Kinderstück for piano, Op. posth.

The Klavierstucke, which probably dates from 1925, was discovered in Sketchbook I, which also contains the sketches for opp. 17-19. The sketches reveal Webern¹s obsessive attention to detail, even in such a short, ³aphoristic² piece as the Klavierstucke, with its countless changes, deletions, and corrections. His markings in the sketches for this short piece suggest a minuet tempo and the three-part structure; however, the piece was published posthumously in a two-part form. It consists only of two repeated sections of nine and eleven measures each. The Klavierstucke was composed at a crucial point in Webern¹s development as a composer, and at a crucial point in the history of modern music, namely when Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern abandoned atonal composition in favor of Schoenberg¹s 12 tone serialism. The Klavierstucke precedes Webern¹s first true serial 12-tone piece--his op. 20 string trio--and and does make use of a tone row, but also still belongs with the atonal works: its inbetweenness shows Webern struggling with the structural problems of atonal composition, and also the necessity of the move to dodecaphony in order to solve them.