Concerto, Op.24

Etwas lebhaft

Sehr langsam

Sehr rasch

Total serialism starts here. Or, rather, it was in the first movement of Webern’s Concerto of 1934 that, twenty years later, Stockhausen claimed to have found a move towards the systematic serialisation not only of the pitches but also of other elements of music. However reasonable his analysis might be, it is highly unlikely that Webern had any such thought in mind. True, he worked out the basic series for the Concerto with mathematical precision - it consists of four groups of three notes, each containing a minor second and a major third - and in attempting to find a musical equivalent to the Latin palindrome

SATOR

AREPO

TENET

OPERA

ROTAS

(which reads the same whichever way you look at it) he was looking for an uncommonly high degree of motivic unity. But it is always a mistake to underestimate the emotional motivation of Webern’s music.

Early sketches for the Concerto, which associate each movement with a place that was dear to the composer, seem to indicate that there is some programmatic inspiration behind it. The programme may have been forgotten during the course of the composition but the colouring of the Etwas lebhaft (“fairly lively”) first movement, with its tenderly expressive middle section, is surely not a matter of systematic calculation. Its construction in three-note phrases just as surely is. The Sehr langsam (“very slow”) second movement proceeds in two-note phrases at a dynamic level somewhere between pianissimo and mezzo-piano except for one brief episode of forte just before the recapitulation. Its gently thoughtful quality is offset by a Sehr rasch (“very quick”) last movement based at first on two alternating three-note phrases, one of them in a dancing dotted rhythm. Excluded from the middle section, where pressure is applied by a diminution of the note values, the dancing motif reappears in a kind of coda at the end.

Gerald Larner

No few then six Webern works were performed at ISCM Festivals during the composer’s lifetime. He had a particularly firm supporter, of course, in Alban Berg who was a member of the jury for the Siena Festival in 1928 - “I was able to get Webern’s Trio and Zemlinsky’s last Quartet pushed through,” he wrote to his wife. “Otherwise there is nothing interesting” - and for the Oxford/London Festival in 1931 when Webern’s Symphonie, Op.21, was so controversially presented in the same programme as Gershwin’s American in Paris. The Concerto, Op.24, was performed against much political opposition at the Prague ISCM Festival in 1935. Webern’s activities as a conductor at the 1936 Festival in Barcelona are described elsewhere in this programme. - G.L.