2. Juvenilia and student works, 1899–1908.

The earliest of Webern's compositions to survive were written in 1899, his 16th year, and consist of two pieces for cello and piano and a song with piano accompaniment on a poem by Avenarius. All are between 21 and 24 bars long and bear key signatures, though the shorter of the cello pieces shows already an uncomfortable relationship with its key signature that was to become more pronounced in the pieces written in the next few years. These and subsequent compositions written prior to the time Webern entered university in 1902 (eight other works from these years survive, all songs with piano accompaniment) exhibit the same rich textures and occasionally adventurous but frequently awkward harmonic language. The texts of the songs are for the most part lyrical vignettes on subjects from nature (clouds, stars, the moon, blossoms, the song of the blackbird, etc.); like both cello pieces, most are in a slow tempo.

Commencing formal studies in harmony and counterpoint in 1902, Webern began to broaden his horizon. Besides a number of arrangements of music by Schubert and Wolf, surviving sketches from 1903 and 1904 are of 13 more songs for voice and piano, one for voice and orchestra, 24 pieces for solo piano, nine movements for string quartet, a theme and variations for piano quintet and seven works for orchestra. Key signatures disappear for the first time in some of the songs from 1903; though this does not indicate the absence of tonality, the more adventurous pieces do not begin and end in the same key. There is little harmonic progression in the traditional sense in the early pieces, and the level of dissonance is in most cases rather high, but the basic harmonic language remains emphatically triadic. Phrases and movements inevitably end on pure triads, though harmonic motion between these cadence points is unpredictable. Textures are thick and a wide range is covered, with extended measured arpeggios, low bass tremolos and movement in octaves, both open and filled in with 3rds or triads.

From 1905, Webern's first year with Schoenberg, sketches for only five works are extant, all instrumental movements; Webern continued to write almost exclusively for string quartet and orchestra in the next two years. Two of the movements for string quartet, both written between June and August 1905, deserve attention. In these pieces we see a composer of considerably greater refinement and sophistication than the youth of even one year earlier. Perhaps the most striking difference between these and earlier pieces is in their coherence, and in the logic, both structural and harmonic, that governs them. Whereas in the earlier pieces the frequent unexpected harmonic shifts often seem aimless and without purpose, the situation is different in the quartet movements, where motion is directed: here surprises serve to interrupt, rather than to deflect or dissipate. The first of these movements, published posthumously as Langsamer Satz, is the shorter and more lighthearted. It is Brahmsian in style and texture with sumptuous harmonies and is simple but structurally secure. The longer piece (in fact the longest instrumental movement in all of Webern's music), known simply as String Quartet, represents the convergence of several influences. During the 1903–4 concert season Webern had heard Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. He was later to write to Schoenberg: ‘The impression it made on me was one of the greatest I had ever experienced’. The 1905 String Quartet is Webern's Verklärte Nacht: his familiarity with Schoenberg's work expresses itself in many ways. But the work does not refer to Schoenberg alone. Webern noted on his sketches for the quartet that it was inspired by the artist Giovanni Segantini's triptych Werden–Sein–Vergehen (‘Becoming–Being–Passing Away’), and in addition the opening bars and various transitions within the work are obviously modelled on the ‘Muss es sein?’ motif of Beethoven's String Quartet op.135. Some months earlier, on 6 November 1904, Webern had compared Segantini's art with that of Beethoven. After hearing a performance of the Eroica Symphony, he wrote: ‘The genius of Beethoven reveals itself more and more clearly to me … I long for an artist in music such as Segantini was in painting … That man would then be the Beethoven of our day.’ Clearly the conjunction of references associated with this work was not a coincidence. Finally, and perhaps quite by chance (but who can say?), the motif used as a unifying device throughout this movement – Webern's ‘Muss es sein?’ – is the three-note cell that was to be the all-important germ motif in his Concerto op.24 over a quarter of a century later.

In the next two years Webern produced a large number of chorale settings as exercises for Schoenberg and made sketches for an equally large number of instrumental movements, but few of these reached completion and none has the assurance of the 1905 String Quartet. The last two works written under Schoenberg's tutelage were the first Webern felt to be worthy of opus numbers. The Passacaglia for orchestra, staunchly in D minor, is formally his most rigorous work so far, though its inevitable repetitions are well masked by a superstructure of larger sections and by frequent variations in tempo and texture. The influence of Brahms seems obvious. Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen, on a text by Stefan George and much less well known, is perhaps of more importance, as a forecast of what was to come many years later, for it was in his op.2 that Webern for the first time used canon on a large scale.

Webern, Anton