Webern and the Transformation of Nature (review)

Webern and the Transformation of Nature. By Julian Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. [x, 274. ISBN 0-521-66149-8. $64.95.]

For Julian Johnson, Anton Webern's music serves as the vehicle for investigating broader sociopolitical and aesthetic issues. "In fin-de-siècle Vienna," he explains, "one of the principal functions of art and music was to mediate, in aesthetic form, a society's own understanding of itself" (p. 9). One of Johnson's aims is to excavate this process of mediation as it pertains to Webern's music.

Chapter 1, "The Social Construction of Nature," defines nature as mediated by Viennese society and explains Webern's relationship to this idea, which was fraught with contradictions, such as the conflict between the "naturalist" (p. 17) and "rationalist" (p. 17) theories of urban design. According to the "naturalists," the city should approximate nature itself; nature was imported into the city, for instance, through the construction of parks. The more modern "rationalists" asserted that urban edifices constituted the city's natural "landscape" (p. 17). Because the city as "nature" was mediated by such modern technological achievements as the rapid transportation system, one perceived "a net effect of constant, directionless motion" (p. 18). Webern's idea of nature was molded by these conflicting perceptions, but he eschewed popular attitudes by retreating inward and reworking the social construct via art. Influenced especially by Gustav Mahler, Webern developed away from a reverence for the natural world characteristic of his early years toward a "fulfilled spirituality" (p. 41). He sought a profound meaning in nature even while undertaking such commonplace activities as mountain climbing and collecting plants. Johnson suggests that Webern's rational approach to these activities had analogues in his approach to his twelve-tone works. He concludes (chap. 6, "Webern, Nature and Modernism") that Webern's serial works construct a "'paradisial' metaphor" (p. 165), "a globally static but internally active play, a self-contained proliferation which avoids . . . linear, goal-directed discourse" (p. 232). This new idea of nature connects with the modern construction of subjectivity. With obvious debts to Theodor Adorno, Johnson explains that Webern's music "refuses to differentiate the viewing subject over and against the whole, and in doing so simultaneously dissolves and expands the category of the subject" (p. 236). Webern's music nevertheless preserves subjective freedom, in distinct opposition to the ideology of National Socialism.

In chapters 2-5, Johnson employs the semiotic notion of "musical 'topic[s]'" (p. 10)--musical devices that function as signifiers for a far-reaching network of extramusical associations--to argue that Webern's music, whether vocal or instrumental, from his 1899 works predating opus 1 through the Second Cantata, op. 31 (completed in 1943), refer to nature and thus are not abstract in an absolute sense. Webern inherited a maternal conception of nature (chap. 2, "A Maternal Landscape: The Early Works [1899-1905]") whereby nature (i.e., landscape) was viewed as a comforting home where the suffering subject could achieve the completion, unity, and even transcendence for which it yearned. Musical topics associated with these ideas include diatonic harmony within a chromatic context to convey the idea of completion, and "tonic prolongations" to represent "home" (p. 50). As Webern embraced atonality, his maternal conception of nature connected with his memories of his own mother (who died in 1906), the landscape associated with her, and belief in a consoling presence reaching out from the spiritual world (chap. 3, "Paradise Lost: The Dehmel Lieder to Op. 11 [1906-1914]"). Webern's memory abstracted from concrete events to project a utopian idea. Musical topics that survived in transformed versions include the use of a prolonged diatonic chord within a chromatic context to symbolize the utopian goal, and "registral completion" (p. 111), which replaced tonality as the symbol of fulfillment. The works of this period also show Webern's increasing reliance on static forms based on juxtaposition rather than goal-directed narrative forms.

The transformation of Webern's personal version of...