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Inside Webern's workshop: a glimpse of op.9 no.6 in the making

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2009

Benjamin K. Davies
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Extract

The Webern Collection of the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel holds a fair copy of an early version of the Drei Stücke für Streichquartett (1913), comprising the song ‘Schmerz, immer Blick nach über’ together with what later became numbers 1 and 6 of the Sechs Bagatellen op.9. This document is highly interesting on many counts: here I will mainly discuss one, the existence of a discarded ending to the third piece (later op.9 no.6). This passage is heavily blacked-out in mauve pencil in the manuscript, but the notes, dynamics and indications can be discerned with a strong light and magnifying glass.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 222 , October 2002 , pp. 2 - 8
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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References

1 The document is contained in File 28. The author wishes to thank the Sacher Stiftung and Dr. Felix Meyer for permission to examine the original manuscript.

2 This MS was discussed by Regina Busch in ‘Octaves in Webern's Bagatelles’ (Tempo 178, September 1991), where she notes: ‘The earlier version of bars 7 to 9, which had been obliterated by heavy crossing-out in blackish-violet, has not yet been deciphered.’ Fig.2 of her article reproduces part of Webern's MS (corresponding to the second system of my Ex.1) showing one of the blacked-out bars.

3 The bars corresponding to the published version are given as 1 to 9, while those of the discarded ending are numbered 7 A to 11 A.

4 Pitch-register class: middle C is C4, the note immediately below it is B3.

5 A later fair copy, also in the Sacher Stiftung, of the same pieces but grouped as in op.9, differs from both this version and the published one in similar sorts of details.

6 However the later fair copy has a double sheet used as a cover that might originally have been for these three pieces, since it announces 3 Sätze für Streichquartett, with the number first altered to 2 (the song suppressed) then altered again to 6. Beneath this title and the composer's name is a veritable labyrinth of alterations and crossings out as Webern sought to allocate these pieces a grouping and an opus number. The chronological order appears to be as follows:

1. op.3No.3

2. op. 5 III Teil

3. op. 5 No.2 (also heading the first page of the score)

4. op. 7 No.2

5. op. 9

The second page carries the dedication 'z(um) 2.VII.1913', Webern's wife's birthday.

7 This conception of the set thus corresponds to the first or second opus numbering in the list in footnote 6 above.

8 Schriflen 1966–1995, Breitkopf, and Härtel, , p. 42Google Scholar.