Webern's Lost Cello Sonata – II

Chapter 3 builds on the essentially descriptive harmonic work performed in Chapter 2. The author offers an interpretation of the form of Webern's Cello Sonata (1914) in light of their foregoing harmonic classification. An account of the work's ‘two-dimensional sonata form’ is provided, uniting miniaturist fin-de-siècle impulses with tools from across the landscape of the ‘new Formenlehre ’. However, this particularly ambitious close reading raises conflicts of seemingly irreconcilable status with regard to the piece's harmonic ‘quality’. Two competing theories of ‘quality’ – one after Joseph Straus, the other after Anthony Pople – are thus played against each other to entertain the possibility that the striking octatonic near-centre of the Cello Sonata might be heard as both tensile, in one Tristan -esque sense, and relaxed, in another. The chapter concludes by musing on the poietic-esthesic distinction, as outlined by French Semiotic Theory, in regard to pitch-collectional genera. It is argued that the collectional categorisations pursued in Chapters 2–3 are to be understood – in Webern – less as scalar modes and more as particular metrics that enunciate a preoccupation with different kinds of harmonic symmetry.