The Five Canons on Latin Texts, Op. 16, count among a handful of vocal works composed by Anton Webern in the 1910s and 1920s, and exemplify the manner in which his seemingly austere, constructivist methods serve as means to what ultimately are deeply expressive ends. They present listeners with a composer possessing a keen poetic sensitivity, as well as an almost microscopically calibrated emotional precision. The Op. 16 pieces are striking in their Spartan instrumentation: a lone soprano is joined only by a B flat clarinet and a bass clarinet, instruments arguably as approximate to the human voice as any, separated from the singer primarily in the inability to deliver text. They also emphasize Webern's penchant for canonical structures—indeed, the entire collection is rife with echoed contours of lines in counterpoint and complementary motivic shapes as melodies unfolding in mirror images, like the angular peaks of a mountain range reflected in inversion on the surface of a lake. Despite the spare and homogeneous forces used, the often strict canonical writing, and, indeed, the use of highly religious texts sung in arcane Latin (taken from the Catholic Breviary), the pieces reveal subtle and profound expressive details to those with an ear to listen closely.

In the first piece, "Christus factus est pro nobis," the vocal and clarinet lines intertwine contrapuntally as well as timbrally—as Christiane Oelze's recording on Deutsche Grammophon expertly brings out by matching the initial voice quality with the clarinet's opening trills. Webern even indulges in a bit of tone painting, with an unexpectedly high leap on "nomen quod est super omne nomen" (name above all other names). In a similar fashion, the upward gestures in the clarinet that begin the second movement, "Dormi Jesu," contrapuntally set up their descending inversions in the voice in the opening words ("Sleep, Jesus"). The clarinet ominously shadows the vocal line at a moment's delay in the third movement ("Crux fidelis"), then foreshadows in the fourth ("Asperges me"). Perhaps due to its invocational nature, the fifth and final movement, "Crucem tuam adoramus, Domine" (We Worship Thy Cross, Lord), is the most ardent and active. Its intensity derives from shifts of articulation, from low, nimble staccatos to full-voiced, adulatory ascents—and here again a telling word picture: a high C sharp on "guadium" (joy). That all these expressive elements occur within the rigors of canonical forms speaks to the transcendence Webern sought in these pieces.

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