Im Sommerwind

The piece unfolds as a single continuous span, without breaks or separate movements, so listeners should simply settle in for one unbroken arc of sound. It opens quietly, with strings and woodwinds suggesting a still, warm afternoon, the kind of hushed orchestral haze associated with late Romantic tone poems. From this quiet opening, the music gradually swells, with rising string lines and glowing brass suggesting movement, perhaps wind stirring across a summer field, giving the piece its title. Listen for waves of orchestral color that build to a full, warm climax roughly midway through, horns and strings blooming together, before the texture thins again. Woodwind solos surface periodically, offering brief, songlike moments above the shifting harmonies. Toward the close, the energy subsides, the orchestration lightens, and the piece settles back into the hushed calm of its opening, ending softly rather than with a dramatic flourish. First time listeners should not expect the spiky, fragmented Webern of his later, more famous atonal miniatures. This is lush, tonal, and immersive, closer in spirit to Richard Strauss or early Schoenberg than to the pointillistic style Webern would soon develop.

Webern composed Im Sommerwind in 1904, while still a student, inspired by a pastoral poem by Bruno Wille. It belongs to his earliest creative period, before he began studying with Arnold Schoenberg and long before he developed the extremely condensed, atonal style for which he is best known today. The score remained unpublished and unperformed during Webern's lifetime. It resurfaced decades after his death and received its premiere only in 1962, in Seattle, conducted by Milton Katims. Since then it has occasionally appeared on orchestral programs as a striking contrast to Webern's later, more austere works, offering audiences a glimpse of the lush late Romantic idiom he was capable of before moving in a radically different direction.