# Webern: Cantata #2 op. 31



## soni (Jul 3, 2018)

Webern's Cantata #2 op. 31 is currently on the 77th tier of the Talk Classical community's favorite and most highly recommended works.

Wikipedia and Trout haven't done anything on this yet unfortunately 

*What are your views on this work? Do you like it? Love it? Hate it?* This is one of my personal favourite works of all time! There's something beautiful and ethereal about this piece I feel. *Webern fans, what are your favourite moments of the piece?* I'm struggling to decide because there's so much amazing in it, but the dramatic third movement is definitely a highlight for me. There is also a very beautiful sonority which appears in the fifth movement, when the soprano descends by a perfect fourth followed by a perfect fifth. The sixth movement is awesome too! In fact, I love the entire piece 

Listening on YouTube:


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

It's a great piece. I wish he would have lived longer. He was heading in an interesting direction.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Nice thread! 

I've heard two recordings of this work, both by Boulez (one on Sony and one on DG). It is definitely a work I need to revisit. 

I look forward to seeing what other people have to say about this work.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Can someone post a translation of the poem? I have no idea what they’re singing about!

I bought Hans Moldenhauer’s biography of Webern hoping it would have some ideas about his religious and philosophical beliefs, but it has proved a bit disappointing in that respect. I assume the cantata is a bit “spiritual”


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

Mandryka said:


> Can someone post a translation of the poem? I have no idea what they're singing about!
> 
> I bought Hans Moldenhauer's biography of Webern hoping it would have some ideas about his religious and philosophical beliefs, but it has proved a bit disappointing in that respect. I assume the cantata is a bit "spiritual"


I've got the booklet right here, I'll type it up after work unless someone beats me to it.

How is that book, outside of your disappointment with the religious side of things? I just bought Webern Studies, edited by Kathryn Bailey, but it seems to be more musicology than biography. Still excited to delve into it.

Re: OP, as much as I love Webern, this is a work that is still quite mystifying to me. I will have to listen to it after work.


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## soni (Jul 3, 2018)

flamencosketches said:


> Re: OP, as much as I love Webern, this is a work that is still quite mystifying to me. I will have to listen to it after work.


I recently worked through the complete works of Webern, and my experience was that at first the Second Cantata was among his most difficult works to appreciate, but after repeat listenings it turned out to be his very best, at least in my opinion.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

soni said:


> I recently worked through the complete works of Webern, and my experience was that at first the Second Cantata was among his most difficult works to appreciate, but after repeat listenings it turned out to be his very best, at least in my opinion.


The first is still very challenging for me.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

flamencosketches said:


> How is that book, outside of your disappointment with the religious side of things? I.


Unread!

Rocncnskcnsndkjcn


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## soni (Jul 3, 2018)

Mandryka said:


> The first is still very challenging for me.


The First Cantata has some similarities with the Second, but is more joyful. I love both Cantatas equally, but I think the Second is the more profound of the two. Das Augenlicht is also highly recommended.


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## Janspe (Nov 10, 2012)

soni said:


> Das Augenlicht is also highly recommended.


I'm glad you mentioned this piece, it's a fine work but I feel like it doesn't get mentioned too often in Webern-related discussions.

For some time I've felt like I might have a slight preference towards the first cantata, but yesterday I revisited the 2nd (inspired by this thread, thank you!) and was reminded what a bloody great work it is. In general I wish that Webern had written more, _much_ more for large-scale vocal ensembles. Such a terrible shame that he died so early!


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Not for me. I find this sort of vocal writing - the fragmented, ejaculatory phrases, with their constant reaching for extremes of range - mannered and tiresome. It strikes me as the empty shell of Expressionism. Erwartung, Pierrot, Lulu and Wozzeck needed such gestures; here they seem to have become a mere style. Nothing in this would draw me back for a second hearing.


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## Janspe (Nov 10, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Not for me. I find this sort of vocal writing - the fragmented, ejaculatory phrases, with their constant reaching for extremes of range - mannered and tiresome.


Just out of interest: how do you feel about Webern's purely instrumental writing?


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

When listening to later Webern I hear a composer increasingly painting himself into a corner by his unyielding adherence to the strictest of procedures which led to works having short running times. The second cantata is approx. 15 minutes in length - epic for Webern the Serialist standards - so perhaps he was on the verge of finding a way through the woods.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

elgars ghost said:


> When listening to later Webern I hear a composer increasingly painting himself into a corner by his unyielding adherence to the strictest of procedures which led to works having short running times.


Would you say the same of Hugo Wolf? The Italian Songbook?

I think you have a distorted view of how long a piece of music should normally be. I know that in the c19 people wrote long pieces, but that's not the norm. The average motet or toccata lasts less than 10 minutes.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> the fragmented, ejaculatory phrases,.


There's something interesting going on there, the rejection of long phrases. Speech like singing, maybe. I don't know. Anyway, I would say that the normal conservatory way of approaching Wagner singing, for example, or Liszt singing, are no less



Woodduck said:


> mannered


One person's



Woodduck said:


> tiresome..


is another persons not


Woodduck said:


> tiresome..


For me, nothing is more mannered and tiresome than Elton John.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Mandryka said:


> I think you have a distorted view of how long a piece of music should normally be. I know that in the c19 people wrote long pieces, but that's not the norm. The average motet or toccata lasts less than 10 minutes.


Well, rightly or wrongly I've always assumed Webern's pieces were as short and concise as they were partly because he never repeated himself but with the methods he used isn't it possible that he could eventually have run out of permutations? The cantata was long compared to much of Webern's other work, which made me wonder if he had found a different, more expansive (for want of a better word) way of expressing himself.

Unless anyone posts in the meantime I will put the text of the cantata up in about half an hour.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

elgars ghost said:


> Well, rightly or wrongly I've always assumed Webern's pieces were as short and concise as they were partly because he never repeated himself but with the methods he used isn't it possible that he could eventually have run out of permutations? The cantata was long compared to much of Webern's other work, which made me wonder if he had found a different, more expansive (for want of a better word) way of expressing himself.
> 
> Unless anyone posts in the meantime I will put the text of the cantata up in about half an hour.


I must say, I find the question how a composer knows when to stop a really interesting one, I don't have the answer!

(Similar question about painting.)


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

*I*

_The world, though silent, is always full of colours so long as the sun shines.
The nightingale, when at night no glimmer of colour any longer gleams, weeps for joy.

Then when nothing more arrests the eye, everything resounds,
And brilliance floods into the ear.
When the mobile colouration disappears, all that moves emerges in sound._

*II*

_Buried deep, innermost life sings in the beehive in the silence of midnight,
Because it still brings to it tidings
That diligence makes sweetness from motley diversity.
The beehive, the white tent of stars, 
Is densely bathed in the sweet light of creation.
In it revolves a world of each little bee
Before the swarm breaks out into eternal dawn.

The heart, the smallest hive, surrounds all the others.
Its honey is gathered by the one beekeeper
Who loves the sweetness of pure love that he dispenses without reserve._

*III*

_To draw from heaven's springs the waters of the Word is to ring
When thus the human hand draws pitchers of sound.

We want to ring all bells, the heart, O men!
Never through eternities of time, never let their peal be silenced!

Love must now ring like a storm-bell!
It must not come sluggishly and wearily,
No, it must stir in the air, touching in innermost sleep.

It must come through densest darkness and lay the dead to rest, 
Watch where life still grows to awaken it there._

*IV*

_Through space I carry the trees' lightest burden: their fragrance.
On softest breath I bring you, from afar, the lime-tree's essence._

*V*

_Kindly is the Word that questions us on our love for it.
"Be not afraid, it is I",
Comes a consoling voice through the darkness
That is in our midst when we are at peace.

What then can there be among us other than the Word?
Because it fell silent on the Cross we must follow it;
Our breath follows it in all of the gravity of bitterness,
Yet when it sounds again at early dawn, 
We all gladly turn to it as the elect.

Kindly is the Word.
And when you know that it knows all about you
Then you know it: that pains you more than death
When a cloud of hostility, the mother of tears, 
Extends between you and it and creates a chill._

*VI*

_Delivered from the womb in God's springtime,
Arriving bare to star and man and tree
From the Great One to greatness.

A life is given to the light of the world;
It must be lived again, placed before the gaze of him
Who can release us from night.

He can hold heaven and lead to the greatest light, 
Because a little child speaks, 
The basic powers of love form us from the bosom of peace._

Hildegard Jone


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## soni (Jul 3, 2018)

elgars ghost said:


> Well, rightly or wrongly I've always assumed Webern's pieces were as short and concise as they were partly because he never repeated himself but with the methods he used isn't it possible that he could eventually have run out of permutations? The cantata was long compared to much of Webern's other work, which made me wonder if he had found a different, more expansive (for want of a better word) way of expressing himself.
> 
> Unless anyone posts in the meantime I will put the text of the cantata up in about half an hour.


I've always found Webern's brevity to be one of his best features, along with the intimacy and symmetry of his music. Take for example the Concerto for Nine Instruments - this piece is such a masterwork _because_ it is so short - he manages to write a 5-minute concerto on the same level as many of the great classical concertos of the past - particularly in the 3rd movement, where it takes 50 seconds for him to build up to an incredible climax.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Well I’ve now followed the cantata with the text. It just raises the question, what is the relationship of the music to the poem? I can’t answer that question.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Well I've now followed the cantata with the text. It just raises the question, what is the relationship of the music to the poem? I can't answer that question.


There is an insightful and rather detailed discussion of the relationship between Webern's music and Jone's poem starting on page 181 of Julian Johnson's _Webern and the Transformation of Nature_.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Mandryka said:


> There's something interesting going on there, the rejection of long phrases. Speech like singing, maybe. I don't know. Anyway, I would say that the normal conservatory way of approaching Wagner singing, for example, or Liszt singing, are no less [mannered].


I was speaking of the musical style, not the singer's vocalism. Such fragmentary vocal lines, making wide leaps to extremes of range in a way that would be dramatic if the music itself were actually dramatic, has good reason to exist in _highly_ dramatic works such as Berg's operas, or Schoenberg's _Erwartung_ (or even in Wagner's Kundry), where the characters are expressing extreme mental states. I don't have the text of the cantata handy, but I'm pretty sure from the general tone of the music that we aren't dealing with desperate emotions here. That style of melody, divorced from the necessity of expressing such states, is pretty much the opposite of song, and I notice it in a lot of post-tonal music, both vocal and instrumental, to the extent that I would describe it as a Modernist cliche. Maybe it wasn't yet a cliche when Webern used it, but after decades of atonal serialism it seems tired and empty to me, an extreme effect without sufficient cause - in other words, a mannerism.

(What's the normal conservatory approach to singing Wagner and Liszt?)



> For me, nothing is more mannered and tiresome than Elton John.


I guess that at his advanced age Mr. John could be doing an imitation of himself.  BTW, did you know that he has classical training and enjoys classical music?

ADDENDUM: I now see that elgars ghost has posted the text of the cantata. After hearing Webern's music, I find the poem more than a little surprising. It's something Mahler should have set - a "Symphony of a Million," maybe.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

..................................


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Janspe said:


> Just out of interest: how do you feel about Webern's purely instrumental writing?


Not fond of it, but this kind of fragmentary melody doesn't annoy me as much when it's purely instrumental. See my reply to Mandryka in post #22.


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