6 Bagatelles

When Webern completed his 6 Bagatelles for String Quartet in 1913, his modernist idiom had evolved to a point where the focus on ultra-compressed musical forms and expression was extreme even by his standards. A complete performance of the Bagatelles lasts only about four minutes. Webern’s original concept was shorter even than that: he at first envisaged the four central Bagatelles, Nos 2 to 5, as comprising a self-contained String Quartet in themselves. Nos 1 and 6 were originally composed as prelude and postlude for a song setting he composed in 1913, featuring words of his own, for soprano voice and string quartet. The music of Schmerz immer Blick nach oben (Pain, always—raise your glance upwards) is extraordinarily spare and elusive, relating to Webern’s ongoing inner trauma after his mother’s death in 1906. First, he made the song the centrepiece of a tiny three-movement work; then he repositioned these two movements as the first and last of the Six Bagatelles, and put the song-setting aside. (It was not performed until after his death.) The musical processes of the Bagatelles are so concentrated and fleeting that any connection with standard string-quartet forms has virtually disappeared. But there is perhaps the ghost of a conventional scherzo in the quick Bagatelle No. 2 (it lasts about 30 seconds), and a distant memory of a late-Romantic adagio in the slow and still No. 5.