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Anton Webern - Variations, Op. 27 (1936) 00:00 - I. Sehr Mässig 02:02 - II. Sehr Schnell 02:47 - III. Ruhig fließend Krystian Zimerman, piano The composition of the Variations op. 27 fell during Anton Webern’s (1883-1945) last creative phase, starting in 1926, in which he made the twelve-tone method the basis of his composing and at the same time took recourse to traditional forms and genres. We know quite a lot about the genesis of op. 27 - which was incidentally Webern’s only work for solo piano - though the sketches and draft versions as well as from a number of letters. On 14 October 1935 he began with what later became movement III, but soon discontinued work on it. In a letter to Arnold Schoenberg, dated 9 March 1936, Webern reported that he “has not managed to do any work since December” (cited after the facsimile; available as a digital reproduction on the website of the Arnold Schoenberg Center ). The reasons for this were probably, among other things, the death of Alban Berg on 24 December 1935, the preparation of the première of Berg’s Violin Concerto in Barcelona (Webern however cancelled his participation as conductor on short notice), as well as his conducting engagements, lectures, and teaching activities. Work on the composition presumably resumed only in June 1936, with the already started movement being completed on 8 July. The fact that signs of a multi-movement conception are missing from the first sketches (in op. 24, for example, such references were present from the very beginning) is an indication that the Variations were possibly initially planned as a single movement. Yet shortly after the completion of the movement, on 18 July Webern began a further movement, which he finished on 19 August and later placed at the beginning of the work. Between 1 and 5 September, he then composed movement II. Webern presumably made a fair copy for the engraver in the autumn of 1936. The work was probably printed from January 1937, and ultimately released at the end of April 1937 (cf. letter from Universal Edition to Webern, dated 27 April, in which three “honorary copies) were also enclosed”. In the course of its genesis, Webern reshaped the material, the twelve-tone row, for his composition several times. The work process, which went hand in hand with the first sketches, can easily be reconstructed on the basis of the sketch leaves. Only after various adjustments did Webern find the final basic form, as can be heard in M 1-5 of movement III. On three sketch leaves, Webern thereupon notated all 48 forms of this row (basic row, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion, each in twelve transpositions), and numbered them consecutively with ordinal numbers. These row numbers are also found in the sketches and the first draft; they provided Webern with orientation both for the correct sequence of the notes as well as for the systematic combination of the rows. Webern’s deliberations about the integration of the completed movement into a larger formal context are partially documented. In letters to David Josef Bach (15 July 1936) and to his friend, the poetess Hildegard Jone (18 July), Webern mentioned that the whole work was to be a “kind of suite”. Several weeks later, on 24 August 1936, and thus at a time when movement II had not yet been composed, it was however clear that it was to become a three-movement work which Webern wanted “to simply call ‘Variations’” (letter to Eduard Steuermann, as cited in Aus Dem Briefwechsel Webern-Steuermann, transcribed and furnished with annotations by Regina Busch, in: Musik-Konzepte, Sonderband Anton Webern I, p. 26). After he had reported details of the work to Schoenberg on 21 September 1936, Webern described it as follows in a letter of 6 December 1936 to the dedicatee and pianist Eduard Steuermann, which was sent at the same time as a copyist’s manuscript of the Variations: “As I believe I already mentioned to you, they are divided into (three) self-contained movements. I do not expressly present the theme at all (for example, as in the earlier sense at the beginning). It is almost my desire that it may remain unrecognized as such. (But if somebody were to ask me about it, I would not conceal it from him.) Yet, it would be better if it stayed in the background, so to speak. (It is - I naturally reveal it you right away - the first eleven measures of the third movement.) […] The first movement is like an Andante, the second a Scherzo (it is a two-part ‘endless’ canon, endless within its two parts, but also in relation to both of these; one has to play it as something friendly, that is to say, to strive to bring out, in spite of the fast tempo, the espressivo of the figures - ‘cantabile’, so to speak). The third movement is really a set of variations in therm of its structure. (Music-Konzepte, pp. 32 f.)
