“Consider,” wrote Arnold Schönberg in the preface to Anton Webern’s three-and-a-half-minute 6 Bagatellen op. 9, composed in 1913,“what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. Every glance can be extended into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single indrawn breath – such concentration can only be present when there is a corresponding absence of self-indulgence.”