Word: webern
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...Webern, one of the great innovators of the 20th century, this was a spiritual matter. In every vista he saw a creative idea logically developed. The merest wild flower reminded him of Goethe's ''primeval plant,'' symbol of the unity of all organic life. Most important, his moun tain treks re-enacted his artistic aspirations. More than any composer before or since, Webern worked on the timberline between sound and silence. His austere, rigorously condensed pieces seem to hover in a clear, rarefied ether of their own, like clusters of ice crystals on the point...
Compared with Webern, his fellow revolutionaries Schoenberg and Berg were vestigial romantics. They used Schoenberg's twelve-tone system to rework the old, large-scale forms of Wagner and Brahms. Webern used it to abolish those forms, along with the entire principle of elaboration and climax. He let his three-or four-note motives suggest their own, rather static structural implications through intricate counterpoint and variation-not development. ''Once stated,'' he said, ''the theme expresses all it has to say.'' By relating everything else to that theme, he attempted to achieve...
This radical method, so little acknowledged during Webern's lifetime, was eagerly embraced by the generation that came after him, the generation of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen...
Even the septuagenarian Igor Stravinsky converted to twelve-tone composition under the sway of ''St. Anton.'' Among lesser composers, instant Webernism-compressed structures, jagged melodic leaps, spare, pointillist orchestration-became a sort of standard, freeze-dried product in the 1950s and '60s. Now that the vogue has subsided somewhat, Webern is in danger of having come and gone as an avant-garde influence without ever being absorbed into the standard repertory. A more definitive assessment is needed...
...Complete Works of Anton Webern (Columbia, 4 LPs) lays before us a lifetime of composing in roughly three hours of listening time. (A further set, presumably comprising Webern's juvenilia and unpublished works, is planned for release at a later date.) The generally excellent performances, recorded over a period of 41/2 years under Pierre Boulez's direction, feature the London Symphony Orchestra and such guest artists as Violinist Isaac Stern, Pianist Charles Rosen and the late Gregor Piatigorsky. They supplant in every way the pioneering complete Webern recorded by Robert Craft in the 1950s, also on Columbia...