Re Discovery

Sometime back in the 80s I got hold of an all Webern CD, with all the pieces done by von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. Over the years I've played it occasionally, generally sort of enjoying what's going on, but never really quite 'getting it', except for Passacaglia for Orchestra (Opus 1) which is fairly obvious stuff in the late-Romantic, everyone-in-Vienna-is-ravingly-neurotic, tradition. (Think Schoenberg on steroids.)

Then this week it clicked for me. Or, rather, Five Movements (Opus 5 - version for String Orchestra) and Six Pieces for Orchestra (Opus 6) did. Every note seemed to fall into place with a sense of inevitability, as if the music had written itself. And I was left wondering why I had been so deaf to all this before.

I was assisted in my listening, enormously so, by the excellent account of the pieces in question in Jan Swafford's The Vintage Guide to Classical Music. Just before I bunged the disk on I remembered there was an interesting chapter by Swafford on Webern, and, to my delight, on going back to this I found the wonderful movement-by-movement accounts in the second half of the chapter. I read them as I listened, to my profit.

Thinking about this reminds me that I tend to be a little too negative with regard to the work of critics and commentators at times. The best critics (and Swafford is one) don't so much judge as illuminate. According to the sleeve notes that accompany the CD the original audience for Six Pieces for Orchestra chatted and laughed throughout. Pity them: so deep in the dark and nothing to light their way.