Analysis of Anton Webern’s ‘Zwei Lieder,’ Op. 19

I: Introduction

“Zwei Lieder,” or “Two Songs,” op. 19, is a short piece for mixed choir and five instruments by Anton Webern, set to two poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was composed in 1925-1926; the five instruments are celesta, guitar, violin, clarinet, and bass clarinet, with a choir of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses.

Webern, along with Alban Berg (who composed the opera Wozzeck), was one of the most famous pupils of Arnold Schoenberg (who composed Pierrot Lunaire), these three composers being the most famous members of the Second Viennese School, who used Schoenberg’s twelve-note compositional technique. This technique involves taking the twelve semitones and rearranging them in any order to produce a tone row, or basic set. This tone row becomes the thematic, melodic, and harmonic basis of a composition.

Because the twelve-note system eschews the major-minor system, the resulting music is atonal, and therefore it is an acquired taste, to put it mildly. One must get used to the ’emancipation of the dissonance,’ which is no longer required to be resolved quickly back to consonance, and so the music sounds ‘harsh’ to the uninitiated listener.

When it comes to Webern’s music, I usually prefer to listen to his instrumental works, such as the Symphony, op. 21 (1927-1928), the Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5 (1909), the Piano Quintet (1907), the Concerto for Nine Instruments, op. 24 (1931-1934), and the Quartet, op. 22 (1928-1930), for clarinet, tenor saxophone, violin, and piano. However, since when it comes to my doing analyses of music here on my blog, I prefer to have programmatic content along with the music, I’ve chosen a Webern composition with a text, among his music that I don’t listen to all that often.

Therefore, I’ve chosen to analyze his “Zwei Lieder,” among his least-performed, and therefore least-known, compositions. The reason that this otherwise superb piece of music is so rarely performed is that Webern’s choice of instrumentation is, sadly, impractical from the point of view of setting up performances of it. A choir, combined with the odd assembly of five instruments I mentioned above, all to perform a piece that lasts about two minutes, will be too much trouble for most organizers of concerts to put together.

Such a piece is best performed as a recording, and here is a link to a recording of the piece. Here is a link to the first poem in the original German and in English translation (which I will not be quoting here!); and here is a link to the second poem in the original German and in French translation (which I wouldn’t be quoting here even if I had permission to!).

The text of the two poems, in the original German as well as in English and French translations, can be found also in the booklet (pages 142-143) for the Complete Works of Webern, Opp. 1-31, conducted by Pierre Boulez for Sony Classical. I’ll be using these texts as the basis of my interpretation of the poetry; the websites linked in the previous paragraph are just there for your information, Dear Reader.

II: The Music

The tone row that Webern uses for the setting of both poems is G, B-flat, F-sharp, F-natural, E-flat, A, G-sharp, C-sharp, D, B-natural, E-natural, and C-natural. The “Zwei Lieder,” op. 19, is Webern’s first work to use the same tone row all the way through the entire composition.

A tone row can be played out in four ways: the original order, inversion (upside-down), retrograde (backwards), and retrograde-inversion (both backwards and upside-down). Furthermore, the tone row can be transposed to any key other than the original set of pitches. In the case of the “Zwei Lieder,” Webern transposes the tone row by a tritone, the diabolus in musica.

Now, as Samuel Andreyev demonstrates in his musical analysis of Webern’s piece (and my analysis owes a great debt to Andreyev’s analysis of the piece), one would find it impossible to hear the tone row played out in a clear, linear fashion because Webern breaks up the tone row among the instruments and choir in a way that the ear could never follow, certainly not without reading the score as one is listening.

For a precise demonstration of how the tone row is manifested in the piece, I’ll leave that to Andreyev to explain, since I lack his technical expertise. Instead, I’ll just make some more general remarks about the music.

Instead of the traditional kind of melody, which flows and is linear, having a singing quality, Webern’s concise musical style tends toward punctualism–an isolating of the successive notes through wide leaps, unorthodox uses of duration, dynamics, and attacks that are divorced from conventional ‘expressivity’–and Klangfarbenmelodie, or an assigning of the successive notes of a melody to different instruments. Therefore, melody isn’t perceived as musical lines, but rather as musical ‘dots,’ if you will.

Because of these kinds of innovations in Webern’s music, he has been associated, in retrospect, with the postwar total serialism of composers like Boulez (i.e., his Le Marteau Sans Maître) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (i.e., his Gesang der Jünglinge). Webern’s puncualism and Klangfarbenmelodie have been seen as anticipating the 1950s serializing of not only pitch, but also all the musical parameters as listed in the previous paragraph.

III: The Text

Goethe’s poems are both sets of two four-line verses in trochaic tetrameter (a line has four feet, each of which has a stressed, then unstressed, syllable), with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD. They are vignettes of the beauty of nature, of flowers in bloom or soon to be in bloom. Images or scenes of natural beauty were something Webern always loved, and I understand that even among his instrumental works, there was the inspiration of nature.

His choice of having a mixed choir sing these verses–as opposed to, say, having just one singer–what must have been the main factor in causing the logistical difficulties in having op. 19 performed, must have been of such insistent importance to him, overruling the practical problems that would have forbidden frequent performances of the piece. I’m guessing that the choral singing was meant to give the verses a sense of holiness. For Webern, nature is sacred.

These poems are inspired by Chinese literature; in fact, these two poems are part of a cycle Goethe composed, called Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten (“Chinese-German Seasons and Times of Day”). Chinese literature, all things Chinese, actually, had been quite popular in Europe at the time of his writing, ever since Voltaire‘s time.

The first poem describes narcissus flowers blooming in a garden in rows. The first verse gives us a vivid sense not just of the flowers’ beauty, but also of their ‘innocence,’ ‘purity,’ and ‘modesty.’ Since when is a narcissus modest, I wonder?

Indeed, one thing to keep in mind when interpreting poetry, or literature in general, is that things often aren’t as they seem. We may be reading a beautiful description of nature, but what the imagery is meant to represent may not be all that beautiful…once we have looked beneath the surface.

The narcissus flowers are as white as lilies; they have the purity of candles. Candles may give light, which is inherently a good thing, but the light comes from fire, the fire of the passions, which are anything but pure. Goethe’s word for pure is reine, the same word Heinrich Heine used in “Du bist wie eine Blume” (“You are like a flower”), “So hold und schön und rein” (“So lovely, fair, and pure”), a poem about a woman whose ‘purity’ broke Heine’s heart. ‘Purity’ isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Goethe would have been perfectly aware of the Echo and Narcissus myth, in which the latter broke the former’s heart, and the latter was punished for his vanity by being made to fall in love with the image of his own reflection in a pond, meaning that the handsome youth, in a sense, broke his own heart. In his grief over never being able to have what he saw, Narcissus died and turned into the flower of Goethe’s poem.

Now, obviously neither Webern nor especially Goethe would have known anything about narcissism in the modern psychiatric sense that people today would know of it. The seeds of the personality type, however–the vanity, haughtiness, and pitiless rejection of others–would have been intuited in the mythic character of Narcissus, intuited especially by a poet of Goethe’s stature. So on at least an unconscious level, Goethe must have used the flower as a symbol of sinful pride; Webern must have picked up on this idea–again, at least unconsciously, and reflected it somehow in his music.

Similarly, while Webern would never have consciously thought of the music he’d arranged for the poems as ‘harsh,’ he certainly knew, from the conservative public’s reaction to his atonal works (and those of his modernist contemporaries, like Schoenberg and Berg), that they were perceived that way. And even though his “Zwei Lieder” use softer sonorities, their atonality, dissonance, and wide melodic leaps are all clear signs of musical tension, deliberately used. Therefore this tension, set to these poems, suggests a sensitivity in his mind to Goethe’s expression of an undercurrent of tension in otherwise surface idyllic verses.

Now, I’m about to do a kind of ‘retrospective’ interpretation of these verses, applying a modern meaning to writing that’s showed no knowledge of contemporary ideas. Some of my readers, such as one who commented on my analysis of the Echo and Narcissus myth (link above), would balk at my ‘projecting of modern ways of seeing’ onto old texts, insisting instead that whatever the original meaning there was of the old text is the only ‘correct’ way of thinking about it.

I beg to differ. Just because the writing is old doesn’t mean the interpretation has to be old. The arts are not STEM fields: they don’t have only one correct answer, like 2 + 2 = 4, and an infinitude of incorrect answers. Artists often are reticent about what they’ve created because they want to allow us to find our own meaning in their works. Insisting that the work means only what the artist had originally intended takes all the fun and joy out of experiencing the work.

Another justification I have for interpreting the meaning of a work of literature, film, or piece of music, drawing on elements that came into being long after the work was created, is to give the work a new meaning and relevance for us now, so we can relate to it in our own way and therefore enjoy it far more. Insisting that the work’s ‘ancient meaning’ is its only meaning makes the work dead to us now.

Besides, some themes and ideas are so universal that they apply to all times of history, including those times when people knew nothing of the modern concepts. Just because narcissism wasn’t known as a personality disorder in, for example, ancient Greece, doesn’t mean that narcissists didn’t exist back then, let alone cause pain and suffering to the Echoes of their day.

With this understanding in mind, I can begin to do my interpretation of these verses. We should also keep in mind when Webern set the poems to music: in the mid-1920s, when certain…politically tempestuous…things were going on in Europe, in Germany and Austria in particular. As of the piece’s composition, Hitler would have been released from prison after having served just over eight months of his sentence for the crime of high treason after the failed Beer Hall Putsch. The Nazi Party may not have achieved their immediate goal of taking over the German government, but they did gain national attention and their first propaganda victory, which surely would have gotten Webern’s attention.

As an Austrian patriot, Webern did, for a while at least, have some sympathy for Nazism. By the time the Nazis had come to power in the early 1930s, though, he was growing in opposition to them. He even gave a public speech in 1933, publicly denouncing the Nazis for calling his music, as well as that of Schoenberg and Berg, “cultural Bolshevism” and “degenerate music.” (He was lucky the Nazis didn’t arrest him for this.)

He was certainly never an antisemite. His musical mentor, Schoenberg, was a Jew. He resigned from a position as chorus master for the Mödling Men’s Choral Society in 1926 (the year he finished his “Zwei Lieder”) over his controversial hiring of a Jewish singer, Greta Wilheim, to replace a sick one. So his attitude towards Nazism was complicated.

I’ll now relate these political issues to how I imagine Webern could have read Goethe’s poems. To think that Goethe would have intended the interpretation I’m about to make would be absurd, and I admit I’m stretching things when I make speculations about Webern interpreting them in the way I’m about to describe. But in making this interpretation, I’m hoping not only to make the poems relevant for our time, but also to show that there’s more to them than just a pretty painting of nature in words–there’s a deeper meaning.

These narcissus flowers, white and pure, like stars, are as pretty as lilies. They bow with a modest demeanour. Since, as I noted above, the associations one makes of this flower with vain Narcissus are so obvious, then the flowers appearing so modest must be mere affectation on their part.

The white flowers have a yellow centre with a red rim circling it, glowing love, as the first verse points out. This red around the yellow middle is thus the loving heart of the flowers. This love, affection, and affinity of the flowers is thus a personifying of them…and an idealizing of them.

This idealizing of the narcissus flowers is significant, for as is associated with such flowers, narcissism is all about an idealizing of the self. As is indicated in the second verse, these early narcissus flowers have bloomed in the garden in rows. They are a group symbolizing beautiful and idealized, but also vain, self-important people. They are thus representative of group narcissism.

Now Freud, who discussed how groups of people living in the same community may look down on those outside their circle with contempt, was writing about this issue as an example of group psychology in 1922, which was just a few years before Webern composed his “Zwei Lieder.” I’m not suggesting that Webern read Freud’s work and was influenced by it in setting the poems to music. What I am saying is that we’ve all–at any point in history, even back to Goethe and earlier–sensed the arrogance of the in-group toward outsiders. Parochial, chauvinistic attitudes have existed since time immemorial.

So, is Webern’s choral setting of the poems meant to suggest a holy beauty in these flowers, or a ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude? Webern surely would have been aware of the hyperinflation of Germany in the early 1920s and its effect on the German psyche. This pain is the kind of thing that can drive people to have nationalistic feelings, to looking for a leader who will ‘save the nation’ from its ruin. As we know, some Germans looked to Hitler in the hopes of such a saviour.

I suspect that Webern could have read such a meaning in the poem’s hope that the narcissus flowers know for whom they’re waiting. As they stand in their rows waiting for their idealized leader, they are described in the original German as “so spaliert erwarten,” or “so trellised in expectation.” They’re being held up, as if by a trellis, which implies that they’re “stand[ing] at attention,” as the translation in my CD booklet (page 143) has it.

Narcissism involves an idealizing of another–an idealized parental imago who may mirror back one’s grandiosity, as Heinz Hohut described the relationship, or an idealized political figure–who reflects back one’s own narcissism. This is the true meaning of Narcissus falling in love with his reflection in the pond: the ideal is oneself, yet it’s also out there, another, as Lacan spoke of the ideal-I in the mirror stage. One sees oneself in the idealized other, and hopes to attain that ideal oneself.

So the narcissus flowers, standing at attention in their neatly-arrayed rows in the garden…a kind of Garden of Eden in its idealization?…are like the SA standing at attention before Hitler, whom they wait for, in hopeful expectation, ‘to save’ their nation, while looking down with scorn and contempt for foreign nations and other ethnic groups.

Webern could have made these associations in his mind–consciously or unconsciously–as he read Goethe’s poem, and written the music the way he did in accordance with such a meaning–with the dissonance, atonality, and wide melodic leaps to express his own inner conflicts (should he, in his Austrian patriotism, support fascism, or oppose its antisemitism and rejection of his art?) about the political direction he saw Europe going in at the time.

As for Goethe’s intention, he could have imagined the narcissus flowers standing in an orderly group awaiting a leader of a more general sort, but one who has the same demagogic qualities. This ‘follow the leader’ mentality has always existed, of course, so his poem has a universal relatability in this regard.

Now, the second poem describes sheep leaving a meadow, revealing a pure green of grass. There’s that word, “reines,” or “pure” again: recall what I said above about both the positive and negative feelings that can come from the use of this word.

So, who are the sheep? Are they those who are timid and easily led, as the word is commonly used today to describe people who blindly believe all the nonsense in the mainstream media and follow mainstream politics uncritically? Such a meaning could be too contemporary and too English to be fitting in a reading of such an old, German poem.

Or are the sheep the followers of the Church? Certainly Goethe, as a freethinker, wasn’t fond of the more dogmatic aspects of the Church, and so he probably wouldn’t have thought much of the simple-minded, unthinking flock. The sheep’s leaving the meadow, to reveal the purity of the green, could be indicating an improved world once we’ve been rid of the uncritical believers.

Or are the sheep those who truly abide by the spirit of what it means to be a Christian, as opposed to the mere conformist churchgoers? Not those who say “Lord, Lord,” but those who do good works without regard of reward (Matthew 7:21)? Their leaving the meadow could reveal a grass whose purity is of a more ironic sort.

In any case, the sheep’s absence will result in the glorious blooming of the flowers. This blooming is described as a “paradise” (recall my reference to the Garden of Eden in its idealization). Again, is Webern’s use of a choir to sing these verses in earnest, or is it ironic? And whichever answer may be correct, for which is it in earnest, and for which is it ironic…for the sheep, or for the paradise?

Note that there are parallel themes going on in both poems. There’s an idealizing of the beauty of the flowers, with an ironic undercurrent. By the end of each second verse, there’s a hope or expectation of good which may end up being its opposite.

Hope, in the second verse, spreads a light mist in front of us, implying that what we see is no longer clear because of that hope. What will be true and what we want to be true are often very different from each other.

Similarly, a parting of the clouds should give us clear, sunny skies (‘the fire of the sun’), and therefore clear vision. Just as one hopes that the leader the narcissus flowers are waiting for will be a good one, so does one hope that one’s unobstructed vision will reveal happiness and the fulfillment of one’s wishes.

IV: Conclusion

Among all of the German and Austrian nationalists, like Webern, there was a growing feeling that fascism might fulfill their wishes and give them happiness by restoring glory to their countries. While he felt that national pride and hoped that leaders like Hitler would fulfill those wishes, his continued friendship with Jews, going all the way to the Anschluss and beyond, would have been a source of great conflict for him, not to mention a potential danger.

He surely would have felt that conflict as early as the mid-1920s, when he composed the “Zwei Lieder,” for Hitler had made no secret of his antisemitism, of course, just as he was putting his nationalism on broad display. I believe the second poem’s expression of hope as a mist obscuring one’s vision put Webern’s conflict into words.

Similarly, as I said above, the atonality, dissonance, and wide melodic leaps at least unconsciously expressed his psychological conflict about the growth of European fascism in the 1920s. This musical expression of that conflict extends to the transposition of the tone row by the tritone interval…known significantly as the ‘devil in music.’

So Goethe’s poems teach us that we need to be careful as we look through the mists of hope, as well as to know who we are waiting for. Will we get that happiness, or will we get horror? Are we waiting for a hero, or a villain? In Webern’s case, he got shot and killed by an American soldier in the end, after having been disillusioned by fascism’s bloody failure. Be careful what you hope for…and for whom you are waiting.