6 Pieces

The Six Pieces for Large Orchestra, composed in 1909, established Webern as one of the most radical composers of his time. The work’s first performance was in Vienna in 1913, conducted by Webern’s former teacher Arnold Schoenberg. Part of the audience booed and whistled in derision; subsequently, during two songs by another former Schoenberg pupil, Alban Berg, the concert degenerated into a riot that had to be broken up by the police. Some of this audience behaviour was deliberately facetious. But other listeners were more genuinely startled by how Webern’s music had moved beyond traditional tonality, into a new world of atonal modernism and dissonance. Apart from the fourth piece, all are short (the third lasts less than one minute). The musical line often consists of fragmentary phrases parcelled out between different instruments of the orchestra, a technique described by Schoenberg as Klangfarbenmelodie (sound-colour melody). Conventional harmony and rhythm are almost totally absent. The inspiration behind the work’s emotional bleakness was the death of Webern’s mother in 1906; the fourth piece is a hushed funeral march, whose ending flares into a sudden roar of massed brass and percussion. Apart from the fast-moving second piece, all the others are slow and almost always ultra-quiet. The very large orchestral lineup requires six each of trumpets and trombones, with other instrumental groupings similarly expanded. In 1928, Webern revised the score, reducing the orchestra’s size while leaving the music unchanged.