Webern, the Major Miniaturist

Peter Greenaway--the British filmmaker responsible for “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”--has a melodramatic theory about a conspiracy against composers, and it starts with Anton von Webern. The composer, whose complete chamber music for strings will make up the program for the Monday Evening Concerts this week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was murdered on Sept. 15, 1945.

The facts, as we know them, are these. Living in occupied Vienna at the end of World War II, Webern had gone to Mittersill, a nearby village in the countryside, to visit his daughter and son-in-law, Benno Mattel, a Nazi and black marketeer. The composer stepped outside to smoke one of Mattel’s illicit cigars after dinner. It was pitch-black, and an American soldier, who had come to arrest Mattel and was possibly drunk, apparently bumped into Webern and saw the flash of light from match or stogie. He shot first and asked questions later, according to testimony from Mattel’s cook; from the thief, Mattel, himself; from the composer’s wife; and from the soldier.

Greenaway has assembled 10 clues that he contends link this murder to nine more murdered composers over the next 35 years, culminating in the shooting of John Lennon in front of the Dakota apartment building in New York City in 1980. The clues include the fact that each composer left a grieving widow, each was killed smoking a cigarette or cigar, each was wearing a hat when killed, each was killed near greenery and so on.

This sounds preposterous, and of course it’s meant to be, since Greenaway has proposed creating an opera about each composer, and the first one he conceived--Louis Andriessen’s “Rosa,” which was premiered by the Netherlands Opera two years ago--is pure fiction. But Greenaway’s conspiracy notions aren’t much more preposterous than much of what has been propounded about Webern over the years.

Musicologists still, for instance, question how an American soldier could mistake a meek, small, weak, 62-year-old intellectual for a hulking, swaggering black marketeer. Yet another important art film director, Jean-Luc Godard, has also pointed his finger at this murder, and in his apocalyptic 1991 film, “Germany Year 90 Nine Zero,” he goes so far as to blame Americans for having killed music because of it.

And then there is the theory, propounded by the controversial British music critic Norman Lebrech and others, that it was the Nazis who killed music by killing composers, mainly Jews, who represented the Romantic tradition, thus leaving a gap that would be filled by modernists after the war. Equally preposterous was the feeling among many modernists that Webern and Webern alone offered the path for music of the future.

The first to pursue the mathematical implications of 12-tone technique developed by his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, Webern became the patron saint of abstraction and the postwar avant-garde. He was to music what Wittgenstein was to philosophy, what Joyce was to literature, what Jackson Pollock was to painting. He was chosen as representative of the ultramodern in its purest, most extreme, most elegant and most advanced form. It is possible to look at all music in the second half of our century as either being directly influenced by Webern, as in the case of the avant-garde, or as being in rebellion against that influence, as in the case of the Minimalists and neo-Romantics.

All of this furor exists over one of music’s most introverted composers and an extreme miniaturist who only wrote about four hours worth of music total, whose entire oeuvre contains far fewer notes than might be found in a single, good-sized opera. The music for string quartet and string trio should take the Quatuor Parisii only about an hour to play on Monday.

Webern’s influence on modern music came about because he was perceived to have gotten beyond a musical tradition that evoked horrors among survivors of World War II. Pierre Boulez has spoken about how little Webern’s music reminded him of the German Romanticism that Hitler had so avidly embraced. Karlheinz Stockhausen took to Webern, he has said, because Webern more than any other composer had gotten away from regular beats, and regular beats to Stockhausen, who had been forced into Hitler’s youth corps as a teenager, sounded like the Nazi army.

For John Cage, Webern was the composer who stripped away so much from his music that therewas room for prominent silence,leaving space for individual notes to breathe. For many academics in America and Europe, Webern’s 31 published works proved an especially lucrative trove, because a career could be sustained analyzing the intricate mathematical watchwork complexity of his meticulously constructed scores.

But now, from the vantage point of the end of the century, Webern is beginning to seem a very different kind of composer than he was once considered to be. More and more, he interests us not as the composer who made the most abstract music--who systematized the 12 tones of the octave, following Schoenberg’s example, and rhythm and timbre as well--but as a Romantic after all, a colorist who wrote exceedingly beautiful scores, scores in which tonal colors are refracted with the dazzling brilliance of light through a diamond.

Webern always saw himself as that kind of Romantic, and it now seems that his extreme tendency toward miniaturization was the result of his own diffidence as much as anything else. He was born in 1883 at the foot of the Austrian Alps in Klagenfurt and grew up with a near mystical attachment to nature. Arnold Elston, the late composer who taught at UC Berkeley, used to regale eager young Webern-obsessed hippies in the ‘60s with stories of taking walks with the composer, and being trapped for hour upon hour as Webern became distracted by a single leaf and its structure. Webern, in the German manner, held art to be the calling of man to the spirit of nature.

It was this attitude of awe in the face of great art that made Webern a somewhat humorless and almost creepily devoted acolyte. He worshiped Mahler; he groveled at the feet of his mentor, Schoenberg, but they also had regular fallings-out, given Webern’s impossibly high demands.

He hated working as an opera conductor, which he did as a young man to earn a living, because he felt that the theater soiled the purity of art. He was an easy victim to calls of German nationalism. He avidly joined up to fight in World War I. He later deluded himself into thinking that there might be something to the Nazi rationale of German ascendancy, even though the Nazis would have none of Webern and banned his highfalutin music as degenerate.

Ultimately it was this perverse Romanticism that, when allied to his diffidence, made Webern’s miniature world so amazingly rich. He started to see the universe in every single note, just as he did in every single leaf. He became, clearly, obsessed.

And for decades after Webern’s death, it was hard for listeners to get past that obsession with structure and detail. Worse, Webern’s sound became associated with the hugely influential set of his music that Robert Craft recorded for Columbia in Hollywood in the mid-’50s. Craft’s predilection was, in the best of situations, for cool, collected performances, and these recordings came out of the worst of situations. A minuscule budget meant that he had to rely on studio musicians and then rehearse music that was unfamiliar in every way during the recording session itself. Still, this is the Webern that just about everybody heard at the time. It is this Webern that changed Stravinsky’s late style of composing. It is this Webern, stiffly played as if each note were carved in inexpressive stone, that made his music seem a kind of tyranny.

But times have changed, in some ways for the better and some ways not. We now have a whole new approach to playing Webern. Pierre Boulez, who also once played Webern with chilly rigor, now conducts this music with a startling warmth and as vividly as if it were Debussy, as evidenced by his new Webern recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon. The Emerson Quartet plays Webern, also on Deutsche Grammophon, with grand Romantic passion and a big, fat sound. The Arditti Quartet plays Webern for Disques Montaigne as music of ethereal, timeless beauty.

But Webern has also become a harder and harder composer for many to play and hear at all. His time frames, ironically, are too short for these fast times, for a society more and more bombarded with information yet less attentive than ever. To really hear Webern, one has to slow down the ear and focus intently on every utterance. It is an exercise in attention. An hour of music, as the Parisii will play Monday, is actually a huge concert.

And in that sense both Greenaway and Godard got things right. There has been a conspiracy, and we have killed something in music along with Webern. The conspiracy is in the attitude that art is casual entertainment, something you can talk through, eat along with, listen to with half an ear, watch with one eye. It is in the culture of the remote control. It is the conspiracy of art as commerce, of art as something disposable.

Webern’s music, on the other hand, is a vestige of a high art that made no compromises. It is a music so concentrated that it can work miracles. And even though it no longer has to be nearly as forbidding as it once was made to seem, it still can hold powerful sway over the imagination.

Just look how Webern has gotten the imagination of two of our most fanciful filmmakers to work overtime.

Now, from the vantage point of the end of the century, Webern is beginning to seem a very different kind of composer than he was once considered to be.

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WEBERN’S STRING ENSEMBLE WORKS, Quatuor Parisii, Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Date: Monday, 8 p.m. Prices: $6-$15. Phone: (213) 857-6010.