Anton Webern – Cantata #1, Op. 29 (1939)

Now that I’ve reminded myself just how sensuous and beautiful Webern’s music is, let me strengthen the statement in my previous post and say:  Feldman’s De Kooning is really disappointing.  The thing about Webern is that for all his structural games and ingenious innovations in the use of the twelve-tone method — which, to be honest, I don’t care about all that much — his work always seems to be motivated by musical concerns.  On top of that, if anyone doubts that he was a Romantic, all they need to do is take a look at this piece, with its texts about thunder and lightning, maple keys falling through the air, and the music of Apollo.  There are even some unexpected moments of madrigalistic word-painting:  the entrance of the choir in the thunder-and-lightening movement is preceded by a startling fortissimo attack in the timpani and cymbal, and in the third movement, the words “im Dunkel” (“in darkness”) and “als Tau” (“as dew”) are set to eerie, mystical harmonies — including two very unexpected major sixth chords.

I have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced by the text-setting in the second movement, the one about maple keys.  It’s for solo soprano and orchestra rather than choir and orchestra, and although it doesn’t use Sprechstimme technique, the way the melodies flow reminds me a lot of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), especially on the words “Erde Dunkel sinken” and “kleine Flügel” — the latter in particular reminds me of the setting of the phrase “Erinnerung mordend” in “Nacht.”  This kind of leapy atonal singing full of major sevenths always sounds nervous and anguished to me, and I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to set a description of the beauty of nature in that style.  Even the choir’s leap of a major seventh in the previous movement, on the word “folgt nach,” strikes me as unnecessarily dramatic, but at least there the fact that many people are singing — without vibrato, of course — gives the music a more abstract quality.  When it’s a solo soprano, I can’t help but wonder what she’s so upset about, even as the orchestra, playing very similar music, seems to suggest the clockwork that secretly underlies the functioning of the natural world.