Symphony guide: Webern's op 21

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In this luminous, miniature symphony, time goes backwards as well as forwards. It's an extraordinary work.

The symphonic principle, as we've been discovering, can take in a gigantic range of interpretations.

Anton Webern's Symphony, Op 21 for strings (without double-basses), harp, clarinet, bass clarinet, and two horns is a piece that takes the idea of symphonic self-referentiality to an intensely concentrated extreme, and it's so focused in its choice of notes and precise disposition of rhythm and texture, that the result is a distilled expression and extension of symphonic logic into every dimension of music that's pretty well unparalleled in the story of the symphony. The paradox is that this apparently tiny, pocket-sized piece (its full score is written on just 16 pages), does things with the most important elements of all, our old friends musical space and time, that much grander symphonies take ten times as long to achieve. And Webern's Symphony manages something even more remarkable: the whole academic discourse of score-based musical analysis is (or was) based on proving how "organic" and "logical" symphonic structures can be, supposedly endowing Beethoven's music, say, with the objective power and glory of natural phenomena. But Webern's little symphony is probably the most genuinely "organic" symphony ever composed, in the sense of creating networks of connections between its smallest scales and its largest dimensions, so that there's a symbiotic relationship between the way every fragment of motive and melody sounds and the shape of the whole symphony. That all-pervasive connectivity, this "striving for unity", as Webern put it, was inspired by his love of nature (Webern was a keen alpinist); as he said, referring to Goethe's idea of the "Urpflanze" - the ur-plant: "the root is really nothing other than the stalk, the stalk nothing other than the leaf, the leaf again nothing other than the blossom: variations of the same idea." 

Composed in 1928, the Symphony is in two movements, a two-part first movement, with both halves repeated, which is based on the idea of complex species of canon, in which the same, or similar, musical material is played by different combinations of instruments. (What's a canon? Think of a round such as London's Burning only much, much more complicated, in this case...) Webern told Schoenberg that this movement lasted 15 minutes; in fact, it's more like seven in performance. The second movement is a three-minute set of variations on an 11-bar theme, which crams in as much expressivity as the variation-based finale of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, but on a somewhat more concentrated scale!  Now, if you want to delve into the canonic complexities of Webern's symphony, or the subtleties of the way it manipulates its 12-tone row, I refer you to composer George Benjamin's essay on the Symphony, as well as his thoughts on the piece in a collection of essays published for Alexander Goehr's 70th birthday. George describes the idea of the canon in the first movement: "The simultaneous ramifications on past, present, and future inherent in any one creative decision provide a sustaining context, the sequential nature of canon literally pulling the music forwards, devouring empty manuscript paper ahead". But he finds poetry in all this constructivism: this first movement of the Symphony seems "weightless - a complex, crystal-like object hovering in space". And that's the greatest connection of all: between the way this music is made, and the sounds it makes.

Benjamin's description beautifully captures the sense of stasis in this first movement of the Symphony, the uncanny feeling that time is not moving like an unstoppable arrow, but rather softly expanding and exploding in all directions, like the growth of a crystal - or, since it's nearly Christmas, a snowflake. The limpid clarity of the music, the spaces and silences around the musical material in the orchestration, the fact that Webern makes it impossible for you to miss a single note, and that each pitch has its own definite meaning and expression - it's all part of the articulation of the structure of the music. Every line you're hearing is a usually symmetrical fragment of the grander design of the 12-note row - itself symmetrically constructed - that the whole piece is based on. You literally hear time going backwards as well as forwards in this music, since Webern's canons play with the fact that the second six notes of the row are a transposed version of the first six, played backwards, and there are also bigger symmetries at work, to do with the shapes of both halves of the movement.

Keeping up? Not sure I am, but that's not the point! Rather, the thing is that all of this structural unity creates a symphonic form that sounds neither completely predictable nor totally random. When you listen to the Symphony, you're taken in by the centripetal concentration of the music, and you're set out on a meditative journey in the first movement into a vortex of almost infinite musical connectivity. This is an emotionally moving experience, too, in the range of expression Webern conjures, which includes heightened, violent lyricism as well as pointillist brilliance.

The connections continue in the Variations movement, in which the second half of each tiny variation - from a march to a moto perpetuo, from a lyrical reflection to an enigmatic coda - contains the same notes as the first half, played backwards, and in which the whole movement pivots around its exact middle point, the 4th variation. Webern himself was pretty thrilled with what he'd discovered in this piece: "Greater coherence cannot be achieved. Not even the Netherlanders [the Renaissance polyphonists like Ockeghem, whose music Webern had intensely studied] have managed this … The entire movement thus represents in itself a double canon with retrograde motion … What you see here (retrograde, canon, etc. - it is always the same) is not to be thought os as 'Kunststückerln' [artistic tricks] - that would be ridiculous! As many connections as possible should be created, and you will have to admit that there are many connections here!"

But I think George Benjamin again gets closer to what it's like to listen to this Symphony: "Paradoxically, this product of hermetic constructivism seems infused with intense emotion, that emotion evenly diffused across the whole surface of the music. Gone is the mono-directional thrust of Classical and Romantic music; in its place a world of rotations and reflections, opening myriad paths for the listener to trace through textures of luminous clarity yet beguiling ambiguity."