Webern: Six Pieces for orchestra - op. 6, for orchestra

The predecessors to Opus 6 were - besides several timorous student ventures, a piano quintet in C major and the imposing Passacaglia Op. 1 composed under Schoenberg's Supervision - a few little vocal works (Op. 2, 3 and 4) and the Five Movements for String Quartet. The pieces for orchestra are the only larger, as it were symphonic, work into which Webern incorporated his "method", that "method" he was later fond of associating with the concept "law", in the double meaning of the Greek word "nomos". Here, to be sure, the law is not yet identical to the row law of twelve-tone composition which subsequently raised his method to the state of musical autonomy, but it is already very much his own law. A different aspect of greatness. The rather conventional external display of instrumentation, which binds Opus 6 to the mental and emotional sphere of the Passacaglia and its silent partners, also counts, precisely because this Webernian law materializes spontaneously in the opposite direction, in concentration on internals, or more exactly, in the substratum of seeming insignificance that is brought to light. A world of musical micro-organisms is displayed.

The Six Pieces have an average length of 25 bars; the longest (IV) has 41, the shortest (III) has 11. The mental volume is of course incommensurable. There is nothing comparable in pre-Webern music, and as a category in the domain of occidental musical art it has remained present only through him. (F.S.)