Anton Webern's Eight Early Songs (1901 - 03)—"Tief von fern," "Aufblick," "Blumengruss," "Bild der Liebe," "Sommerabend," "Heiter," "Der Tod," and "Heimgang in der Fruhe"—are for the most part short, highly chromatic works that predate the composer's studies with Arnold Schoenberg. The Eight Songs, which are marked by brevity, austerity, and an extremely expressive character, foreshadow Webern's mature lieder style. The moods of the texts (by Goethe, Dehmel, Martin Greif, Wilhelm Weigand, and Fredrich Nietzsche) are aptly embodied in Webern's settings; "Blumengruss" (Flower-greeting) is richly Romantic and lyrical, while the carefree spirit of "Heiter" (Cheerful) is reflected in the easy flow of its 6/8 meter.

The Eight Songs also feature such characteristic Webernian features as extreme dynamic ranges, contrapuntal textures, and the use of canon. Furthermore, they make substantial vocal demands upon the singer: extreme ranges, disjunct lines, pianisissimo dynamic levels, and so on. These early songs clearly approach chromatic saturation; this coupled with their adventuresome harmonic sense point the way to Webern's imminent abandonment of functional harmony.



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1.Tief von fern: Aus des Abends weißen Wogen

In 1901, an ambitious and optimistic seventeen-year-old Anton Webern (actually still Anton von Webern at that time) copied a list of five recently composed songs into one of his personal notebooks, calling them collectively his opus one and listing their titles, keys, and the authors of their poems. Webern was, however, not so pleased with himself as this list might indicate: he was quick to disown (but not, tellingly, destroy) these five songs, and the label "Opus 1" was torn from them and ultimately applied instead to the Passacaglia for orchestra of 1908— by which year Webern had moved from a composer of uncomfortable juvenilia to one gradually but steadily approaching mastery of the craft. Each of these five songs survives, and most were published in one collection or another in the years following Webern's death. One of them, Tief von fern [From Far Away], composed on April 21, 1901 to a text by Webern favorite Richard Dehmal, made its way into the largest and most famous group of posthumously published Webern songs: the Eight Early Songs for voice and piano. It serves as that group's No.1, and was first heard in public in May of 1962.



Indeed, uncomfortable is not an inapt or unfair adjective for this music. Webern is grappling with a late nineteenth century musical idiom here— it would be years yet before he stood alongside Schoenberg and thrust his avant-garde epee at the very seams of tonality asunder— and it would not be too harsh to say that the song does little better than stumble its way through a slow, chromatically-tinged E major. Eighteen measures of Langsam [Slow] are enough for Dehmal's words, which tell of the distant movements of celestial bodies— the moon, a star— on a tranquil evening. Sometimes. Webern applies a steady stream of rich, pianissimo chords to the task of supporting the gently rising melody. Sometimes the result is a ringing sonority worthy of that great late-Romantic Lied composer Richard Strauss; but sometimes, on the other hand, one cannot help feeling that Webern's hands simply found their way from chord to chord on the piano keyboard without much thought for gluing one to the next in a sensible manner. Happily, the very last bars, during which a forte climax (a torrent next to the pianissimo texture of the opening!) is sweetly dissolved away, count as one of the former occasions.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide

2.Aufblick: Über unsre Liebe hängt eine tiefe Trauerweide

Anton Webern's Eight Early Songs were never called thus by their composer. They are, instead, a posthumous grouping-together of originally unaffiliated songs composed over a span of several years very early on in Webern's development, and thus vary greatly in quality and style one to the next (and then to the next again). Whereas the first song in the bunch, No.1 Tief as fern, represents Webern as a seventeen-year-old still for the most part living the life of a young rural aristocrat, the next one, No.2 Aufblick, was composed a year after he moved to Vienna and entered the University as a student of musicology. He had not yet, in 1903 when Aufblick was composed, entered Arnold Schoenberg's circle (that would happen the next year), but there is still a quite noticeable difference in the manners of these two songs, and in Aufblick we can observe some of Webern's early feelings of confusion and musical impotence (he felt plenty of both when it came to composing music, as his personal notebooks and letters readily tell) beginning to dissipate— to be replaced by a perhaps just as frustrating progression towards an as-yet undetermined avant-garde.



Like so many other Webern songs, Aufblick is a setting of a poem by Richard Dehmal. Webern had begun discarding the use of key signatures in works written around this time; Aufblick begins and ends with gestures in the key of G (minor at the start, major at the end), but there is no key signature— neither two flats nor one sharp— to be found. Events in-between the G minor and G major harmonic bookends are sometimes oriented around traditional tonal gestures— for instance that long-held, quietly whispered D major chord in the piano just before the G minor reprise of the opening music midway through the song— but also sometimes slides off in unexpected directions, as at the end, when the final G major chord (in second inversion) comes as quite a surprise!



Dehmal's poem is a wonderfully evocative one, drawing a lover's reflections on a love gone gloomy and sour but then at the end twisting back around, as the sound of bell-choirs is heard ringing from the distant cathedral, to touch on a more hopeful tone, on "bell-choirs, Night, and Love" as the poem reads. This last strain is set by Webern to thirteen bars of quiet, glistening, unhurried music that moves from the dreary chromatic minor-mode arena of the rest of the song through several layers of major-mode harmonies, each given with the solid, bell-like support of perfect fifths in the bass.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide

3.Blumengruß: Der Strauß, den ich gepflücket

The Anton Webern song Blumengruss, posthumously published as No. 3 of the Eight Early Songs for voice and piano, was like its immediate predecessor in that group, Aufblick, composed in 1903. With that, any similarity between the two ends, minus only that degree of kinship that any two works by the same composer necessarily must share, no matter how far separated they may be in time or in musical language. Blumengruss, which is a setting of a Goethe text, might well have been composed 20 or perhaps even 40 years before Aufblick, so far as the matter of musical style is concerned. Save for the few bars leading directly up to its central forte climax, this music is quite un-chromatic; and its rhythms are of the straightforward, repetitive type that Goethe himself approved of (Goethe's correspondence, and also the letters and writings of those who knew him, tell how greatly he disapproved of some of Schubert's more complex settings of his poems). In 1903 Webern was in the first stages of his real development as a composer, seeking out new techniques, new syntaxes. For Aufblick he busied himself trying (not wholly successfully, it must be said) to create a sweeping lyricism in the full-blooded late-Romantic manner, complete with light chromaticism and a few strange twists of harmony. For Blumengruss, on the other hand, he let Goethe's early-Romantic poem stand more or less on its own legs, providing plain music that is both transparent and single-minded—as single-minded as the short poem is itself.

Goethe's Blumengruss [Flower-greeting] has just six lines, which Webern sets as two comparatively short phrases of music. When the singer has finished, the pianist continues onward, providing quiet closing music that fills a full five bars (a considerable portion of a song that in its entirety lasts just 18 bars) and takes us to a tranquil conclusion. The only thing about Webern's Blumengruss that might strike one as even slightly progressive (for 1903) is the lack of a clear tonal framework for the first few bars—it takes a while for the opening phrase to settle down to C major—it sounds at first perhaps like G major, and then moves very gently through A minor. But such tonal uncertainty had been in the bag of composer-tricks for decades by the time Webern applied it here.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide

4.Bild der Liebe: Von Wald umgeben

Composed in September of 1904, around the time that Webern began studying with Arnold Schoenberg, the Early Song for voice and piano No.4, Bild der Liebe [Picture, or Image of Love], is far and away the most harmonically advanced— i.e. chromatically active— of the Early Songs yet heard, assuming that one is listening to them in the order in which they were published (which is not entirely the same as that in which they were composed). Webern originally composed Bild der Liebe with no key signature, but it was transposed up a fifth when the Eight Early Songs were printed, and given a one-sharp key signature. Neither the original lack of key signature nor the posthumous addition of one by publishers, though, should be taken to mean that the piece was firmly "in C major" and then transposed up "to G major": yes, those two keys are touched on, or better yet passed through, a few bars into the respective transpositions of the songs; but when Webern leaves them for more chromatic activity they are never again heard. In its published form, the song ends in a bizarre and colorful C major, which of course means that it originally ended in a bizarre and colorful F major. So much for key signatures!



Bild der Liebe is a setting of a short poem by Martin Greif; its content is as one might imagine from the title: "a blooming tree", representative of "the dream of love", which "vanishes". Webern apparently feared that the dreamy chromaticism of the vocal line would prove too much for some singers, and provided that the whole of the singer's first phrase be doubled in the piano part! But the vocal line is, when all is said and done, actually not of primary importance in the song. Of 21 bars, the singer only sings in 9. The rest is devoted to a miniature instrumental essay, a glimpse, perhaps, of the direction that Webern's music would take under Schoenberg's guidance.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide

5.Sommerabend: Du Sommerabend! Heilig, goldnes Licht!

The poem of Anton Webern's song Sommerabend, No.5 of the posthumously-published Eight Early Songs, was written by poet Wilhelm Weigand; and what a text it is! Here is a bit a nature-glorifying quasi-transcendentalist verse the likes of which composers a generation before Webern could hardly get enough of. Webern seems to thoroughly relish the text, providing music that rocks quietly back and forth in six-eight meter, slipping chromatically from chord to chord— there are times in the two and a half minute song that these incessant emotive changes of harmony (they are not really modulations in the proper sense) sound astonishingly like an excerpt of film music. Webern was hardly the master of subtlety here in these early years, but one wonders if a text like Sommerabend really asks for much subtlety?



There is a great deal to be admired about this 1903 song, far though it is from the kind of music that Webern would devote himself to writing in just a few years. Rich, shining B major is the perfect starting- and ending-point for a song about a "glowing", "golden" summer dusk; and the oscillations of the piano accompaniment within the radiant harmonies are well-designed. Indeed there are too many local modulations for the song's own good; but one would probably object far more to this extravagance were it played out at a garish, loud dynamic— instead, Webern makes the whole song a pianissimo whisper, so that these less-than-balanced tonal fluctuations become just a gentle textural rustling. The song ends with the very same four measures that started it, minus the singer, who has disappeared into "the dark hours of heaven [gleaming] in silence."

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide

6.Heiter: Mein Herz ist wie ein See so weit

One might not guess a happy, peaceful text like the poem set in the Anton Webern song Heiter to have been written by a man so intellectually— and sometimes emotionally— explosive as Friedrich Nietzsche; but indeed it was. The song, whose title is sometimes translated as "Happiness" but perhaps should read "Happy" or "Cheerful" (the word heiter is no noun), has eight short lines of text in two stanzas, set by Webern in 1904 to nineteen measures of music that begin and end in a kind of A major (a non-traditional kind of A major, mind you) but roam far and wide between those opening and closing pillars. The song does, however, bear a key signature, something increasingly absent in the music Webern wrote during these years.



Webern allows Heiter to unfold in relaxed dotted rhythms. Hardly a moment goes by that we are not hearing one simple triadic harmony or another, and yet the impression is entirely one of modernity— these chords, so plain and old-fashioned when examined individually, do not interact in a traditional harmonic manner at all. Sometimes Webern slips chromatically from triad to triad, sometimes he jumps, suddenly, in an unexpected direction towards an unexpected new chord that seems wholly unrelated to the last. The song is proof positive that a piece of music can be almost without local harmonic dissonance and yet still be barely attached to the fabric of traditional tonality. Webern, here in 1904, barely bothers to pay even lip-service to the rules of musical grammar that dominated the thoughts of the generations preceding him. One might even say that the impression of music like this— completely ordinary chords used in a completely extraordinary way— is more shocking than a supersaturation of dissonance, which can eventually begin to sound like a gray wash of sound.



This Nietzsche poem was also set to music by Carl Orff and Kurt Thomas, both times under the title Mein Herz ist wie ein See so weit.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide

7.Der Tod: Ach, es ist so dunkel in des Todes Kammer

Der Tod. Death. A short title, applied by Anton Webern to an equally brief 1904 setting of the eighteenth-century poet Matthias Claudius' poem "Ach, es ist so dunkel in des Todes Kammer" ["Ah, it is so dark in Death's room"]. Claudius, who is famous for having written the poem Der Tod und das Mädchen [Death and the Maiden, set by Schubert], proves himself in this poem a master of concision and compression— qualities, one might add, that in the coming years would become all-important to Webern himself. Such concision can come at the expense of sensible form or flexible ideas. In Der Tod, Claudius avoids these pitfalls admirably— everything in these four lines is imagery and metaphor, and yet we are left with concrete, inescapable, and somewhat disturbing image of a man at the very brink of death realizing that the actual moment has finally arrived. Opinion is divided on whether the 21-year-old Webern's effort to mirror Claudius' poetic concision with a musical concision is altogether successful. But that isn't a new story— there has always been some difficulty accounting for pieces written by Webern before Schoenberg took him under his wing; they are often at once clumsy and brilliantly original.



C minor was Beethoven's doom-and-gloom key, and Webern takes it up for Der Tod. A deep octave C pedal in the piano accompaniment starts up at the beginning and never leaves, seeming almost scornful of whatever the upper voices might happen to be doing at any given moment— and they do roam around the chromatic circle quite a bit, so that dissonances, sometimes wrenching ones (by comparison with most pieces written by Webern between 1902-4) abound.



Like nearly all of the other Eight Early Songs, Der Tod is built as a single climactic arch— moving from pianissimo up to an imposing, loud climax and then dying back down at the end. At the top of this arch a wonderful thing happens: "Death lifts up its heavy hammer", and Webern provides a pair of noisy hammer strokes in the shape of two accented, grace-note-adorned chords in the piano right hand.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide

8.Heimgang in der Frühe: In der Dämmerung

The longest by far of the Eight Early Songs composed by Anton Webern between 1901 and 1904, No.8 Heimgang in der Frühe was also the second-earliest to have been composed. September 21, 1901 is the date Webern noted on the score; it is one of just two of the Eight Early Songs to hail from 1901— the other is Tief von fern, No.1, making the two 1901 songs kinds of bookends for the group (a choice of the publisher, not of Webern, who was dead when these originally independent songs were issued and never likely imagined that they would ever be thought of as a group). Poet Detlov von Liliencron wrote the text of Heimgang in der Frühe. Whereas most of the Early Song poems consist of just eight lines, or even six or even four, Liliencron's poem boasts a hardy 28 lines in seven stanzas, which of course forced Webern to break free from the miniaturist-mold he had adopted for the other songs and draw on a bigger pad, so to speak.



"Early Morning Homecoming" is a good translation for the song's title. Webern's setting fills six pages (the next longest in the Early Songs lasts three) and four minutes (the others last just a minute or two), and explores most of the ways and means of creating the kind of late nineteenth century chromatic inscrutability that was so popular amongst the younger composers of the day. The song has no key signature— Webern didn't really abandon key signatures until after 1903, and then only slowly, one piece at a time; in Heimgang in der Frühe on suspects that the reason there is no key signature is very simple: Webern couldn't figure out what key signature would apply to such a far-flung tonal excursion! One can argue that it begins in a much-modified C major, but Webern himself, still young, still groping, was almost certainly not sure. At any rate, it ends in D flat major, dissolving whatever C might be lingering around.



After an opening ten bars in almost waltz-like three-four meter, Webern adds a beat to the meter for the rest of the song. As the song moves along, Webern opens up the accompaniment more and more; what was at the beginning a relatively plain chordal texture becomes a cascade of voluptuous Romantic counterpoint, almost certainly an effort to mimic the song-style of Richard Strauss.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide