Webern's Three Songs after Texts by Ferdinand Avenarius were composed over a span of several months from the latter half of 1903 to April 1904. These songs are among the very last Webern pieces to appear before the composer headed to Arnold Schoenberg for lessons. They are the works of Webern the doctoral student in musicology at the University of Vienna, a man of twenty or twenty-one years who would before long abandon musicology forever, and instead inscribe his name on the annals of conducting and composing. Webern might not yet have been under Schoenberg's wing when he wrote the Three Avenarius Songs; but he most certainly knew the man's music, and the Avenarius Songs are, in a way, connected to Schoenberg. By 1903-4, Webern was applying a thick chromatic veneer to his music, a veneer modeled closely after the chromatic antics contained in Schoenberg works like Verklärte Nacht (1899) and Pelleas und Melisande (1902). The young Webern's skill can hardly, at the time of the Avenarius Songs, be said to approach that of Schoenberg in those same years. But their intents were much the same: Webern, even before officially becoming a student of Schoenberg's, was already following in the older man's footsteps. He would continue to do so, sometimes to an almost slavish degree, for the rest of his life.



The three Avenarius poems chosen by Webern for the three songs are all intensely emotional. They are brief but dense fusions of earthly love and divine joy— a blend of romance, camaraderie and religion that must have been particularly appealing to the young, deeply emotional, and quite religious Webern. The three songs are as follows: 1. Gefunden [Found, 1904]; 2. Gebet [Prayer, 1903]; and 3. Freunde [Friends, 1904]. Gefunden. The last song is the longest by a fair margin— it lasts almost three minutes, whereas the other two each fill less than two. It can be quite a shock to here this music right before or after some of Webern's later music: here all is seamless, flowing, legato, rich, wide of textural and dynamic compass—not at all chiseled into small, quiet, inscrutable gestures the way so much of Webern's later music is. All three songs are tonal; but the tonality of each fluctuates a great deal, and in none of them can the listener really be sure what key is operating until well into the song. Webern purposefully obscures the harmonic starting-points by saturating the opening gestures with diminished intervals.



The Avenarius Songs were never published during Webern's lifetime, as indeed no Webern music written before the Passacaglia, Op.1 of 1908 was. Not until the early 1960s, almost two decades after Webern became a very unexpected casualty of World War II, were they picked up, thrown together, premiered and printed.



© All Music Guide