Langsamer Satz

This
work was written when Webern was studying under Schoenberg, who was 9
years older than him. Schoenberg had written his first string quartet
in 1897 followed by Verklärte
Nacht two
years later. Webern studied with him from 1904-1908 during the period
when Schoenberg wrote his first two published quartets including the
intoxicating ‘air
of another planet’.
Webern was naturally a few steps behind the master and his quartet
writing of 1905-6 took the late romantic style of Verklärte
Nacht as
his starting point. So with the gorgeous Langsamer
Satz we
are still a long way from the brevity and compression that he was to
develop only a few years later. Here we still have rich late Romantic
flowing melodies looking back to Mahler, Richard Strauss and Brahms
as well as his mentor. Commentators looking forward to the
extraordinary achievements of his maturity tend to be dismissive of
this early fragment but audiences never fail to be moved by the
beauty of the melodic ideas and the pathos of the dying fall in the
coda.