- Written between 1911-1913, Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra are a series of five miniature character pieces. Just as the listener begins to gain a sense around one piece, it dissipates into the next one.
- Webern later attributed the following titles to each of the Five Pieces for Orchestra:
- Urbild (“Archetype”)
- Verwandlung (“Metamorphosis”)
- Rückkehr (“Return”)
- Erinerung (“Recollection”)
- Seele (“Soul”)
- The titles weren’t meant to offer programmatic meaning but rather indicate the composer’s emotions and images brought up while composing these pieces.1
- Among others, this work demonstrates Webern’s developing proclivity for pointillism, a technique that would eventually be largely associated with the composer in which the pitches of a melody are presented as isolated points of sound rather than as a continuous melodic line.
Sources
- Willi Reich, “Anton Webern: The Man and His Music,” Tempo, no. 14 (1946): 8–10, http://www.jstor.org/stable/943713.
Cut IDs
24730