anton webern variations for piano
There is a sense of rapid motion underlying it – and hence of the climactic block I missed in Stadlen's performance – but it is articulated around a series of events that require particular attention and are given extra time: the passage from E101 to E103 that Webern linked to a mysterious drum, and the registral high points at E107 and E112. That might equally be said of the first movement, where the gestural shaping to which I referred normally involves the coordination of pitch, rhythm and dynamics. Jacobs's strategy is identical to Monod's, and the effect is that much more articulate at his slightly slower tempo. Listen to the solo pieces, alone at night and be captured by the unique way that Schoenberg distills the essence of modern alienation. (Hence Stein's 1965 DMA.) And whereas in the B section Stadlen begins E46–52, E58–67 and E73–85 with a flurry of short notes, Manchon‐Theis smooths their profile into something closer to arches, again mirrored by dynamics, thus creating a more measured effect reminiscent of recitative: her playing is less impulsive than Stadlen's, more classical. As usual it is the B section that offers the greatest interpretative contrasts. She takes the average tempo of the A2 section down to 23 and flattens the tempo and dynamic profiles in a way that Stadlen does not. Background on Atonality Before looking at the birth of atonality, I will first take some time to describe the end of the Late Romantic period and then see how the atonality of the Post-Great War period arose. If you do not receive an email within 10 minutes, your email address may not be registered, Theory had become the preserve of composers. In terms of organisation – and despite the curiously opaque appearance of Webern's rhythmic notation – the B section (bars 19–36, E46–132) looks more straightforward in the score than it sounds in Stadlen's recording. At the beginning of both A1 and A2 Loriod consistently plays the third and fourth pitches of each group staccato, breaking up the residual sense of more or less legato melody that is present in almost all the other recordings I have discussed: in doing this she is of course disregarding Webern's slurs. For this Pollini Edition re-release, not only do you get the piano concerto as an extra, they also throw in Webern's Variations for solo piano, making this CD a winner on all fronts. This illustrates precisely the kind of musical causality that Grant associates with thematic rather than serial hearing, the sense of continuous temporal entailment that Heinrich Schenker (1987, vol. And that is precisely Mathew's point. the extent to which this movement draws on the familiar rhetoric of tonal music. Yet, even allowing for the cultural fault line of the war, it is hard to imagine that pre‐war performance practices had been forgotten quite so completely as Stadlen implies. Indeed one of them is the matching dyads at E7 and E10, the prolongation of which creates the oddly limping effect I described as searching for meaning, and which comprise the same pitches as E31–32 (c1 and d2). And in the A2 section the change of quality is that much more obvious. Jean‐Rodolphe Kars's recording, from 1969, stands out by virtue of its tempos: his A sections, in particular, are not just slower than anyone else's, they are far slower. I shall provide an overview so brief that it might best be seen as a listening guide. 27. She also sees as essential characteristics of serial aesthetics a ‘conscious concentration on the internal structure and character of individual events’ (she calls this ‘microaesthetics’) and the use of silence for ‘indicating the boundaries between groups and textures, […] throwing elements into focus and then, contradictorily, leaving them hanging in space, as if to question their significance’ (Grant 2001, pp. Please check your email for instructions on resetting your password. The lack of flow is enhanced by the fact that – like Stein rather than Monod or Jacobs – she prolongs the terminal dyads rather than the notes preceding them. This idea is nowadays mainly associated with twentieth‐century conservatives from Schenker to Pfitzner, but it was equally an article of faith for Webern (1963, pp. 27 overall, though in the central sections there is 18% more rubato in Op. It is rather like what happens when pianists are asked to play deadpan: they play as usual, only less so (London 2004, p. 176). Symmetrical on the printed page, the form of this movement as heard traverses an emotional trajectory that is wholly the creation of its performers. Webster retains the distinction between A1 on the one hand and B and A2 on the other, but he plays everything much faster: his average tempos (35, 31 and 30) are much closer to those of the postwar modernists I describe in the next section. 1 of Stockhausen's Texte, 1963, in Hasty (1997), p. 297. The reception at Darmstadt of Webern's serial compositions represented in its most extreme form the resistance to history and search for meaning in the text which have underpinned the disciplinary identity of music theory. 27, is a twelve-tone piece for piano composed by Anton Webern in 1936. 28 (1937-38) - dont la série est basée sur le motif BACH; Cantate n o 1, pour soprano, chœur mixte et orchestre, op. In short, there were shifting and competing currents within the ostensibly monolithic modernism of Darmstadt and Die Reihe. (John McCabe [2003, p. 17], who made his own recording of Op. There is an example in the last bars of the A1 section of Op. The first lasts fully 82% longer than the second; the unexpected prolongation of E7 (73% longer than the previous semiquaver) creates an oddly limping effect that turns into a kind of lilt at E9–12. He added (with specific reference to the Concerto Op. And that is what Mathew hears in Monod's recording. Even recordings like Monod's and Loriod's draw on deeply internalised codes of expressive performance that have developed over the years around the tonal repertoire, and it is because these codes are also internalised by listeners – because of what Bruno Repp (1999) calls listeners’ ‘timing expectations’ –that they are not perceived for what they are. An early advocate was Leibowitz (1949, p. 241), who argued that in Op. – cites Rose Subotnik's suggestion that ‘Stravinsky's professed formalism […] evokes “not the conceptual […] but the stylistic attributes of objectivity”’. The aim was not to continue but to repudiate a history perceived as hopelessly compromised. The particular form this took reflected something that American theorists shared with their Zero Hour predecessors: a social‐constructionist distrust of the traditional idea that the tonal system is given in nature and hence uniquely privileged. In short, the traditional codes of expressive performance persist in Monod's playing. Anton Webern in Stettin, October 1912. One might say it was at this time that Op. 27 as series of temporal proportions There is simply a slippage from the one to the other via the notion of interpretation: after explaining what he sees as the movement's atonal background structures, Wintle (1982, p. 91) asserts that ‘[a]n awareness of these articulations is essential to a properly balanced interpretation of the movement’. Leading performers from the Schoenberg circle, including Rudolf Kolisch and Eduard Steuermann, attended the Darmstadt Ferienkurse (annual summer schools), which were initiated in 1946 and became the principal anvil on which postwar musical modernism was forged; Stadlen – who had by then settled in London – attended from 1948 to 1951, and it was there, on 31 July 1948, that he gave the German premiere of Op. On each left-facing left page is the facsimile with pencil annotations made by Webern while he instructed the pianist Peter Stadlen. The conjunction of tempo and dynamic graphs can nevertheless make broad relationships between the two parameters visible at a glance. Performance is evanescent, and as a result the narratives that cluster around it easily become entrenched. Every ornament is excluded, and the composition is governed entirely by logic’. Anton Webern - Variations op.27pf: Maurizio Pollini"Happy Birthday, Mr. Given the extent to which performers are generally believed to internalise stylistic practices around their late teens or early twenties (Leech‐Wilkinson 2009, p. 250), one might expect to hear aspects of pre‐war performance in their recordings, despite the dates, and this proves to be the case. Pollini does the opposite. Published on Jul 20, 2013. Stadlen was vocal in his opposition to this new style, insisting in a number of publications (the best‐known of which is ‘Serialism Reconsidered’, published in 1958) that Webern's intentions had been quite different. These were graphed and incorporated, along with associated dynamic values, piano‐roll notation and event numbers – all derived from the captured data – within Sonic Visualiser session files, creating a playback environment optimised for close listening. Yet it was precisely in serial music that the detachment of ‘musical surface’ from serial ‘background’ to which Hasty refers created new opportunities and indeed requirements for performers to co‐create the music that listeners heard. The element of crossing over comes in the tempos of the A sections, which at respective averages of 29 and 25 are close to Stadlen's (28 and 24). As we have seen, the objective qualities that Schwartz associates with ‘Webern purists’ have been repeatedly attributed to the second‐wave performances of the 1950s and ’60s. Although the first part of the B section has never settled down to a consistent tempo – itself a characteristic of early twentieth‐century pianism – there is a clear sense that a quite different tempo, around 40, has been established during the climactic passage. 27, he said that in performance Webern wanted ‘not only something additional […] but something that occasionally even contradicts the construction, something that destroys it, so that […] the listener […] must – or should – be misled now and again’.3232 Translated in Quick (2010), p. 190. Of no less interest, however, are the outliers, four recordings that cannot be sensibly classified in any of my categories. 27, it was not then a matter of simple ignorance but rather a highly selective, scriptist, even fundamentalist appropriation of Webern's music (recall Fox's comment about Webern on the page being the touchstone for postwar composers). [T]he material is itself vested with the capacity to posit musical meaning’. It is not, of course, that all recordings in the consensus style are the same, but that they are easily classified in relation to this hypothetical norm. It probably makes more sense to look for the sources of Gould's particular take on literalism – which is no more literal than Monod's – in the performance practices he had developed in relation to the seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century music that was already in his repertoire before he started playing that of the Second Viennese School (Bazzana 2004, p. 89). Like Stadlen, she emigrated in the late 1930s and subsequently taught at the Royal Academy of Music,99 As stated in Peter Hill's notes to his recording Schoenberg – Berg – Webern: Piano Music (Naxos 8.553870), p. 4. where a prize for performing contemporary piano music is named after her. Anton Friedrich Wilhelm (von) Webern, 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor. What is most revealing about Stein's thesis, however, is the evidence it provides that – more than a decade after his recording – he was still thinking of Op. All this made the Piano Variations a key arena within which postwar modernist values were negotiated. Biret plays with considerably more rubato in Op. Stadlen's perplexity, then, is the result of a literalist mind‐set that is not just unhistorical but unrealistic. The rhetoric of building to a climax, tearing it off, completing what was left hanging (but in a fragmentary or desultory way) and concluding with a pregnant pause is familiar from any amount of nineteenth‐century piano music conceived within a broadly narrative or dramatic paradigm. The opening bars of the outer sections, too, form a storehouse of ways in which different patterns of emphasis can be created through the interaction of duration, dynamics, and articulation. Whereas Stadlen breaks up the continuity, in line with the caesura Webern pencilled in after E99, Manchon‐Theis continues at full speed; only at the second of Webern's pencilled‐in caesuras – after E112 – does she momentarily hesitate before resuming motion and breaking off more strongly at the notated rests after E121. It is this cool Webern, the Webern of the late instrumental music, that dominated Anglophone musicology and theory until it was overturned in the 1990s by the combined efforts of Kathryn Bailey, Anne Shreffler and Julian Johnson. And when Ernst Krenek (1966, p. 10) writes that, in Op. Among his other books, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin‐de‐siècle Vienna (2007) won the SMT's Wallace Berry Award in 2010. 83–5 and Spinner 1960, p. 10). Successively longer groups of isochronous demisemiquavers (E46–51, E58–66 and E73–84) alternate with groups of six slower notes of varying lengths centred on the Spiegelbilder: Stadlen marks the first of these ‘particularly intense’. Sehr mäßig ("très lent" à 3/16) Sehr schnell ("très rapide" à 2/4) Ruhig fliessend ("calme, fluide") Bibliographie. Jacobs's recording might be seen as the first clear sign of a crossing over between the hitherto distinct styles initiated in the recorded repertoire by Stadlen and Monod. It was also Stein (p. 173) who spelled out what this meant for the performer's role. 6–7). When he speaks about motivic transformations, Borio (2005, p. 95) observes, Schnebel does not talk about their chronological development but rather their formal derivation. 5 has 47% more rubato overall than his 1976 recording of Op. And like Stadlen, Stein traded on his first‐hand experience of the Second Viennese School. Though – contrary to the score but like almost everyone else – Monod takes A2 at a slower tempo (average 35) than A1, he again plays its first part (E133–148) more or less metronomically. 27 sont une œuvre pour piano d'Anton Webern composée entre octobre 1935 et septembre 1936. 5 and Op. This sparked off an enduring controversy that overshadowed critical responses to the cultural productions of the war years. By contrast, Stadlen treats the annotated edition he published in 1979 as the comprehensive prescription of what is to be done. Wason's reluctance to articulate this may reflect the social‐constructionist ideology to which I referred, but it also has to do with the valorisation of structure rather than style. In effect, performance was thought of as an extension and supplement to composition. To leave it at that, however, would be to ignore a massive discrepancy between the score – either score – and almost all the recordings of Op. dotted quaver = 32). 186 and 202–3) says, ‘hardly ever wrote a piece which did not have, for him, significant extra‐musical associations’. There are two later recordings that might equally be seen as exemplary of what Mathew calls ‘Darmstadt pianism’: one by the Juilliard‐trained American Paul Jacobs, recorded live at the 1956 Cité Radieuse festival in Marseille, and the other a studio recording by Yvonne Loriod, who trained at the Paris Conservatoire. All the recordings I have described in detail are consistent in shaping isochronous groups into distinct gestures, usually involving some degree of tempo and dynamic arching; articulating relationships within non‐isochronous groups by means of agogic and dynamic accentuation, though in very different ways; using tempo and dynamics to build the second half of the section towards climax and collapse; and separating off the section as a whole through more or less extended silences. The same might be said of Stadlen, who rendered this passage as a series of discrete gestures, and the effect in each case is the same splashy rhetoric. And in this context ‘free’ does not mean unconsidered – as is evident in a letter that Webern sent to the conductor Hermann Scherchen in 1938, in which he described how the fugal subject should be played in his arrangement of the Ricercar a 6 from Bach's Musical Offering: ‘from g via f♯ to f faster, then holding back a little on the e♭ (accent given by the harp) and again rubato on the trombone progression (including the tied e♭ of the horn where the trombone has a crotchet rest in bar 6)’.44 Translated in [Webern et al.] Writing in the second (1955) issue of Die Reihe, which was dedicated to Webern, Herbert Eimert – six years older than Adorno but arguably the leading ideologue of postwar serialism – says the same but draws the opposite conclusion. 27 was recorded on 10 September of that year (http://ml.naxos.jp/album/9.80273). Webern's structures seem to circle continuously in their illusory space’. 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