German Dances

Schubert wrote the twelve German Dances D 820 for piano in 1824, and the manuscript then stayed unknown for more than a century. Anton Webern came upon it in 1931, orchestrated the set and conducted the first performance in Vienna, treating Schubert's small pages with the transparency he brought to his Bach arrangement of the same years: flutes, clarinets, horns and strings, and no thickening of the harmony. The result is a rare instance of a serialist composer working entirely at the service of another man's dance music.