"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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delicate they can only be thought” (line 29). Webern refers to art in general. In his
opening ‘speech’ he says: “I am Anton. As in Chekov” (line 7) and, in closing, states:
“my small pieces will live” (line 30). Here the use of the future tense “marks both the
composer’s confidence and the poet’s ambition” (Morphet 206).
Webern’s music was revolutionary and misunderstood. In the poem he is made to
recount how he suffered a figurative “fusilade” (line 27) of criticism and mockery. He
says he does not care. Because “the notes [are] so delicate they can only be thought”
(line 29), his real message lies behind or beyond the music. Through his revolutionary
“twelve-tones” (line 30) or serial technique he was able to blend or “temper” his world,
able (perhaps) to communicate the vision of interconnection he found in the Austrian
Alps when he saw “in physical nature … the highest metaphysical theosophy” (Sudie
279).
The poem is written in six, six-line stanzas with a skeleton rhyme scheme where
lines one and five of each stanza either rhyme or half-rhyme. This structure may be a
half-echo of Webern’s serial technique, also known as twelve-tone which he developed
along with his fellow musicians, Schoenberg and Berg (Sudie 270). The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians attempts to describe Webern’s style:
Those broad features which remain constant – brevity, the importance of silence,
the usually restrained dynamic range, clarity of texture and simplicity of harmony
– do not go far in explaining what makes up Webern’s style. (Sudie 278, my
italics)
The poem refers to Webern’s simplicity and sparseness: “Even now I care naught for
such dense cluttered lives.” (line 10).
Webern’s source of inspiration was nature, which he had learnt to appreciate as a
boy in the Carinthian Alps. In 1919 Webern wrote to Berg:
I love all nature, but, most of all, that which is found in the mountains. For a start
I want to progress in the purely physical knowledge of all these phenomena …
Experimenting, observing in physical nature is the highest metaphysical
theosophy to me. (in Sudie 279)
The poem echoes this philosophy: “I touched my pencils to varihued manuscripts /
spare beauties in profile like these Austrian peaks” (lines 10-12).
The next stanza explains that his “bagatelle” or small pieces of music are
“enfolded essences” (line 16), delivered through the technique of “variation and space
counterpoint and silence” (line 17). The music never developed into something beyond