String Trio Op 20 (1927)

Sehr langsam

Sehr getragen und ausdrucksvoll - zart bewegt

‘Did you hear about the ghastly incident at the performance of my String Trio in London? The cellist got up, saying: “I can’t play this thing!” and walked off the platform!’ It was ironic, Webern might have reflected as he wrote about it to Willi Reich, that such an indignity should have happened to a String Trio that, structurally at least, was as classical as any of Beethoven’s. Since, however, it had been hissed even at the festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Sienna in 1928 (the year after it was written) he cannot have been entirely surprised by its treatment in London, obviously unprofessional thought it was.

As Stravinsky was honest enough to observe of the first movement, “The music is marvellously interesting, but no one could recognize it as a rondo.” The structural problem here is that the rondo theme – which is not the same as the twelve-note series presented in whispered harmonics and delicate cello pizzicati in the opening bars – is so varied on its recurrences that it is scarcely recognisable to the ear. It makes its first appearance on an expressive viola, immediately after that introduction, and reappears three times. It is usually distinguishable not so much by its intervals as by its legato or linear quality, in contrast to the staccato figuration of the first episode and the attenuated recall of the introduction on the fingerboard in the very middle of the movement.

The sonata-form second movement - at just under six minutes one of Webern’s longest - is so consciously classical in construction that it includes a literal exposition repeat (with a second-time bar). There is an introduction here too, largely in harmonics and pizzicato notes, before the presentation of the main themes. An elusively eloquent first subject on violin is linked by a dramatic transition to a lyrical second subject fragmented through the three-part texture and from there to a gently percussive closing theme discreetly coloured by the wood of the bow on the strings. The development features a repeated-note motif as well as tiny splinters from the main themes. When the main themes are recapitulated, after a prolonged harmonic on violin, they are transformed almost beyond recognition. The repeated-note motif, on the other hand, persists almost to the end of the coda.

What worried the London cellist, however, was surely not the structure but precisely that aspect of the work which Stravinsky found so “marvellously interesting” and which is its inspired major distinction – ts extraordinary and at that time unheard-of flexibility in every rhythmic, textural and colouristic respect.