Symphony, Op. 21 was composed by Anton Webern between 1927 and 1928. It was his first twelve-tone orchestral work. The two-movement work lasts 10–20 minutes and contains Alpine topics, abstraction, and intricate musical form, including some fixed register. The Symphony was influenced by Gustav Mahler. Alexander Smallens conducted the world premiere at New York's Town Hall on 18 December 1929.
Historical background In 1926, Webern was pleading for financial assistance from his publisher, Emil Hertzka at Universal Edition (U.E.). By the end of 1927, however, he was pointing to a steady increase in performances of his works as evidence of growing recognition. Though still struggling financially, he viewed this gradual success as more meaningful than rapid fame and grew increasingly confident that his music would find its audience.
He was an alpinist whose favorite mountain was the Schneealpe, and he climbed it and the Hochschwab twice while writing the Symphony, summiting the former that July. He loved the quiet otherworldliness of the altitude and referred to these landscapes as "up there", a spiritual, utopian realm. He continued Mahler's practice of portraying Alpine stillness and spaciousness in his music.
After finishing the Symphony, Webern wrote to the poet Hildegard Jone on 6 August 1928. Replying to her suggestion that "progress is made only ", he concurred, "I understand 'Art' to mean the faculty of bringing a thought into the clearest, simplest, i.e. 'most comprehensible' form." Pointing to previous masters like Beethoven, he continued, " I have always only endeavoured to do exactly as they did: to represent as clearly as possible that which is given to me to say."
Orchestration Webern's Symphony is scored for clarinet, bass clarinet, two horns, harp, and strings without basses. Concurrently in 1928, he rescored the Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 (afterward, he wrote Alban Berg, it looked "like an old Haydn score"). The Symphony's wind section is limited to clarinets and horns. With their wide ranges and strong pastoral connections, they are often paired together. The horn is an archetypal symbol of wide Alpine space.
In the summer of 1929, the League of Composers offered him the windfall sum of $350 to premiere a chamber orchestra work by October. Unable to meet that deadline, he consulted with U.E. and offered the newly published Symphony. The League accepted, and he wrote them that the string parts, with their occasional solo passages, could be performed entirely solo or in multiples. After conducting the work himself, he wrote in his diary: "Better with multiple strings."
Tone row Webern saw variations as "the primeval form" which yields "the most comprehensive unity". He pointed to the second Netherland school's use of canons as the simplest method of variation because "everyone sings the same thing", and a great deal of material can be generated through simple methods like reversing or inverting the melody. Almost the entire Symphony is a series of canons, turning it into a kind of "essay in symmetry".
He used the same tone row for both movements. The material is even more cohesive because the second half of the row is derived from the first, a technique he relied on extensively. The first six notes (hexachord) are transposed up a diminished fifth and reversed to generate the last six notes. These symmetries are part of what make the Symphony one of the most unified works of its type. Since it is a mirrored row, there are only 24 permutations instead of the usual 48.
Symphony Op. 21 Tone Row
The tone row consists of the tetrachords [0,1,2,3] and [0,1,6,7]:
Its trichords are [0,1,3] and [0,1,4]:
Movements The symphony is in two movements: I. Ruhig schreitend (Calmly paced) II. Variationen (Variations)
Webern initially planned three movements and sketched two iterations:
Webern's first sketch for the symphony is dated November–December 1927. He finished the variations in March 1928. He wrote a canonic Adagio as the second movement that summer. He began drafting the third movement in August but quickly abandoned it. While deciding to jettison the third movement, Webern found comfort in the models of Beethoven's two-movement piano sonatas and Bach's two-movement orchestral suites. He also decided to reverse the movements, putting the adagio before the variations.
I.
The first movement consists of an inverted double canon with frequent palindromes. Webern's experience in vocal writing predisposed him to compose linear, song-like material. The first canon features lilting pastoral rhythms in the lower strings and -like horns. Webern's rhythms and orchestration for the second canon are less homogenous with ornaments, double stops, mutes, harmonics, pizzicati, and plucked harp. Eventually, the more chaotic second canon affects the character of the first. Because the fitful canon is so attenuated and broadly dispersed among the instruments and their registers, it is difficult to perceive.
Webern marshals his double canon into a rough, tempo-demarcated sonata form (exposition, mm. 1–26; development, mm. 25–44b; recapitulation, mm. 61–66). He introduces both themes simultaneously, repeats sections to recall early sonatas, and lets the second canon finish alone like a stretto. But his music often features several overlapping formal strategies, and scholars debate these labels' descriptive and explanatory power in particular.
Exposition Webern painstakingly sketched the first several bars through several iterations. They are an archetypal example of (tone-color melody). The texture is very sparse, but because of the constant timbre changes, the passage sounds dense.
The symphony's opening is evocative of Mahler's Symphony No. 9 (1912). Webern enthused to Arnold Schoenberg that Mahler's Ninth was "inexpressibly beautiful". From Mahler's opening, Webern borrowed the texture of horns, harp, and low strings designed to evoke an Alpine expanse. Both composers' tempo markings also allude to walking: Ruhig schreitend (calmly paced) and Andante comodo (comfortably walking).
The opening horn call establishes a motif that is recognizable in subsequent phrases, even as the material is transposed and accelerated.
Opening horn fanfare, mm. 1–4
First variant, mm. 6–8, clarinet
Figure with acciaccatura, mm. 14–15, violin I
The motif is so strongly established that the row's tetrachords are highlighted and quite perceptible. This emphasis is a counterpoint to the binary nature of the row.
During the exposition, Webern limits the pitch space to a fixed register. The horn's opening A is the center of a symmetrical axis that generally expands outwards in increasing intervals, beginning with chromatic minor seconds and ending with fourths. This organization of the musical space is another of the work's mirrors in that it reverses the interval relationships of the tonal overtone series.
Pitch space of the tone row centered on A (mm. 1–25)
The pitch space may also be seen as two symmetrical columns of perfect fourths around the row's initial A, bounded by the only repeated note, E, the row's terminal note. This arises largely from inversion at even index positions in the row, yielding a partition of five dyads and two singletons that may function as pitch axes.
Vertical arrangement of the tone row's pitch space (mm. 1–25)
Sketches suggest that vertical sonorities followed contrapuntal lines' trial-and-choice adjustment, and the D at the bottom of this pitch space permits recurring D-major sonorities (e.g., a major 10th D and F at m. 13). Webern's idyll Im Sommerwind centers on a slowly unfolded D-major triad.
Development Webern expands the range of the piece to four and a half octaves in the development. In fact, the development section ends on the highest note in the entire movement, a pianississimo 8th-note C in the harp (mm. 45). Webern's Fünf Geistliche Lieder also ends with a single, high, quiet harp harmonic.
Webern continues developing the opening horn motif in the development. The shape is distorted but still recognizable. Illusions of tonality also persist in the development, particularly C major beginning in m. 27.
Recapitulation
Relative to that of the exposition, the music of the recapitulation is generally louder, quicker, and higher in pitch. It is more melodically fragmented, ornamented (with acciaccature), registrally expansive (by a tritone), rhythmically erratic, and timbrally varied (with harmonics and mutes) despite sharing the same tone-row structure. The transmuted form of Webern's material is evident from the first statement of the recapitulation by the viola. It plays the same four notes the horn did to begin the piece, but their character is far removed from its atonal alpine call.
In the stretto coda, the texture becomes leaner. There are quick, shifting eighth-note figures of three to five pitches each (not including acciaccature), mostly in the violins and violas. The horns play one note each. The motivic material is reduced to a wisp of two notes and finally one muted tone marked with a diminuendo, an ending quite common in the slow movements of Romantic symphonies.
II. The second movement is a theme and variations with a coda. Webern indicates seven variations in the score, and each section is eleven bars for a total of 99 in the movement.
Unlike the relentlessly symmetrical fragmentation of the first movement, the theme of the second movement is stated entirely by the clarinet. The horns and the harp accompany by playing the theme in reverse, imitating a crab canon. All of the variations are canons. The coda is sometimes seen as an additional variation.
The fourth variation is a vague parody of the waltz and . It is also the midpoint of the entire movement. From there, Webern repeats the material in reverse. He described the movement as a double canon in retrograde motion.
The harp's ostinato in the fifth variation was an imitation of cowbells. When Theodor Adorno recognized the allusion, Webern was "extremely happy". Webern loved Mahler's use of almglocken particularly in the Nachtmusik of his Seventh Symphony. Webern's early orchestral works actually included cowbells in imitation of Mahler.
There is another echo of Mahler in the violin solo that makes the last sustained statement in Webern's Symphony. It recalls the violin solo in the closing gesture of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.
Tempo and total duration The reported duration of Webern's Symphony varies substantially from approximately ten to perhaps as many as twenty minutes. The published score gives a duration of ten minutes. Webern wrote Schoenberg in September 1928 estimating "almost a quarter of an hour" for the first movement and "about six minutes" for the second, or "about twenty minutes of music" in total.
Conductors' approaches have varied significantly, but Webern's ideas about his music having a longer duration or slower tempi have generally not been realized in practice. This problem is not exclusive to the Symphony, as Webern gave conductor Edward Clark estimates of seventeen minutes for the Op. 5 arrangement and ten minutes for the Op. 10 orchestral pieces, total durations nearly twice as long as what is the case in most performances.
Reception Performances Premiere: Smallens in New York Alexander Smallens and the Orchestra of the League of Composers gave the world premiere at New York's Town Hall on 18 December 1929, meeting jeers. The New York Times Olin Downes wrote that the "audience laughed it out of court". He never did like Webern's music and described the Symphony as "one of those whispering, clucking, picking little pieces which Webern composes when he whittles away at small and futile ideas, until he has achieved the perfect fruition of futility []". The same month, Webern wrote to Schoenberg that Otto Klemperer, Hermann Scherchen, and Leopold Stokowski had all expressed interest.
Webern in Vienna