“Preludes to What?” The Many Worlds of the Piano Miniature
Richard Bratby
The World in a Dewdrop The art of the miniature contains multitudes. “The world in a dewdrop” was how it was described by the Viennese cultural historian Hilde Spiel, and that idea—that a small artistic form can distil vast truths—was elegantly articulated by the great Viennese essayist (and friend of Alban Berg) Peter Altenberg. “I put store in the little things of life, in neckties, parasol handles, cane handles, discrete remarks, pearls that roll under the table and no-one ever finds!” he wrote in 1909. “The momentous things have no significance at all!” Did Arnold Schoenberg have Altenberg’s words in mind when, in 1924, he wrote a preface to the newly published score of Anton Webern’s Six Bagatelles of 1913? They had frequented the same cafés, after all. Certainly, in doing so, he neatly summarized Webern’s mature aesthetic—as well as an entire philosophy of the artistic miniature: “Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. You can extend every glance into a poem, each sigh into a novel. But to express a whole novel in a single gesture, a joy in a single indrawn breath—such concentration is only possible when there is a corresponding absence of self-indulgence.” Novels, poems: such are the worlds that have been perceived to lie behind the few perfectly-chosen notes of a musical miniature. By the time of Webern’s Variations of 1936, the idea was so well- established that a set of variations—the form which, in the hands of Bach and Beethoven, could fill more than an hour—could plausibly
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