Anton Webern was a 15-year-old student at the Klagenfurt Gymnasium when he first tried his hand at composing music in 1899; happily enough, the earliest finished products of this effort—a pair of Pieces for cello and piano—have survived and even been published, despite the irrefutable fact that the music is of inferior stock (it would not be until 1908 that Webern felt he had written a piece worthy to be Opus 1). Webern played cello himself, and his mother was a pianist, so there could be no better combination than cello and piano for the budding musician to explore. We can safely assume that they were performed privately at least once at the Webern family home; but not until 1970—after being forgotten and lost and then, by sheer happenstance, re-discovered in the 1960s—did they first enjoy a public presentation. The cellist on that occasion was the legendary Gregor Piatigorsky.

The two Pieces are fairly slight—the first is 24 bars long, the second 21—but each bears the tempo indication Langsam [slow] and thus they are not so brief as a passing glance might imply. The first is in G major and begins with a two-bar piano introduction. The cellist then begins to sing a tune that is ever-so-gently impassioned—the melody roams up and down the fingerboard on lyric wings, but avoids the baser delights of Romantic self-indulgence (perhaps by choice; perhaps because Webern had not yet the technical means to write such music!). This music is light and delicate, even when the dynamic soars up to fortissimo midway through. The piano is not relegated entirely to a simple harmonic backdrop: there is some ambitious (for a beginner like Webern) contrapuntal interplay as we go along.

The second piece is in F major. In it, the accompaniment is simpler (save for a three-measure fortissimo outburst in the unlikely key of G major) and generally not so integrated with the melody. The cello melody is, on the other hand, just as attractively composed as that of the previous piece, perhaps even more so. And the climax drawn just before the above-mentioned piano outburst is, if not masterly, by no means incompetent—there is evidence enough of a real talent here, waiting, watching, learning.

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