars long, a few of the songs from his university years had been two or three times that length, and several of the instrumental pieces written during his study with Schoenberg were quite extended. The songs of op.3 range from 10 to 16 bars; those of op.4 are only slightly longer. Two of the four that were left over are 22 and 30 bars long, which was perhaps one reason for their being excluded from the published sets. All ten are studies in near-silence. Half of them use a dynamic range from ppp to p, with p used very sparingly; in all ten ppp is the level that predominates. They show a new compression and a new world of dissonant non-triadic chords: both were to be essential features of Webern's music from this time onwards. Registrally they cover a wide span in a brief time: the piano accompaniment in all but one of the ten published songs makes use of over five octaves, and in two of them the range extends to just short of or just over six. Textures are dense, with complex cross-rhythms and chords of up to eight different pitches, as well as the movement in octaves and octaves filled in with 3rds that had pervaded the earlier songs, but the remarkable reduction in dynamics and the non-triadic atonal nature of the vertical collections result in shimmering and quickly changing colours rather than the turgidity their appearance on the page might suggest. The same is true of the instrumental works to follow in the next few years, opp.5–11.

This was a prolific time for Webern. Besides the completion of the George songs, 1909 saw the composition of the brief and other-worldly op.5 movements for string quartet and the slightly larger-scale orchestral pieces of op.6, which he wrote as a memorial to his mother, whose death in 1906 affected him greatly; the op.7 pieces for violin and piano and the op.8 Rilke songs followed in 1910. In 1911 he wrote four of the Sechs Bagatellen for string quartet op.9 and two of the orchestral pieces of op.10. These 23 pieces, comprising his published work of 1909–11, continue on the course set by the two groups of George songs. They are increasingly minimalist in nearly every respect; they are fleeting glimpses, whispered suggestions, breaths – with George and Schoenberg – of ‘the air of another planet’. Igor Stravinsky would later write of Webern's ‘dazzling diamonds’, Schoenberg of ‘a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath’.

Schoenberg's brief description is in fact more perspicacious than it might at first appear. While comparison with a novel implies a compression of content, the image of ‘a joy’ supposes nothing of the kind. Each of these sets of tiny pieces strikes a balance between movements of two sorts: those in which the most extreme registral and dynamic differences have been condensed into a few frenzied gestures in as many bars, and those in which time and activity seem to be suspended for a few seconds. Pieces of the first sort are generally longer than those of the second and written in a quick tempo, with thick textures and impassioned activity, and extremes of register and dynamics (ppp to fff) in close proximity. Pieces of the second type are usually between eight and 14 bars long (several are over in eight or nine bars, one in only six), contain a minimum of notes (the fourth piece of op.10 consists of 28 notes, two of these expressed as a trill), and may also cover a wide registral canvas, but are confined in dynamic activity to ppp and pp (in the case of op.7 no.3 never rising above ppp). Multifarious instrumental effects – harmonics, pizzicato, spiccato, non-vibrato, col legno, am Griffbrett and am Steg in the string parts, fluttertongue in the flutes, the liberal use of mutes in all parts – abound in the pieces of both types, resulting in an eerie sound world in which timbre frequently predominates over pitch, and silence assumes a place on a par with both. A single example of the second type of piece (a joy, rather than a novel) will illustrate many of the features just discussed; the example is the fourth of the Bagatellen op.9 (ex.1).

The small number of notes in some of these pieces is probably their most striking feature when compared with the music of other composers of the time, and can be seen as a direct expression of the crisis that the Viennese triumvirate created for themselves in abandoning tonality. Webern said later of his experience when composing the bagatelles: ‘I had the feeling that when all 12 notes had gone by the piece was finished … In my sketchbook I wrote out the chromatic scale and crossed off the individual notes.’ While none of the atonal aphorisms attempt serial composition, the constant circulation of the 12 notes is a significant feature of all of them. Other characteristic traits are the preponderance of semitones and their permutations (7ths, 9ths and so on), a lack of rhythmic pulse and metric definition, single chords and short melodic figures isolated by silence on either side, continual changes of timbre, and the juxtaposition of extremes, timbrally and registrally. While long repeated-note figures and measured tremolos in which two notes alternate are surprisingly frequent, repetition of longer figures is abjured. This refusal covers imitation, sequence, variation and even motivic development. Short melodic figures may look like motifs, but they are not treated as such.

The appearance of the final work of this type was delayed by three years, during which Webern struggled with several projects, among them a stage play, Tot, and a cello sonata, in which he attempted to extend the new atonal idiom to longer forms. In summer 1914 he finally admitted defeat in this experiment and produced instead the Drei kleine Stücke op.11 for cello and piano, once again in the spare style of 1911. In the third of these pieces, entirely ppp and pp, the cello plays eight notes and the piano a three-note melody and three chords, all in or below the bass clef (fig.4). At a total of 32 bars, this opus represents the extreme of Webern's aphoristic style.

Webern, Anton