Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6

Webern wrote the Six Pieces for Orchestra in 1909, in the months after his mother's death, and the cycle follows that experience: the fourth piece is a funeral march built over a slow crescendo of percussion that ends without resolution. Schoenberg conducted the first performance in Vienna on 31 March 1913, at the concert that broke up in fighting and became known as the Skandalkonzert. The original scoring calls for a very large orchestra that is almost never used at full strength; Webern reduced it in 1928, and both versions are played.