"It is always all over before it starts" was the reaction of Webern's father upon hearing the Four Pieces, Op. 7 for the first time. While brevity had always been a hallmark of Webern's style, the Four Pieces are truly extraordinary in their restraint: The shortest is only nine measures in length, the longest, twenty-four. Apparently, even Webern himself felt some uncertainty about the scale of these works. Some early manuscripts bear the designation Op. 7, No. 1, suggesting a possible future expansion of the set. The brevity of the Four Pieces is especially striking in light of the grand proportions that were so much a part of the contemporaneous musical aesthetic. In 1910, the year in which Webern wrote the Four Pieces, Stravinsky completed The Firebird, Strauss completed Der Rosenkavalier, and Mahler's Symphony No. 8 (1906) received its first performance.

The concentrated aesthetic of the Four Pieces markedly alters one's perception of their durations. Dynamics, motivic shape and length, and gestures are all expressed in the sparest language possible. Musicians who worked with Webern were constantly surprised by the results he was able to achieve by such modest means. Peter Stadlen, who premiered Webern's Piano Variations (1935 - 36), recalled, "As he sang and shouted, waved his arms and stamped his feet in an attempt to bring out what he called the meaning of the music, I was amazed to see him treat those few scrappy notes as if they were cascades of sound." The violinist Felix Galimir, who prepared the Four Pieces under Webern's supervision, concurred: "I remember at first our shock, a reaction almost prompting us to ridicule the sparsity of notes in each composition. After we worked with him for a little while, though, the proportions were so perfect that all length or shortness vanished. Of course, the minutest details were of greatest importance. How expressive every little miniature phrase became when he sang it."

The Four Pieces are so concentrated that, as Theodor Adorno aptly noted, "their continuation would have been a sigh alone." This remark is not far-fetched, for added to the pianississimi in the third piece is kaum hörbar ("scarcely audible"). Such markings on Webern's part led some of the composer's friends to invent the indication pensato ("thought of").



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