A Revolution in a Whisper

By Christopher Porterfield

Anton Webern expanded the modem idiom by shrinking it

No more unlikely mountaineer could be imagined. Slight, sedentary, intensely fastidious, bored by hiking, Anton Webern nevertheless trudged determinedly up the alpine slopes of his native Austria. ''From time to time,'' he explained to his friend Alban Berg, ''I must breathe this air. Transparent, clear, pure--the heights.''

For Webern, one of the great innovators of the 20th century, this was a spiritual matter. In every vista he saw a creative idea logically developed. The merest wild flower reminded him of Goethe's ''primeval plant,'' symbol of the unity of all organic life. Most important, his moun tain treks re-enacted his artistic aspirations. More than any composer before or since, Webern worked on the timberline between sound and silence. His austere, rigorously condensed pieces seem to hover in a clear, rarefied ether of their own, like clusters of ice crystals on the point of vaporizing. ''Scarcely audible,'' ''dying away'' are typical directions in his scores.

His longest work, the haunting Cantata No. 2 for voices, choir and orchestra (1943), takes scarcely a quarter of an hour to perform. The shortest of his Three Small Pieces for Cello and Piano (1914) consists of nine measures. His Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913) go by in an average of 40 seconds each--expressing, in the words of his mentor Arnold Schoenberg, ''a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath.''

Compared with Webern, his fellow revolutionaries Schoenberg and Berg were vestigial romantics. They used Schoenberg's twelve-tone system to rework the old, large-scale forms of Wagner and Brahms. Webern used it to abolish those forms, along with the entire principle of elaboration and climax. He let his three-or four-note motives suggest their own, rather static structural implications through intricate counterpoint and variation--not development. ''Once stated,'' he said, ''the theme expresses all it has to say.'' By relating everything else to that theme, he attempted to achieve ''an all-embracing unity.''

This radical method, so little acknowledged during Webern's lifetime, was eagerly embraced by the generation that came after him, the generation of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Even the septuagenarian Igor Stravinsky converted to twelve-tone composition under the sway of ''St. Anton.'' Among lesser composers, instant Webernism--compressed structures, jagged melodic leaps, spare, pointillist orchestration--became a sort of standard, freeze-dried product in the 1950s and '60s. Now that the vogue has subsided somewhat, Webern is in danger of having come and gone as an avant-garde influence without ever being absorbed into the standard repertory. A more definitive assessment is needed.

Thanks to two recent events--the release of a major recording project and the publication of an exhaustively documented biography--fresh new materials for such an assessment are now at hand.

The Complete Works of Anton Webern (Columbia, 4 LPs) lays before us a lifetime of composing in roughly three hours of listening time. (A further set, presumably comprising Webern's juvenilia and unpublished works, is planned for release at a later date.) The generally excellent performances, recorded over a period of 41/2 years under Pierre Boulez's direction, feature the London Symphony Orchestra and such guest artists as Violinist Isaac Stern, Pianist Charles Rosen and the late Gregor Piatigorsky. They supplant in every way the pioneering complete Webern recorded by Robert Craft in the 1950s, also on Columbia. The postman may never whistle Webern's melodies, as Webern predicted. Many listeners may never get past what sounds cryptic and arid to them in his work. But these new discs show to what extent performers have mastered his difficult idiom in the past two decades. Among the highlights: the feathery shading of Soprano HeatheR Harper's pitch in the early songs; the tensile, wire-sculpture precision of members of the Juilliard String Quartet in the String Trio (1927); the transparent textures and rhythmic subtlety of Boulez and the L.S.O. in Variations for Orchestra (1940).

The 803-page Anton von Webern (Knopf) is the magnum opus of Scholar and Archivist Hans Moldenhauer, 72, in collaboration with his wife Rosaleen. The Moldenhauers do not set out to interpret Webern's personality or evaluate his music. But they furnish such extensive extracts from diaries and letters, as well as such detailed ''work histories'' of the compositions, that their valuable book adumbrates the shape of many biographies and studies to come. It also reflects their recovery of a number of Webern manuscripts--characteristically neat, finely etched documents in which individual notes range over the staves with a kind of surreal wit, as in some calligraphic drawing by Paul Klee.

Born in 1883, Webern came of age amidst the last flowering of Viennese culture. He knew the writer Karl Kraus; he was painted by Oskar Kokoschka and treated by Psychiatrist Alfred Adler. Yet by choice and necessity, he remained a soul apart. He lived a frugal, ascetic life with his wife and four chil dren, eking out his income by teaching, by doing hack jobs for his music pub lisher and by conducting. He had a mea sure of success on the podium despite his distaste for the hubbub of the per forming life. He demanded unusual expressive nuances from his players, especially in the pianissimo range; musicians joked that he had invented the pensato, a note so subtle that the per former only thought of it. His conductor's scores were meticulously diagrammed in various colors--road maps, as Robert Craft said, to perfect performances. But the price of perfection could be too high. In 1936, preparing the posthumous premiere of Berg's Violin Concerto, Webern covered only eight bars in two rehearsals. He had to withdraw in favor of a less exacting conductor.

Webern's whole life, Craft commented, was ''a search for the strongest, the most all-abiding rules.'' He believed that only in ''unprecedented shackles'' could ''complete freedom'' be found. He pursued the search in his lifelong veneration of Schoenberg, in his ardent religiosity and in his rigid domestic discipline, which included aligning the pencils on his desk according to length and color. He even carried it into the pages of Mein Kampf. Although Schoenberg and other Jewish colleagues were ostracized, although his own music was denounced by the Nazis as ''cultural Bolshevism,''Webern stuck it out in Austria, transfixed by the ideal of a triumphant German culture. This decision led indirectly to his bizarre death in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II. Visiting his son-in-law in the town of Mittersill, he was somehow shot during a botched black-market raid being carried out by American G.I.s.

For a composer who is perceived as an epochal innovator, Webern never saw himself in opposition to the Austro-German musical tradition that extends from Bach through Mahler. To his composition students he held up Beethoven's sonatas as the supreme models of craftsmanship. The Columbia LPs conclude with a 1932 recording of him conducting his own orchestration of some Schubert dances--a gesture of homage that was not unusual for him. What passed for classicism in his own day, he wrote in one of the letters quoted by the Moldenhauers, ''emulates the style without knowing its meaning . . . whereas I (and Schoenberg and Berg) endeavor to fulfill this meaning--and it remains eternally the same--through our means.'' Webern's meaning may still elude us. But the pure aesthetic integrity of his means continues to beckon us to the heights.

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