Overview
Introduction
There is precious little Webern piano music. Aside from appearances in ensembles and, more plentifully, as an accompaniment in songs, the pianoforte figures into Webern's mature catalog only three times: first, a tiny solo piano Kinderstück [Children's Piece] composed in 1924, and last, the Piano Variations, Op.27 of 1936. In between these two is a two-page Klavierstück written in 1925 as one of Webern's very earliest experiments into the workings of Arnold Schoenberg's brand-new twelve-tone method.
As can be said of Alban Berg's music, the outward manner of Webern's music didn't change all that much when he adopted serialism. A passing glance at or a quick hearing of the 1925 Klavierstück and a Webern piece selected more or less at random from the 1910s or early 1920s, and one mightn't guess that a momentous change is at hand in the Klavierstück, so similar are the two pieces. The Klavierstück is pointed and fractured much as Webern's earlier music is, sometimes leaping about in a most un-traditional manner, and complex, even self-contradictory (from the traditional perspective) rhythms are thrown atop one another without regard for the s difficulty a performer might face in executing them both accurately and expressively. If anything, this new twelve-tone piece is in fact less complex in texture and structure than earlier pieces, and with good reason-- Webern, like any composer trying out something new and different, is getting his feet wet a little at a time; the technique is still a young and unfamiliar one, and the Klavierstück amounts in many ways to little more than a preparatory exercise.
The piece is marked Im tempo eines Menuetts, and does in fact unfold in a three-four meter that still shows the vague rhythmic outlines of the venerable minuet dance-- Webern, like Schoenberg around the same time, is trying hard to connect these new serial techniques with long-held ideals and patterns of Western music. The tone-row is laid out almost entirely in half-step bunches: B flat-B natural, G sharp-G natural, C sharp-D-E flat, F sharp-F natural-E, and finally C-A, a non-half-step that serves as a kind of quasi-cadence. This is not to say, however, that he employs the tone-row in a linear way; n the contrary, these "half steps" are usually heard instead as major sevenths and minor ninths, either as chords or as leaps. The composer keeps things simple in the piece and uses the row only in its original form-- there is no flipping it upside-down (inversion) nor turning it backwards (retrograde). Though most listeners will soon lose the implied minuet rhythms within the Klavierstück's rhythmic mire, a modified, trio-less minuet form, in which the first half is repeated and the second half ends with the very same gesture that closed the first half, is clearly present.
Slight though it is, the Klavierstück was milestone in both Webern's development and the life of Viennese music.
