Anton Webern - Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen Op. 2 (1908)

Anton Webern (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor. Along with his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern comprised the core among those within and more peripheral to the circle of the Second Viennese School, including Ernst Krenek and Theodor W. Adorno. As an exponent of atonality and twelve-tone technique, Webern exerted influence on contemporaries Luigi Dallapiccola, Křenek, and even Schoenberg himself. As tutor Webern guided and variously influenced Arnold Elston, Frederick Dorian (Friederich Deutsch), Fré Focke, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Philipp Herschkowitz, René Leibowitz, Humphrey Searle, Leopold Spinner, and Stefan Wolpe.

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Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen, for chorus, Op. 2 (1908)

Description by Chris Morrison [-]
Anton Webern met his mentor Arnold Schoenberg for the first time in the fall of 1904. Webern had only started composing about five years before that and, impressed by Verklärte Nacht and other Schoenberg works, he sought the older musician out and became Schoenberg's first private pupil in Vienna. While working on his dissertation on Heinrich Isaac's Choralis Constantinus, Webern worked on several compositions under Schoenberg's supervision, the last of which was the short work for unaccompanied chorus Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen, completed in September, 1908. The poem is by Stefan George, who quickly became a Webern favorite, as he set over a dozen of George's other poems over the next few years (George also provided the texts for Schoenberg's notorious String Quartet No. 2).

As George's poem falls into three four-line verses, so Webern's setting is in three connected sections. The quiet ascending melodic line that opens the work mirrors George's invitation to "take flight in light barks." Gradually the polyphony becomes more chromatic and dense, in four parts with canonic interaction between the men's and women's voices. A moving hush descends at the mention of the "new sorrow" that ensues once one leaves these "tipsy, sunny worlds." Then, after a pause, the setting of the final two lines acts as a sort of reprise of the first section as the chorus sings of the "stille Trauer" (silent sadness) of spring. To help support the chorus' intonation, Webern prepared a spare instrumental backing of violin, viola, cello, harmonium, and piano for the work in 1914. Despite this, and although the work was published in 1921, it wasn't given its first performance until April 10, 1927, and was performed seldom if ever during the remainder of Webern's lifetime.