"What he shares with Mahler is the tone of remoteness from the world, the gesture of fighting a losing battle, despite the contrast between Mahler's vast canvases and his own minimal ones, between the threefold fortissimo and the threefold pianissimo. This pianissimo should not be taken as it sounds, in other words as the reflex of the most delicate stirrings of the soul, even though it is that as well.  Frequently, and especially in the Orchestral Pieces but also in some passages of the succeeding Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op.7, and the Pieces for Cello and Piano Op. 11, this threefold pianissimo, this almost inaudible sound, is nothing but the threatening shadow of an infinitely remote and infinitely more powerful din. This was the sound of the rumble of artillery from Verdun in 1916 that carried as far as a forest avenue near Frankfurt. Here Webern comes close to Georg Haym and Georg Trakl, the prophets of the war of 1914; the falling leaf becomes the harbinger of catastrophes to come. " - Theodor Adorno 'Anton Webern' in Sound Figures

Anton Webern, Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op.6

" A last iteration of the ten note-collection occurs in measure 30, and percussion crescendo through measure 41 - torn of in silence after the triple forte is reached. This is the stifled, musical scream to which the entire work builds....

...

I would like to suggest that the piece of music under discussion embodies a traumatic dimension. .... The pervasiveness of mutes is crucial in the work at hand; it is as if the entire content of the piece were heard in an interior space blocked from open expression. And although fortissimo, not all instruments of the penultimate cluster are playing; it is an interior scream" - David Schwarz on Webern, Opus 6, No. 4 "Marcia funebre"

 The Death of Anton Webern

 I

b. December 3 1883
Brown dominant, cigars, mahogany,
sepia afternoons with umber shades.
Contralto darkness of sentiment, Love
leads to marriage, and mahogany, cigars.

The evening shadows in the forest spread
as the fated couples move side by side
to the cadence of appropriate resolution

In the half light of the middle distance
someone is preparing to scream

II

yaaaaaaaaaereeooobhbhbh
uuuuuuuuuh
unh unh aauaugh
ohhoooooooooheeee
ggggggggghaaaeee
aaaahuaaaahuaaaahuaaaa

III

The men and women enter the streetcar
multiple as statistics, paticular as portraiture. Factories
turn them out at the end of the day,
and in the morning they rise from bed
to take their places at the machines.

The wheels follow the inevitable tracks
as evening performs its metamorphosis.
A boy enters the car, an old man leaves
The crowd inside the glass observes the faces
that move along the darkening street outside.
A hundred strangers going home together

-- David Helwig