Anton Webern - Langsamer Satz {Slow Movement}

Composer: Anton Webern (3 December 1883 -- 15 September 1945)
Performers: Emerson String Quartet
Year of recording: 1992

Langsamer Satz {Slow Movement} for string quartet, written in 1905.

One movement: Langsam, mit bewegtem Ausdruck

Webern composed this work for string quartet in June 1905, but it wasn't publicly performed until 27 May 1962, in Seattle (Washington, USA) by the University of Washington String Quartet. The Langsamer Satz (literally "Slow Movement") originated during a hiking trip in Lower Austria that Webern took with his cousin, Wilhelmine Mörtl, who later became his wife. It is love music, as Webern diarized ecstatically -- an outpouring by the 21-year-old composer, whose studies with Arnold Schoenberg had begun the previous autumn.

"To walk forever like this among the flowers, with my dearest one beside me, to feel oneself so entirely at one with the Universe, without care, free as the lark in the sky above -- Oh what splendor...when night fell (after the rain) the sky shed bitter tears but I wandered with her along a road," wrote Webern in language reminiscent of the poet Richard Dehmel, who had inspired Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht -- a work not without influence on the present composition. "A coat protected the two of us. Our love rose to infinite heights and filled the Universe. Two souls were enraptured." The Langsamer Satz is tonal music, albeit chromatic, firmly ensconsed in a tradition stretching from Liszt through Wagner to Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, and Mahler. The last named had not as yet entranced Webern, but during the 1930s he led Vienna's Workingmen Symphony Orchestra in readings of Mahler's music allegedly as insightful as Bruno Walter's, and certainly more comprehensive.

Webern wrote tonal music for several more years after 1905 -- until, as Schoenberg's most intuitive pupil, he became "more Catholic than the Pope," to borrow an apposite aphorism (it nettled the Master when Webern anticipated his serial dicta, especially as regards rhythm). The Langsamer Satz is one of the longest of all Webern works (though this version by the Emerson String Quartet is rather fast), longer even than In Sommerwind that preceded it, or the Passacaglia, Op. 1, both orchestral, that followed. (With Webern's radical renunciation of tonality came a new minimalism.) It has a root key, C minor, and a traditional sonata-form structure.

After the leading Webern scholar, Hans Moldenhauer, settled in Spokane in 1939, Washington state became the world center for Webern's music. Seattle hosted the first of six International festivals, held between 1962 and 1978.