Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op.6

Langsam (Slow)

Bewegt (Quick)

Mässig (Moderate)

Sehr Mässig (Very moderate)

Langsam (Slow)

Webern’s reputation has long suffered from a false but widespread perception of him as an emotionally dry composer so obsessed by detail that he could conceive of nothing but tiny miniatures. Certainly, he was concerned with detail and, certainly, his most characteristic pieces are no more than a few minutes in length. Whatever theoretical or even mathematical principles he applied to his compositions, however, he was never emotionally dry, least of all in those works written between his period of study with Schoenberg and the First World War. “Except for the violin pieces and a few of my orchestra pieces,” he wrote to Alban Berg in 1912, “all of my compositions from the Passacaglia on relate to the death of my mother.”

The Six Pieces for Orchestra were written in the summer of 1909 at Preglhof, the Webern family estate on the Wörthersee, where the composer’s mother had died three years earlier. It is just a coincidence, of course, that Preglhof is close to Maiernigg, where Mahler had completed five symphonies between 1900 and 1906, but it is surely not coincidental that in their original version the Six Pieces, short as they are, call for an orchestra of the same size as that of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and of much the same instrumental make-up. Nor is it coincidental that they are centred on a funeral march which, in the score first performed under Schoenberg’s direction in Vienna in 1913, is actually headed Marcia funebre.

When Webern revised the work in 1928 - reducing the number of horns, trumpets and trombones from six of each to four and the woodwind instruments to two of each - he removed that emotive heading from the fourth movement and, by replacing the prominent E flat clarinet with a piccolo, disguised something of its Mahlerian inspiration. But, as the composer himself said, the new orchestration “is the only valid one.” While the original has more period flavour, the reduced orchestration is more in keeping with the brevity of the work itself. The revised version also clarifies certain features, like the Klangfarbenmelodie (or colour melody) at the beginning of the first piece: as it passes from flute to muted trumpet, back to flute and to third horn, new dynamic markings ensure that the melodic line will not be distorted by the subsidiary celesta or viola and cello colours.

According to Webern, in a letter written to Schoenberg shortly before the first performance, the opening slow movement is intended “to express my frame of mind when I was still in Vienna, already sensing the disaster yet always maintaining the hope that I would find my mother still alive.” Though it is only nineteen bars long, the form of the piece - with a passionate central climax and calm outer sections - clearly reflects the emotions behind it.

The second piece represents the moment when, on the way back home on the train from Vienna to Carinthia, Webern realised the truth about his mother. The uneasy legato at the beginning is interrupted by an at first gentle and then more insistent percussive element, the conflict culminating in cries of agony on woodwind and brass.

The third - which betrays just a hint of Mahler’s Rückert setting, Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft - is the quietest and shortest of the Six Pieces. According to Webern, it “conveys the impression of the fragrance of the heather which I gathered at a spot in the forest very meaningful for me and which I then laid on the coffin.” Like the Mahler song, it omits cellos and basses, except for one chord of harmonics, and breathes pure melody, except for a staccato ostinato figure in the shortest of middle sections.

That third piece Webern regarded as an introduction to the fourth, the funeral march: “Even today I do not understand my feelings as I walked behind the coffin with my held high, as if to banish everything lowly around.” Beginning as another study in Klangfarbenmelodie - first for percussion alone, then for wind in chords of changing colours - it develops into a lament with comparatively extended melodic lines on piccolo clarinet, horn, muted trumpet. It ends on a crescendo of protest for all the brass in rhythmic unison.

Webern is less specific about the background to the last two pieces. They are, he says, “an epilogue: remembrance and resignation.” The fifth seems to be the more immediate in inspiration: the eeriness of string tremolandos and whispered tuba sounds is offset by the lyricism of a legato line on the oboe, which is echoed later by first violins. The glockenspiel colours in the central ostinato are reflected in a high-lying violin solo at the end. The last piece is very distant, the ostinato element now softened and smoothed out, the melodic element gradually more attenuated, the final chords scarcely audible in the neutral colours of harp and celesta over a low bell sound.