Three Little Pieces Op.11 (1914)

Mässig (Moderate)

Sehr bewegt (Very animated)

Äusserst ruhig (Extremely quiet)

Webern’s Three Little Pieces Op.11 are the result of an effort, encouraged by his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, to reverse a recent tendency to work on an ever smaller scale. Paradoxically – with the durations of the three movements adding up to a total of less than two minutes –    the new score turned out to be the shortest of all. The original idea had been to write what Webern described as “a major two-movement composition” for his father, who particularly liked cello music. “However,“ as he explained to Schoenberg in 1914, ”when I was fairly advanced with the first movement, it became clear to me that I had to write something else. I felt with complete certainty that I would leave something unwritten if I suppressed the urge. Thus I broke off the major work, although my progress on it had been smooth, and quickly wrote these small pieces… and rarely have I felt so certain that something good has come into being.”

Webern was not confident, on the other hand, that the Three Little Pieces would be understood – which might explain why they remained unpublished and unperformed until 1924. A performance by Gregor Piatigorsky in Berlin in 1926 provoked laughter in the audience and as late as 1939 the composer discouraged a projected hearing on the ground that “players and listeners would find it hard to make anything of them.”

One, unnecessary, problem is that Webern’s extreme brevity in cases like this is frequently presented as “compression.” Sometimes it is compression but more often it is just the opposite, the acoustic equivalent of large-scale magnification which reveals details scarcely perceptible to the naked eye. In the first and longest (53 seconds) of the three pieces every note and every chord in its nine bars has its own dynamic marking, its own articulation and its own colouring. In such finely detailed circumstances one note can be a whole theme and a melody of four notes a paragraph. Where the dynamic level rarely exceeds pp, finally dying away to nothing, a sfp harmonic on the muted cello or an arpeggiated f chord on the piano is a significant event.

The second piece, on the other hand, is authentic compression. With a now unmuted cello and a percussive piano engaged in outspoken dialogue, it is a violently passionate drama condensed into 13 seconds. The work ends with another tiny fragment magnified in such a way as to reveal the enormity of the nuances between pp and ppp when played at an extremely slow temp on the bridge of a muted cello and in the lower half of the piano range.