4 Pieces

Webern composed his Four Pieces for Violin and Piano in 1910, doing some further work on them in 1914. His music’s brand of hyper-expressive, post-Romantic modernism was now moving beyond the densely worked example of his former teacher Schoenberg, towards the extreme brevity and spareness that was central to Webern’s mature style; a performance of the Four Pieces lasts less than five minutes. The violinist Felix Galimir, who worked on the music with Webern, was at first bewildered, then came to realise that “the proportions were so perfect that issues of length and shortness vanished…How expressive every little miniature phrase became when he sang it.” The first and third pieces are both very slow and quiet: towards the end of the third, the piano’s chords are marked to be played “kaum hörbar” (scarcely audible). The faster second piece is more elaborate; then the last of the four gradually fades into silence, with the violin’s final two descending phrases marked “wie ein Hauch” (like a breath).