Passacaglia, Op.1

Although it is designated as his Op.1, Webern’s Passacaglia is by no means the work of a beginner. The Idyll for large orchestra, Im Sommerwind, is an impressive example of what he could when he was still a student of music history at Vienna University (specialising in renaissance counterpoint) and before he had even started on his four years of intensive study in compostion with Arnold Schoenberg. Completed in 1908, the Passacaglia is the last work Webern wrote under Schoenberg’s supervision - although he continued for many years to show him everything he did - and is an astonishingly accomplished score from every textural and structural point of view.

Knowing the serialist composer that Webern was to become, one could all to easy misunderstand the Passacaglia as some kind of anticipation of developments which were to take place ony several years later. In fact, it has less in common with his Op.2, Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen (for unaccompanied four-part chorus), than with Im Sommerwind: it is passionate, characteristically late-romantic self expression disciplined in this case by strict adherence to a baroque form - but no more displined than, say, the last movement of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, which is constructed in a similar way and which Schoenberg almost certainly recommended to his pupil as a model.

One significant difference between the Brahms and the Webern examples, however, is that in the former the underlying theme is more sharply defined as a melodic outline and is never difficult to find at some level or another in the score. In the Webern the unsuspecting listener could hear the eight very quiet pizzicato notes at the beginning as an insignificant introduction and concentrate his attention instead on the sighing thirds on the flute and the expressively arching line of the clarinet. And in a way he would be right. It is those two counter-themes which dominate the surface of the texture as they pass through a continuous process of development and through three distiinct accelerations of tempo into three intense climaxes. Beneath or above or somewhere in the middle (or in all three plaes at once) the eight-note theme introduced pizzicato in the opening bars recurs in more or less regular eight-bar cycles no fewer than 31 times, but less and less perceptibly.

The presence of the ostinato theme and its influence on the basically D minor harmonies of the piece are not insignificant, of course, but what really matters is what is perceptible to the ear and arresting to the emotions, above all the three great climaxes - the second separatd from the first by a lovely lyrical episode in D major, the last followed by a gradual deceleration and an attenuation of the texture right down to the final D minor chord on three muted trombones.