WEBERN - VARIATIONS OP 27 FOR PIANO

Anton Webern's late instrumental works have always been admired as examples of a systematic, innovative application of twelve-tone technique. From our perspective today, however, the reliance on older models of form and movement-structure, though of course never intended by Webern as a form of "restoration," seems equally important. How closely these aspects are interrelated can be seen from the example of the "Variations for Piano", Op. 27, which were written in 1935/36. On the one hand, Webern has in this work to a certain extent carried Schoenberg's technique of "composition with twelve tones related only to one another" to its logical end in that he derived all of the musical themes "directly"- without the intermediate step of clearly delineated thematic figures and treatments thereof - from the abstract sequence of intervals of a basic tone row; for good reason it has been said that the process of variation has itself been made the subject of the composition. On the other hand, in