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Thus Spoke the Early Modernist: Zarathustra andRotational Form in Webern's String Quartet (1905)

SEBASTIAN WEDLER

Twentieth-Century Music / Volume 12 / Issue 02 / September 2015, pp 225 - 251

DOI: 10.1017/S1478572215000043, Published online: 26 August 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1478572215000043

How to cite this article:SEBASTIAN WEDLER (2015). Thus Spoke the Early Modernist: Zarathustra and Rotational Formin Webern's String Quartet (1905). Twentieth-Century Music, 12, pp 225-251 doi:10.1017/

S1478572215000043

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Twentieth-Century Music 12/2, 225–251 C Cambridge University Press, 2015

doi: 10.1017/S1478572215000043

Thus Spoke the Early Modernist: Zarathustra and RotationalForm in Webern’s String Quartet (1905)

SEBASTIAN WEDLER

Abstract

The large-scale structure of Anton Webern’s String Quartet (1905) is an ongoing conundrum in music scholarship.

Initially inspired by Giovanni Segantini’s Trittico della natura , the quartet has been interpreted by most commentators

in terms of a tripartite episodic form. Through the lens of rotational theory, this article puts forward an understanding

of the quartet that interprets it in dialogue with the sonata paradigm. Based on this reading, it will be argued

that the quartet bears strong links to the early modernist discourse on musical form. This perspective will befurther explored, with reference to Webern’s manuscripts and sketches, in the way the quartet engages with

the Zarathustra trope. In casting the quartet in this light, this article challenges the common historiographical

interpretation that sees it merely as a precursor to the high modernism of Webern’s later development.

In his essay on Anton Webern’s landscape composition Im Sommerwind (1904), Derrick

Puffett lamented Webern’s decision shortly after the work’s completion to take up

compositional studies with Arnold Schoenberg:

Obviously it would be absurd to ‘blame’ Schoenberg for everything that ‘went wrong’

in Webern’s development after 1904 (just as he should not be given all the credit

for what went ‘right’). As with Berg, it is hard to imagine what Webern would have

turned out like as a composer if he had not studied with Schoenberg [ . . . ]. Yet

the fact remains that as Webern’s compositional technique matured – largely under

Schoenberg’s guidance – so his expressive range, and range of musical sympathies,

narrowed, leaving him with a set of relatively abstract preoccupations such as ‘unity’,

‘synthesis’ and ‘logic’. [ . . . ] ‘History’ triumphed again.1

Any attempt to think through such ‘what if’ considerations is most certainly otiose and may

be subject to the criticism which Julian Johnson, indirectly reproaching Puffett, felicitously

put as follows: ‘To regret that Webern did not go on to write more expansive works in the

<[email protected] >

I would like to thank Drs Thomas Ahrend and Benedict Taylor, Professors Jonathan Cross, Daniel M. Grimley, and Julian

Johnson,and the two anonymous readers, for their helpful remarks on thisarticlein its various stages. The research for this

article was supported by generous grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK; Merton College, University

of Oxford; and the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basle, Switzerland. This article is dedicated to Professor Max Paddison, on

the occasion of his 70th birthday.1 Derrick Puffett, ‘Gone with the Summer Wind; or, What Webern Lost’, in Webern Studies , ed. Kathryn Bailey

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65–8.

225

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226 Wedler Zarathustra and Rotational Form in Webern’s String Quartet (1905)

style of Im Sommerwind is simply to regret that Webern wrote the music he did.’ 2 This being

said, while in general I share Johnson’s critical objection, the potential immanent to the

historical subjunctive Puffett raises should not go unrecognized. Pointing out the historical

contingency (rather than the historico-immanent inevitability) of Webern’s decision to step

under Schoenberg’s wings in the autumn of 1904, Puffett – and this is how I would suggest hisregretmaybeturnedintoaproductiveperspective–sensitizesustothe inconsistencies inherent

in Webern’s later self-historiographical account as put forward in his 1932–33 lectures on The

Path to the New Music , where the composer aimed at bringing his entire musical development

into a coherent narrative. As a corollary of this, Webern neglected precisely those strands

of early modernist musical thinking which despite having had great impact on his early

development had later proven themselves subordinate to a certain ‘historical state of musical

material’ (Materialstand ) which he by then considered himself to embody.

Within this field of tensions, Webern’s String Quartet (1905) may provide a particular

point of interest. Composed during his summer break at the Preglhof in 1905 outside of the usual teaching context (though possibly intended as a direct response to Schoenberg’s

D minor Quartet, Op. 7),3 Webern’s quartet has received considerable scholarly attention

as the supposed turning point at which the composer deliberately began to cultivate the

elaborated chromatic idiom which would ultimately become the ‘master signifier’4 of what

he himself later famously described as his ‘path’ to the New Music. Deeply indebted to an

orthodox understanding of Theodor W. Adorno’s historical dialectic of musical material and

the notion of progress that springs from this (Materialfortschritt ), Heinz-Klaus Metzger took

this mode of reception to the furthest extreme when he argued, based upon Webern’s quartet,

that music historians need to date the beginning of atonality earlier than hitherto posited.

Aiming to rectify the historiographical picture, he contended that it wasnot Schoenberg but in

fact Webern who for the first time transferred the ‘emancipation of dissonance’ into the realm

of atonality .5 This reception still inspires a broad consensus, as may be discerned, for example,

by Allen Forte’s study on The Atonal Music of Anton Webern . Aligning himself completely with

Metzger’s assessment of the work’s historical significance, Forte reasoned that ‘the harmonic

vocabulary to which the opening music [of the string quartet] refers [ . . . ] strongly suggests

that of Schoenberg’s atonal music, although of course the date of composition anticipates by

2 Julian Johnson, ‘Review of Webern Studies ed. Kathryn Bailey’, Music Analysis 17/2 (1998), 252.

3 We have good reason to assume that just before the summer break Schoenberg had introduced Webern to his D

minor Quartet (which at that time was still in its gestation); compare the dates of Webern’s sketches with Walter

Frisch’s analysis and dating of Schoenberg’s sketches in ‘Thematic Form and the Genesis in Schoenberg’s D-minor

Quartet, Opus 7’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 41/2 (1988), 298. Similarities between both works

have been pointed out by Lynus P. Miller, ‘The Relationship Between Compositional Technique and Scoring in the

Works for String Quartet by Anton von Webern (1883–1945)’. Master’s diss., University of Kansas, 1967, 22–26; also

Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘Uber Anton Weberns Streichquartett 1905’, in Anton Webern I: Musik-Konzepte Sonderband ,

ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text+ kritik, 1983). However, we do not know if Webern

ever showed the score of his String Quartet (1905) to Schoenberg.

4 The use of this term is borrowed from Annika Forkert, British Musical Modernism Defended Against its Devotees (PhDdiss., University of London, 2014), 59.

5 Metzger, ‘Uber Anton Weberns Streichquartett 1905’, 80ff.





Wedler Zarathustra and Rotational Form in Webern’s String Quartet (1905) 227

some three years the emergence of Schoenberg’s own fully atonal music.’6 While both Metzger

and Forte, basing themselves on the work’s chromaticism, implicitly reinforce Webern’s self-

historiographical narrative, I argue that the formal organization of the work – needless to

say an expressive device in its own right – is of no less importance to the discussion of the

way the work engages with, and is interwoven by, modernist thought, and that it is precisely through this perspective that we can cast the work’s engagement with modernism in a very

different light.

Since the discovery of Webern’s quartet by Moldenhauer in 1965, the work’s formal

organization has proven to be something of an ongoing conundrum in Webern scholarship.

Most commentators have chosen to explain the apparently freely improvized or episodic

formal structure in the programmatic light of Giovanni Segantini’s Trittico della natura

(albeit in quite vague and at times obscure terms) which, as evidenced by a formal draft

found in the sketches, served as Webern’s initial inspiration. In particular, it is the work’s

supposed tripartite structure that has been considered to correlate with Segantini’s triptych.7

Yet this take on the work’s formal organization is somewhat unsatisfying; by merely ‘mapping’

Segantini’s triptych onto the quartet’s formal structure this approach all too readily avoids

grappling with the work’s ‘inner form’ and the Formprobleme therein articulated. In critical

distance to such a ‘heteronomous’ understanding of the quartet’s form, I shall argue that just

as one does not need to be aware of the private programme which inspired Schoenberg’s D

minor Quartet in order to make sense of its formal structure, so too can the ‘autonomous

side’ of Webern’s quartet surely be conceived of in its own terms. As I shall put forward

in the first part of this article, through the lens of rotational theory we can understand

Webern’s quartet as entering into a complex dialogue with the sonata paradigm. Based on

this reading, I will suggest that the quartet can be situated in the context of early modernist

sonata deformation, as opposed to Metzger and Forte’s historiographical interpretations of

the work as a crucial precursor to ‘high modernism’. Renegotiating the heuristic value of

the work’s initial programme with reference to some of Webern’s manuscripts and sketches

archived at the Paul Sacher Foundation, in the second part of this article I shall argue that

Webern’s programmatic concern did not lie in actually representing Segantini’s triptych as

such (despite the suggestions of most commentators) but in the possibilities that this offered

Webern to position himself within what had crystallized towards the end of the nineteenth

century as the Zarathustra trope. This argument will be substantiated with recourse to a

composer who – albeit esteemed by the young Webern as one of the most prolific voices of

6 Allen Forte, The Atonal Music of Anton Webern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 64. See also Andreas Krause,

Anton Webern und seine Zeit (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2001), 21.

7 The seeds of this reception were planted by Hans Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of his Life and

Work (London: Victor Gollancz, 1978), 86; the most systematic analysis pointing out the congruencies between the

formal draft and Webern’s quartet has been put forward by Annabelle Paul, ‘Natur als Spiegel seelischer Erfahrungen:Analogien zwischen Giovanni Segantini und Anton Webern’, in Wie Bilder Klingen: Tagungsband zum Symposion

‘Musik nach Bildern’ , ed. Lukas Christensen and Monika Fink (Vienna: LIT, 2011).






the musikalische Moderne – was later in Webern’s The Path to the New Music deprived of any

historiographical significance: Richard Strauss.8

Analysis of the rotational formRotational theory has been proven to be a powerful tool with which we may come to

grips with turn-of-the-century sonata deformation, enabling us to account for the usually

strophe-like formal idiosyncrasies of the individual work while still remaining sensitized to

its generic components. Precisely in those works where the sonata paradigm seems somewhat

‘unhinged’ or ‘de-constructed’ as it were, rotational theory encourages us first of all to identify

the erstwhile constitutive sonata elements and the power they once had to generate ‘sonata

activity’, and then in a practice of music-analytical hermeneutics to finally bring them into

a new context of meaning and functionality (Sinn- und Funktionszusammenhang ).9 Here

lies the great potential of rotational theory as a method to contend with the complex form

of Webern’s string quartet. If we take the stance, which I shall later substantiate, that the

initial programmatic reference to Segantini’s triptych from the formal draft has only little

significance for our understanding of the work’s formal structure, we may come to expect that

in this piece Webern, in one way or another, engaged with sonata thought. Carl Dahlhaus’s

appeal that ‘a movement is to be interpreted, within sensible limits, as a variant of the form

characteristic of the genre, and not as exemplifying another schema unusual for the genre ’10

may serve here as our guiding premise.

To my knowledge there has hitherto been only a single attempt to understand Webern’s

string quartet in terms of ‘autonomous music’ in any profound way, that of Reinhard Gerlach;

8 Of the three times Webern made reference to Strauss, it is only once that he actually acknowledged him in any

real sense, namely in his discussion of the ‘emancipation of dissonance’ – albeit tellingly only in passing and by far

subordinate to the contributions made by Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner; Anton Webern, The Path to the New

Music , ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black (Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser Company, 1963), 36.

9 The linchpin of this discourse is still James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1993), see esp. 7, 23–6. A comprehensive list of literature concerned with rotational form can be found in

Warren Darcy, ‘Rotational Form, Teleological Genesis, and Fantasy-Projection in the Slow Movement of Mahler’s

Sixth Symphony’, 19th-Century Music 25/1 (2001), 52, n. 9; see also Andrew Davis and Howard Pollack, ‘RotationalForm in theOpening Sceneof Gershwin’s PorgyandBess ’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 60/2(2007),386,

n. 26.Mostrecently, rotationaltheoryhas served as theanalytical focal point in a varietyof studiesconcerned with early

musicalmodernism,including J.P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,

2006), ch. 4; idem., ‘“Our True North”: Walton’s First Symphony, Sibelianism, and the Nationalization of Modernism

in England’, Music & Letters 89/4 (2008), 576ff.; Seth Monahan, Mahler’s Sonata Narratives (PhD diss., Yale University,

2008), published in a revised version as Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); idem.,

‘Success and Failure in Mahler’s Sonata Recapitulations’, Music Theory Spectrum 33/1 (2011); Daniel M. Grimley, Carl

Nielsenand the Idea of Modernism (Woodbridge:Boydell Press, 2010), ch. 7; idem., ‘Landscapeand Distance: Vaughan

Williams, Modernism and the Symphonic Pastoral’, in British Music and Modernism, 1895 –1960 , ed. Matthew Riley

(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); James Hepokoski, ‘Clouds and Circles: Rotational Form in Debussy’s “Nuages”’, Dutch

Journal of Music Theory 15/1 (2010), 1–17; and Michael J. Puri, Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 67–79.

10 Carl Dahlhaus, Analysis and Value Judgment , trans. Siegmund Levarie (New York: Pendragon Press, 1983), 82–3.






1&2

S (?)

Exposition

P

44 69 73 79 80

E [-66] A F

Introduction

1 22

TR

Fugato [ ; 2]

90

131 143

C [-112]

MC or

37

Development or actual S-space?

126 152 178

P S (?)

E [-185]

180 187 200

Recapitulatory Rotation Coda or S-replacement?

TR

introductoryrotation

F

Introductory Rotation

thematic spaces:

D [-221]

222 249 260

E [-end]

D

actual ESC?

actual

EEC?

G

Figure 1 Webern, String Quartet (1905): ‘macro-rotation’.

thus it seems appropriate, first of all, to begin by critically engaging with his analysis. The

quintessence of Gerlach’s reading is that he sees the quartet as being divided into the following

sonata spaces: exposition (bb. 1–79), development (bb. 80–125), recapitulation (bb. 126–85),

and coda (bb. 186–279).11 The crucial peg from which he hangs this interpretation is the

varied recurrence of the three-note motive in b. 126, which for this reason he implicitly

designates as functioning as the primary space. While I believe that he is right to sense that

generic sonata components pervade the quartet, his sonata form reading comes across as

rather forced – something which he himself allows in his quite surprising concession that the

work is not explicitly interwoven by sonata traces after all.12 This inconsistency is borne out

by the mixed success he has in reconciling some of the work’s formal parts with the sonata

paradigm. It is precisely in this that the proton pseudos of Gerlach’s approach becomes evident:

primarily concerned with the positivistic analytical inquiry into whether the quartet is ‘in’

sonata form, he takes a perspective on its formal organization all too evidently informed by

a petrified conception of ‘the’ sonata form (as usually inherited from A. B. Marx’s reading

of the middle-period Beethoven) that is ultimately too rigid, too narrowly conceived to be

actually able to account for the quartet’s formal discourse in its own terms. What Gerlach

identified with b. 126 as the (varied) beginning of the recapitulation is, as Figure 1 suggests,

more felicitously understood in terms of the work’s fundamental rotational structure, or what

I shall refer to as its ‘macro rotation’. The motivic-thematic spaces are shown, in accordance

with Gerlach’s analysis, in Example 1.13

Unlike Gerlach, I see the first impression of a primary theme crystallizing with the onset

of the thematic space γ in b. 44 (P), corroborated by the instruction Mit grossem Schwung

11 Reinhard Gerlach, Musik und Jugendstil der Wiener Schule, 1900 –1908 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1985), 165.12 Please compare pp. 165 and 170 from Gerlach, Musik und Jugendstil der Wiener Schule.

13 Gerlach, Musik und Jugendstil der Wiener Schule , 166, 169.






Example 1 Webern, String Quartet (1905): motivic-thematic chart.

(see Example 2). This isalso the first passage whereE major sticks out as the ‘tonic’ (established

via the harmonic progression I–III–V64–[ . . . ]–I),14 clearly indicating that the two preceding

motivic-thematic spaces, α (bb. 1–21) and β (bb. 22–43), serve an introductory function dueto their segueing dynamic and tonal instability.

The identification of b. 44 as the onset of P reveals the actual formal problem of the quartet

understood in terms of the sonata paradigm: the identification of the secondary thematic

14 I am aware that my reading of Webern’s quartet as a tonal piece requires reflection upon the limitations of this

assumption, the more so since my interpretation of the work’s formal organization critically relies upon the

identification of cadential articulations. My use of the word ‘tonal’ targets those aspects of the quartet’s harmonic

language that are clearly rooted in common nineteenth-century harmonic practices. By conceiving of tonality as

‘practice’ rather than ‘system’ – an understanding and use of the concept of tonality which I believe is anticipated

in the concluding words of Brian Hyer’s important article on ‘Tonality’, in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory , ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 750 – I hope to push beyond the

question whether Webern’s quartet is (still) a piece of ‘tonal’ or (already) ‘atonal’ music.






Example 2 Webern, String Quartet (1905): bb. 44–60 (bb. 53–8 omitted).By Anton Webern/Arranged by James BealeCopyright C 1965 by Carl Fischer, Inc.All rights assigned to Carl Fischer, LLC. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

space (S). The situation is complex and most certainly cannot simply be ‘solved’ in any

positivistic sense; it strikes me that only by the problematization of the issue may we near any

‘solution’. With this in mind, in the following I provide a detailed discussion of what makes

the status of S throughout the work so problematic.

The set of problems begins to unfold with bb. 69–79 (labelled in Example 1 as δ),

which Gerlach, while identifying this to be a new motivic-thematic entity, nonetheless

does not consider to function as S. Indeed, the role of δ as a potential S remains critically

underdetermined given that it is not preceded by a medial caesura (MC) – which is, as James

Hepokoski and Warren Darcy point out, an indispensable requirement for the establishment

of S.15 In fact any notion of a rhetorical caesura associated with the MC is fully undercut: δ is

15 James Hepokoskiand WarrenDarcy, Elements of Sonata Theory:Norms,Types,and Deformationsin theLate-Eighteenth-

Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49.






arrived at as the climax of a Steigerungsform, breaking through in b. 69 with the instruction

Sehr breit , which arguably lends this entire passage a character somewhat reminiscent of a

codetta or coda theme. (Notably, Sehr breit is precisely the instruction which Webern used

in the Langsamer Satz in order to mark the beginning of the coda section, completed only a

couple of weeks before composing the quartet.) What makes the candidacy of δ as a functionof S even more problematic is the fact that it signifies an extensive cadence: it knocks the

harmonic pillar of D major (b. 69) into the chromatic realm, immediately followed by an A

major chord (b. 73), before subtly dipping into F major (bb. 76–7), which finally lends the

last chord of C major (b. 79) a half cadence-like quality. This cadential articulation leaves

us with a set of formal problems: is this passage functioning as the essential expositional

closure (EEC) which would, despite all reservations mentioned above, be a clear indication

of δ serving as S (and then most plausibly associated with the secondary key area of C major

which is conveniently the submediant to the key associated with P); or is this rather the

much-anticipated MC setting up the new key F major?If we were to understand b. 79 as the MC, this might suggest the possibility that the

fugato section beginning in b. 90 serves as some kind of stand-in for S, which at least from

a rhetorical point of view is plausible given that the fugato neatly corresponds with the

conventional expectations that we may have of a secondary theme. Besides the fact that

it is contrastive to γ in textural terms, its tempo is notably rather slow (furthermore we

may note the accompanying instructions weich and sehr zart , played mit D ampfer in pp and

ppp ); moreover, it gives rise to an authentic cadence in C major (bb. 104–11) which, albeit

being the flattened submediant of E major, nonetheless would still form a secondary key

area barely less plausible than the C major associated with δ. And yet the fugato is not a

persuasive stand-in for S after all. Not only does it not take up the key area of F major set

up in b. 79, but this cadence is also immediately followed by a conspicuous transition (bb.

80–9). This suggests that the fugato marks the onset of the development section, a notion

which can be further substantiated by the fact that the fugato refers back to the three-note

rhetoric substance provided by α and δ2. Moreover, there is a long tradition of fugatos

constituting the development section, perhaps most notably in ‘Mephistopheles’ from Franz

Liszt’s Faust Symphony or the beginning of the Von der Wissenschaft section in Strauss’s Also

sprach Zarathustra , Op. 30 (the latter of which I shall go on to argue may serve us as a fruitful

‘hermeneutic window ’16 for Webern’s quartet).17 An understanding of the fugato’s overall

formal function as the development section has far-reaching implications: it would mean that

the exposition has not simply failed because both δ and the fugato have been unable to fulfil

the generic expectations of a secondary theme but in a more fundamental sense because the

exposition has actually failed to produce any S in the first place and thus remains essentially

incomplete.

16 This term is borrowed from Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800 –1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1993), ch. 1.

17 See John Williamson, Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 79–80.






S (?)

Recapitulatory Rotation

152 159 173 175

1&2

178

S (?) P

F G [Steigerungsform]

expository rotationnow complete (!)

E [-185]

180

(!)

22 1

Introduction

S (?)

44

P

E [-66]

Exposition

inverted exposition

inverted expositoryrotation in theexpected order

(but incomplete)

69

S (?)

1&2

inverted expositoryrotation in theexpected order

(but incomplete)

D

Figure 2 Webern, String Quartet (1905): ‘sub-rotations’.

Indeed, in the recapitulatory rotation we are presented with a strategy of compensationfor the underdeterminacy of S. With the consequence that the dichotomy suggested on

the ‘macro-rotational’ level between ‘introduction’ and ‘expositon’ de facto disintegrates; as

Figure 2 suggests, on a quasi-‘sub-rotational’ levelβ could be considered to incrementally take

over the supposed S-function of δ in the recapitulatory rotation, as if the actual expository

space was to be understood as an ‘inverted exposition’.

Whatbringsthepossibilityofan‘invertedexposition’intoplayisthefactthattherecurrence

of γ (b. 152), despite being presented in F major instead of E major clearly suggestive of the

onset of the recapitulatory rotation, is followed by β (b. 159), not δ. This seems to suggest a

reading of β (bb. 159–72) as a stand-in for the lack of S. But β does not settle in any key area

and hence does not result in an essential structural closure (ESC), which would complete

the recapitulatory rotation. Instead, γ is relaunched in b. 173 which, followed by a brief

restatement of β once more, turns into a Steigerungsform that surprisingly culminates in b.

178 in δ (note, mit gr osster Macht and mit erhabenstem Ausdruck und ganz breit ), first stated

in G major before finally yielding to a cadence in E major. It is as if in b. 178 we were invited

to hear δ claiming to have (re)gained the status of a proper secondary theme – as if it had been

the real secondary theme all along. The effect that results from this is a massively protracted

recapitulation: it is only in bb. 180–5 that one realizes that the entire recapitulation has in

fact been repressed all along (Example 3).

Having said this, what is deeply troubling in the recapitulatory rotation is the fact that it

does not produce an ESC in any conventional sense: the E major chord in b. 185 is arrived at

by a plagal cadence, not a PAC. (One may consider this event to have been foreshadowed by

the A major chord in b. 73.) The undermining of the ESC mirrors the MC/EEC-ambivalence

initiated in b. 79 (an association which is at least rhetorically suggested by the shared lang

chords), keeping the under-determinacy of S in limbo. Indeed, it is only in the thematic

space of ε that we get an authentic cadence (bb. 207–21), complementary to the cadential

articulation towards the end of the fugato section (bb. 104–12), but in the ‘wrong key’ of Dmajor. This ambivalence is complicit with the function of ε as both mirroring the supposed

fugato stand-in for S as some kind of S-replacement in the recapitulatory rotation, while also






Example 3 Webern, String Quartet (1905): bb. 152–85 (bb. 155–77 omitted).18

By Anton Webern/Arranged by James BealeCopyright C 1965 by Carl Fischer, Inc.All rights assigned to Carl Fischer, LLC. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

marking the onset of the coda section which entails the return of the ‘tonic’ E major in which

the piece finally concludes.

The ingenuity and subtlety by which the harmonic development facilitates the settling

of the quartet’s generic sonata form strata while at the same time setting up an immanentlogic that exists in its own terms is a fundamental characteristic of the work which is crucial

for understanding it as entering into a dialogue with the sonata paradigm. The harmonic

development of the whole movement is encapsulated in b. 3, where the three-note motive

‘c–c–e’ from the upbeat and the first bar (with a fermata) ‘resolves’ to the augmented triad

‘c–e–g’ (note, again with a fermata). Operating as a Zentralklang (or ‘harmonic motive’)

which exists as a sonority in its own right and which resurfaces in various local instances (e.g.

18 Please note that in Webern’s autograph bb. 178 and 181 are notated in G major; Example 3 cites Beale’s edition (New

York: Carl Fischer, 1965) where this passage is enharmonically respelled as A major; another important enharmonicrespelling concerns b. 74 (not reproduced here but reflected in Example 5), which in Webern’s autograph is notated

as C major, in Beale’s edition as D major. I am grateful to Dr Thomas Ahrend for pointing this out to me.






Example 4 Weitzmann, Der ¨ uberm¨ aßige Dreiklang : reproduction of Example, 15 (1853).

notably amidst P, b. 50),19 this chord foreshadows the logic upon which the ‘harmonic pillars’

of the large-scale structure arise.20 Based on the twenty-four possible ways of resolving the

augmented triad as discussed in detail by Carl Friedrich Weitzmann in his 1853 study on The

Augmented Triad , on the large-scale level Webern’s quartet consistently applies Weitzmann’s

first rule. According to this, ‘[e ]ach voice of an augmented triad or one of its inversions can

fall a half step , while the two other voices sustain, by which means the resolution is achieved

to a major triad or to one of its inversions. The moving voice falls in the process to the fifth

of that major triad.’21

Applying this rule to the augmented triad ‘c–e–g’, Webern obtainedthe three major chords which we are nowadays familiar with as the hexatonic cycle ‘H 0’ (or

what Richard Cohn calls the ‘Northern cycle’): C major, E major, and A major (or when

enharmonically reinterpreted, G major) (Example 4).22

These three chords crystallize as the ‘harmonic pillars’ of the whole movement. Organized

in ‘hexatonic space’ (where triadic uniformity is assumed), the harmonic consistency of

the work can be illustrated along the lines of Figure 3. The distances within triadic space

are exclusively either T2 (in the case at hand, as Gegenterzschritt (PL)) or T4 (either

as Ganztonschritt (LRLR, RLRP, RPRL), Gegenganztonschritt (LRPR, PRLR, RLRL), or

19 See David Clampitt, ‘Webern’s Music for String Quartet’, in Intimate Voices: The Twentieth-Century String Quartet.

Vol. 1: Debussy to Villa-Lobos , ed. Evan Jones (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 197–200.

20 The significance of the augmented triad as the Zentralklang of the whole piece has been singled out by Reinhard

Gerlach, ‘Mystik und Klangmagie in Anton von Weberns hybrider Tonalitat: Eine Jugendkrise im Spiegel von Musik

und Dichtung der Jahrhundertwende’ (1976), in DieWiener Schule , ed. RudolfStephan (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche

Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 359. The functionality Webern ascribed to the augmented triad bears strong similarities to

harmonic practices found in Liszt, Wagner, and Wolf; see in particular Eric Sams, The Songs of Hugo Wolf (London:

Eulenburg Books, 1983), 30–1; R. Larry Todd, ‘The “Unwelcome Guest” Regaled: Franz Liszt and the Augmented

Triad’, 19th-Century Music 12/2 (1988); Mark Anson-Cartwright, ‘Chord as Motive: The Augmented-Triad Matrix

in Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll”’, Music Analysis 15/1 (1996); James M. Baker, ‘Franz Liszt, Carl Friedrich Weitzmann,and the Augmented Triad’, in The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality , ed. William Kinderman and Harald

Krebs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); and Matthew Bribitzer-Stull, ‘The A-C-E Complex: The Origin

and Function of Chromatic Major Third Collections in Nineteenth-Century Music’, Music Theory Spectrum 28/2

(2006).

21 Carl Friedrich Weitzmann, Der ¨ uberm¨ aßige Dreiklang (Berlin: Verlag der T. Trautwein’schen Buch- und

Musikalienhandlung, 1853), 28; cit. in translation after idem., ‘Two Monographs by Carl Friedrich Weitzmann:

Part I: “The Augmented Triad” (1853)’, trans. Janna K. Saslaw, Theory & Practice 29 (2004), 213, 215; emphases in

the original (1853) but not in Saslaw’s translation and reproduction (2004). The significance of Weitzmann’s study

for neo-Riemannian theory has been discussed by Richard Cohn, ‘Weitzmamn’s Regions, My Cycles, and Douthett’s

Dancing Cubes’, Music Theory Spectrum 22/1 (2000); and idem., Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Consonant

Triad’s Second Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 56–8.22 Richard Cohn, ‘Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic

Progressions’, Music Analysis 15/1 (1996), 17ff.






T4D

(200-21)

F(152)

E(44-66)

T2

F(69-79)

T4

C(90-112)

T4

G(178)

E(180-85)

T4

T4

T2

T4

E(249-end)

T2

T2

T2

Figure 3 Webern, String Quartet (1905): hexatonic space.

Example 5 Webern, String Quartet (1905): Urlinie unfolding by means of H0 {E+; C+; G+} and H2

{F+; D+}. Full slurs (unconventionally) indicate whole-tone relationships.

Tritonusschritt (PRPR, RPRP)). While F major is not part of the ‘Northern cycle’ itself, it

nonetheless further advances the whole-tone quality of the large-scale harmonic development

by following or being followed by E major, C major, and Gmajor respectively. In conjunction

with D major, F major forms the complementary (albeit incomplete) hexatonic cycle to the

‘Northern’ one: the ‘Southern cycle’ (‘H2’), which extends the three roots of the six chords

integral to the ‘Northern cycle’ to the whole-tone pentachord ‘c–d–e–f –g’ (in which notably

‘e’, representative of the ‘tonic’ E major, is framed).

Without meaning to suggest that the harmonic development of the quartet can be bent

into orthodox Schenkerian terms, Example 5 aims at illustrating one possible interpretation

of how the notion of the Urlinie is conveyed by means of the underlying ‘bi-hexatonic cycling’identified above. As this graph illustrates, the harmonic-motivic coherence obtained in this

piece arguably lies precisely in the dialectical relationship between the hexatonic cycling on






the one hand and the Urlinienterzzug paradigm on the other.23 Arguably Webern’s quartet

is indeed a particularly pertinent case in point to think through what J. P. E. Harper-Scott

most recently anticipated as a ‘dialectical method of analysing twentieth-century tonality’,

mediating ‘on theonehand, theorthodox, diatonic, prolongation of thetonictriad, and on the

other hand constructions of musical space which tend to cut against diatonic prolongation’.24

The effect obtained in Webern’s quartet through this ‘mediation’ is complex. In a way, one

could understand the whole harmonic development following the ‘lack of S’ in the key of F

major as collapsing into the rest of the work. The tonicization of the S-space frustrated F

major infiltrates into the recapitulatory rotation. And when finally in b. 185 the recapitulatory

rotation is clearly marked (to recall, E major posited by δ), the Urlinie is still at the third

scale-step and thus requires ongoing unfolding in order to actually conclude the work, which

is then finally redeemed by ε. This suggests that the sonata form strata evoked by the divided

Urlinie paradigm and its underpinning hexatonic practice are not simply ‘synthesized’ but

in a truly dialectical sense constitute an immanent logic of disintegration (to speak withAdorno’s early philosophical agenda). But when taking this perspective, the initial formal

‘problems’ are no longer what they initially appeared to be. It is integral to the work’s ‘sonata

deformation’ (in the sense of a second form) that what erstwhile appeared in Gerlach’s analysis

to be irreconcilable with the sonata paradigm (in the sense of a first form) is transcended,

annulled, and preserved all at the same time – in short, in the complex sense of the term,

aufgehoben (sublated).

Webern and the Zarathustra tropeOur analysis of the rotational form has revealed the quartet’s strong links to the discourse on

musical form current among those composers whom Hepokoski has described as the ‘first

generation to come of age in a post-Lisztian/post-Wagnerian world’.25 Given the historical

scope of rotational form of that time, any attempt to pinpoint those strands of Webern’s

musical socialization which saw this principle become an integral part of his musical language

may prove otiose. Yet I wish in the following to venture the suggestion that Strauss’s Also

sprach Zarathustra may have served Webern as a substantive case of reference. As Example 6

illustrates, in both works each ‘development section’ is introduced by a fugato, the primary material of which – again in both cases a three-note subject – refers back to the very beginning:

in Also sprach Zarathustra to the famous introductory ‘nature’ motive; in Webern’s string

quartet to the opening motive ‘c–c–e’.26

23 For Hepokoski and Darcy’s Schenkerian view of the sonata form in the major mode, see Hepokoski and Darcy,

Elements of Sonata Theory , 148.

24 J. P. E. Harper-Scott, ‘Review of Tonality 1900 –1950: Concept and Practice , eds. Felix Worner, Ullrich Scheideler and

Philip Rupprecht’, Music Analysis 33/3 (2014), 394.

25 Hepokoski, Sibelius , 3.26 Given that, as Julian Johnson pointed out, the three-note motive was a locus classicus of nineteenth-century music

(Webern and the Transformation of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 77), to exclusively account






Example 6 Comparison of the three-note fugal subjects in (a) Webern, String Quartet (1905), bb. 90–6;and (b) Richard Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra , op. 30, bb. 201–5.(a) By Anton Webern / Arranged by James BealeCopyright C 1965 by Carl Fischer, Inc.All rights assigned to Carl Fischer, LLCAll rights reserved. Used with permission.(b) Extract from Also sprach Zarathustra , op. 30 by Richard StraussC Copyright by C. F. Peters, LeipzigReproduced by kind permission of Edition Peters, London

With this reference we may contemplate a number of speculative questions. Did Webern

intend the listener to perceive formal analogies to Strauss’s work in his quartet? Indeed, just

as in Webern’s quartet the S-space remains underdetermined, so can the exposition of Also

sprach Zarathustra be considered, following Hepokoski, to have been ‘aborted’. Although the

thematic space entitled Von den Freuden- und Leidenschaften ‘sounds much like the onset

of a sonata exposition’,27 its complementary rotation fails to produce a secondary theme

after all. Instead the Sehnsuchts-Thema , initially found within the complementary part of the

introductory’s second rotation, gains the upper hand in the course of the work, to the extent

that Hepokoski considers ‘Strauss [to have] invite[d] us to imagine that the Longing theme

[Sehnsuchts-Thema ], in its disparate and its scattered placements earlier in the work, has

been aspiring to become a secondary theme within a sonata form.’28 Likewise identifying the

underdeterminacy of the S-space as a crucial formal problem but interpreting the situation in

this to the motto ‘Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein!’ from the final movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s

String Quartet in F major, op. 135 (as most commentators suggest) is perhaps rather one-sided.

27 James Hepokoski, ‘The Second Cycle of Tone Poems’, in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss , ed. CharlesYoumans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 100.

28 Hepokoski, ‘The Second Cycle of Tone Poems’, 101.






different terms, Charles Youmans argues that ‘“Von den Freuden- und Leidenschaften” and

“Von den Hinterweltlern” assume the character of primary and secondary themes in almost

stereotypical fashion, but they appear in reverse order’, concluding that Strauss has ‘inverted’

the sonata exposition29 – a formal strategy, as we have seen above, which is also conceivable

in the terms of Webern’s quartet.30 Seeing Webern’s three-note fugato within this context,could it be possible that Webern intended to provide the listener with the means of finding

some sort of an orientation within the work’s complex form?

My impression is that Webern’s reception of Strauss in this period was much more multi-

layered and complex than could be exhaustively accounted for merely by seeing Webern as

having appropriated here a certain set of expressive formal means and devices(Formsprache ). I

readthefugatoratherasanattempttoconstructStrauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra as a ‘paratext’

intended to make the philosophical authority of Strauss’s tone poem reverberate in his own

quartet. Thus Strauss’s work offered Webern the possibility to buy himself, arguably in line

with Alexander Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, into what had crystallized towards the end of thenineteenth century as the Zarathustra trope.31 As the paragon of a pantheistic worldview

in which, in Kevin Karnes’s words, redemption was attainable through the individual’s

realization of the ‘essential relatedness, even oneness, of humanity and the natural world’, the

Zarathustra trope owes itsplace right at thecentreof turn-of-the-centurymusical modernism,

not least due to its famous antipodal constellation to Schopenhauer’s and Wagner’s vision of

redemption ‘grounded in metaphysical transcendence of one’s physical being, and that were

literally attainable only through asceticism or the destruction of the subject in death’.32 That

Webern, though we do not know whether he was aware of this debate or would have been

willing to take sides, was familiar with an image of Strauss that saw his modernism reflected

not only in terms of ‘musical material’ but also in the philosophical content of his music can

be evidenced by a newspaper article from the Grazer Tagespost , following a performance of

Strauss’s Don Juan , Op. 20, in Graz on 26 January 1900, which Webern copied into his diary

in its entirety. This article celebrates Strauss as ‘the most modern of the modernists’ and as the

‘most shining sun on the horizon of contemporary German music culture’ precisely because,

citing the commentary on Also sprach Zarathustra , Strauss ‘explores music’s potential to

29 Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of

Musical Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 199–200.

30 While making such a comparison one may not neglect the fact that in Webern’s quartet, unlike in Also sprach

Zarathustra , the supposedly S-space, δ, in fact returns in the recapitulatory rotation.

31 See Kevin C. Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 132–6. In particular Karnes points out Zemlinsky’s ‘Turmw achterlied’, op.

8, no. 1 (1899), 137–40, and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (1900–11), 152–62, as crucial cases in point. For an in-depth

discussion of Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence in relationship to modernity, seeMatthew Rampley, Nietzsche,

Aesthetics and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 148–52.

32 Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World , 128. See also Charles Youmans, ‘The Development of Richard Strauss’sWorldview’, in The Richard Strauss Companion , ed. Mark-Daniel Schmid (Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2003),

81–3.






Example 7 Webern, sketch (formal draft) of the String Quartet (1905), Paul Sacher Foundation, Basle,Anton Webern Collection; my transcription.34

express even metaphysical issues’.33 Thus in order to establish himself as a composer who

stood directly upon the beating arteries of the musikalische Moderne , in 1905 this meant for

Webern not only adopting Strauss’s compositional idioms but also the philosophical themes

that Strauss addressed in his own works.It is, as I wish to venture, against this background that Segantini’s triptych appealed to

Webern as his initial programmatic point of departure, as is evidenced by a formal draft

from 13 July 1905 (see Example 7).35 That Nietzsche’s Zarathustra had some crucial impact

on Segantini echoed throughout the reception history of the painter’s work ,36 and was in

33 The Germanoriginals read: ‘den Modernsten derModernen’; ‘glanzendsten Nebensonne am deutschen Musikhimmel

der Gegenwart’; ‘die Ausdrucksf ahigkeit der Musik selbst f ur metaphysische Probleme erprobte’. The transcription of

this diary entry was kindly provided by Barbara Schingnitz; her complete transcription of Webern’s early diaries are

forthcoming in Der junge Webern: Texte und Kontexte , ed. Matthias Schmidt and Thomas Ahrend. Webern-Studien:

Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe, 2b (Vienna: Lafite, 2015).34 A full reproduction of this formal draft is provided by Gunter Metken, ‘L’elevation en musique: Anton Webern

et Segantini’, Revue de l’Art 96 (1992), 82; he has also provided a transcription, albeit incomplete, on page 84; see

also Eric Frederick Jensen, ‘Webern and Giovanni Segantini’s Trittico della natura ’, The Musical Times 130/1751

(1989). The Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe , Basle, under the Editionsleitung of Thomas Ahrend, Simon Obert, and

Matthias Schmidt, is currently preparing a new edition of the quartet from the manuscripts and sketches; I am very

grateful to have been given the opportunity to look at an early version of this edition while studying the Anton

Webern Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation in 2013–14, which was invaluable in the preparation of my own

transcriptions as provided in Examples 7–9 of this article. Any errors are, of course, my own.

35 In this context see Webern’s famous remark from his diary entry from 6 November 1904, according to which he

longed for ‘an artist in music such as Segantini was in painting’ who would then be ‘the Beethoven of our day’ (cit.

in translation after Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern , 76).36 See, for example, the transcription of a report published in the Grazer Tagespost of 12 November 1899 about a paper

delivered by Hermann Ubell at a meeting of the Kunsthistorische Gesellschaft Graz held on 9 November, which






particular advanced with regard to his painting L’annunciazione del nuovo verbo, completed

in 1896 just before he began producing the triptych. On a more general level, the way nature

was transfigured in Segantini’s late work as a whole is often considered to reflect Nietzsche’s

pantheistic vision of redemption. Both Luigi Villari and Franz Servaes, the authors of the

first extensive monographs on the painter, broadly adumbrated Segantini’s late work as thesynthesis of his early period concern for the mimetic or pictorial representation of nature

with the fantastical and at times disturbing dream-like worlds from his middle period. Villari

wrote:

From the point of view of his art his [sc. Segantini’s] religion may be [ . . . ] divided

into three periods. In the first, he paints religion as he sees it in others, in the peasants

of the Brianza. In the second, he passes through a phase of purely natural studies and

of nature worship, in which outward religion is somewhat less prominent. He paints

nature in a realistic manner without giving much thought to the power by whomshe is ruled. But love of nature was too deep for him to forego for long inquiring into

her laws and moving causes, and from the worship of nature he returns to religion,

but to a higher and more spiritual religion than before, for it is now subjective and

not merely external.37

In the triptych these interspersions were considered to balance each other out particularly

well. Villari again: ‘[The three panels of the triptych] contain all that is best in his [sc.

Segantini’s] symbolism, without any of those too fantastic flights of imagination which

alarmed and bewildered even his most devoted admirers. It also contains some of his most

perfect realism.’38 Crucial to Villari’s interpretation are (i) Segantini’s overdrawn realism of

natural objects; (ii) the fact that in La Natura , the mother holding her child while sitting

underneath a pine tree (which indeed is the only element which surmounts the painting’s

frame, and also recurs in La Vita ) has a clear Madonna and child symbolism; as well as (iii)

the unfinished lunettes of all three paintings, which feature the Christian symbolism of angels

as mediators between life and death, elevating from the mundane the seemingly everyday

situations depicted in the painting.39 Hence the triptych – and this was emphasized already by

contemporary commentators of the work – goes far beyond a mere pictorial representation

of landscape. Villari conceived of this seemingly paradoxical situation as follows: ‘He

Webern may have come across. The report reads: ‘The atmosphere of Segantini’s major landscape paintings was

characterised by readings from some of the beautiful poems of Konrad Ferdinand Meyer and a few of the magnificent,

impressionistic, landscape aphorisms of Nietzsche.’; cit. in translation after Susanne Rode-Breymann, ‘“ . . . gathering

the divine from the earthly . . . ”: Ferdinand Avenarius and his Significance for Anton Webern’s Early Settings of Lyric

Poetry’, trans. Mary Whittall, in Webern Studies , ed. Kathryn Bailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),

11.

37 Luigi Villari, Giovanni Segantini (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1901), 172.

38 Villari, Giovanni Segantini , 201.

39 Villari, Giovanni Segantini , 163, 171, 196–201. See also Franz Servaes, Giovanni Segantini: Sein Leben und sein

Werk (Vienna: M. Gerlach, 1902), 104–11; Alfred Peltzer, ‘Giovanni Segantini (Betrachtungen bei Gelegenheit derAusstellung zu Ehren des Verstorbenen in Mailand)’, in Die Kunst f¨ ur alle , ed. Friedrich Pecht (Munich: Verlagsanstalt

F. Bruckmann A.-G., 1900), 292–4.






[sc. Segantini] was a symbolist, but his symbolism lies in the harmony of his landscapes

and his figures, which together suggest the abstract idea.’40 This ‘abstract idea’, the harmony

between nature and humankind (and which, for example, induced Jensen to consider the

triptych as ‘commentaries on nature and man’s role in it’41), gives contour to the pivotal

aesthetic concern by which Nietzsche’s concept of redemption could be considered to havebeen redeemed in Segantini’s late work.

Indeed, we have good reason to argue that it was the ‘Zarathustrian’ impress associated with

Segantini, rather than an intention to actually represent Segantini’s triptych as such, which

fuelled Webern’s primary programmatic concern. This perspective has been opened up by

Johnson who, in distance to those commentators who haveaimed at showingthecongruencies

that apparently exist between Segantini’s triptych and the quartet’s formal structure, instead

sensed that ‘Webern’s quartet bears little resemblance to the painting whose detailed content it

makes no attempt to illustrate musically.’ Rather it seemed to him that Webern was concerned

with the ‘ideas expressed in each part of the triptych’ – that is, the general temporal notion of the circle of life.42 In this respect, in the Wittgensteinian sense, the formal draft was no more

than the ladder which Webern was ultimately to push away from once he had redeemed the

ideas there expounded (just as was Schoenberg’s initial programme for his D minor Quartet

which Ethan Haimo has argued served the composer ‘more [as] an aide-m´ emoire than a

detailed blueprint’43).

That Webern right from the start was concerned with redeeming the supposedly

‘Zarathustrian’ qualities which could be perceived in Segantini’s work is most apparent

in the rather odd German translations of the original titles of the triptych, La Natura , La Vita ,

La Morte , which are translated in Webern’s formal draft as ‘Werden’, ‘Sein’, ‘Vergehen’, and

not as we might expect the more literal ‘Die Natur’, ‘Das Leben’, ‘Der Tod’.44 Quite possibly,

Webern took this peculiar rendering from the catalogue initiated on the occasion of the

IX. Exhibition of the Vereinigung Bildender K unstler ¨ Osterreichs Secession , or from the local

press.45 This suggests that Webern did not derive the idea of the circle of life from Segantini’s

40 Villari, Giovanni Segantini , 164. See also Jaro Springer, ‘Giovanni Segantini’, in Die Kunst f ur alle , ed. Friedrich Pecht

(Munich: Verlagsanstalt F. Bruckmann A.-G., 1900), 70; Franz Wolter, ‘Erinnerungen an Giovanni Segantini’, in Die

Kunst f ur alle , ed. Friedrich Pecht (Munich: Verlagsanstalt F. Bruckmann A.-G., 1900), 297.

41 Jensen, ‘Webern and Giovanni Segantini’s Trittico della natura ’, 12.42 Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature , 76–7 (both quotes); italics in the original.

43 Ethan Haimo, Schoenberg’s Transformation of Musical Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 126.

44 Indeed, most commentators translated the three headings of the triptych as ‘Die Natur’, ‘Das Leben’, ‘Der Tod’;

see, for example, Servaes, Giovanni Segantini ; Emil Heilbut, ‘Giovanni Segantini’, in Kunst und K unstler: Illustrierte

Monatsschrift f ur bildende Kunst und Kunstgewerbe , ed. Emil Heilbut and Casar Flaischlen (Berlin: Verlag von Bruno

Cassirer, 1903), 57; Katalog der Siebenten Kunstausstellung der Berliner Secession (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1903), 32.

45 Katalog der IX. Kunstausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender K unstler ¨ Osterreichs Secession (Vienna: Adolf Holzhausen,

1901), 21. Note that the catalogue does not feature a reproduction of the triptych. In fact it is to this date an open

question as to whether, and if so where, Webern visually encountered Segantini’s triptych. I am aware of two main

threads of speculation. Based on Webern’s diary entry from 1 August 1902, it has become something of a common

place to point out Webern’s visit to the Neue Pinakothek in Munich in July 1902, where Webern, as he reported, saw Segantini’s ‘Alpenlandschaft’ and which ‘made a distinctive impression’ on him. (Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern ,51;

apparently Moldenhauer was not sure which of Segantini’s paintings Webern actually referred to; in all likelihood he






triptych directly, but presumably from secondary commentaries which cast the triptych as

unmistakably inspired by what Nietzsche himself identified as the fundamental idea of Also

sprach Zarathustra : the philosophical conception of Eternal Recurrence (Ewige-Wiederkunfts-

Gedanke ).46

Webern’s heavy reliance upon this particular interpretation of the triptych suggested by the buzz words ‘Werden’, ‘Sein’, and ‘Vergehen’, can be exemplified by the way he set out the

quartet’s third part, ‘Vergehen’. Webern evokes the notion of return and circularity which

was apparent already in the formal draft by prominently restating α both in the transition

(bb. 187–99) and in the closing section (bb. 256 to the end). In fact, as the sketches suggest,

Webern was all too concerned with providing this framing effect; he revised the ending as

originally laid down on the final page of the Reinschrift , in an attempt to advance more

conspicuously the three-note motive from the opening bars. Curiously enough, based on

these revisions Webern wrote the final page of the Reinschrift anew and replaced the older

version. This revision now forms part of the complete Reinschrift which is archived at theLibrary of Congress, Washington, and which formed the basis for James Beale’s print version

of the score; the previous final page is archived at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basle. A full

transcription of this first version of the ending is provided in Example 8.

That in the course of the compositional process Webern changed his strategies to translate

the abstract concepts of ‘Werden’, ‘Sein’, and ‘Vergehen’ altogether, ultimately rendering the

heuristic value or Erkenntnispotenzial of the formal draft highly problematic, can be further

exemplified with reference to the gestation of the fugato section. As the formal draft shows,

Webern’s initial idea was to compose a fugue to serve the function of the development section

– and indeed, in the sketches archived at the Paul Sacher Foundation we find a lengthy sketch

of a fugue evidently from an early stage of the compositional process, presumably the one

initially planned in the formal draft to constitute the ‘Sein’ section (the sketch is transcribed

in Example 9). Here while sketching this fugal section, Webern stumbled upon the three-note

motive which would later form the famous introduction to the piece apparently en passant .

This sketch shows that an accompaniment with the chordal layering of ‘f , f , a’ joins the

restatement of the fugal subject in the lower register (bb. 9ff.), precisely the intervallic content

that corresponds to the opening motive (down a semitone and up a major third). Possibly

Webern found the main overall harmonic idea encapsulated in this intervallic structure:

the juxtaposition of the diatonic scale with the whole-tone scale in a given short melodic

space. Webern, then, seems to have considered this accompanying material to be potentially

fruitful, as is indicated by his enclosing of this group of notes with square brackets, before

completely isolating it from the fugal subject; bb. 27–8 finally show the three-note motive

had seen ‘L’aratura’ (see Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature , 73).) Susanne Rode-Breymann, rightly,

suspiciousof thisExhibition as theplace whereWebern encountered Segantini’s triptychinstead raisedthe significance

of the periodical Der Kunstwart , then edited by Avenarius, as a platform for cultural debates on contemporary art;

Rode-Breymann, ‘“ . . . gathering the divine from the earthly . . . ”’, 11–14. However, to my knowledge none of the

issues of Der Kunstwart actually published a reproduction of Segantini’s triptych.46 See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch f ur Alle und Keinen’, in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe

VI:3, ed. Giorgio Kolli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1969), 333.






Example 8 Webern, sketch of the String Quartet (1905), Paul Sacher Foundation, Basle, Anton WebernCollection; my transcription. The Reinschrift , written with ink, originally dates back to the 25 August 1905;the revision, written with pencil directly onto this page, bears the date 12 September 1905. Ink is presentedin small size, pencil is presented in normal size; non-bracketed bar numbers correspond to the bars of therevised final page of the Reinschrift .

as this would later crystallize into the first two bars of the Reinschrift , just as some of the

three-note layers that he toyed around with in this sketch (bb. 35ff.) correspond to bb. 8–12

in the final version. Surprisingly enough, Webern ultimately discarded this fugal sketching

in its entirety and only saved the three-note motive. Finally, Webern replaced this earlier

contrapuntal sketch in favour of precisely the fugato that we now know from the final version

(bb. 90ff.). That there is no evidence whatsoever that Webern had sketched the fugato before

writing down the Reinschrift corresponds well with the fact that this part bears, in comparison

to most of the other parts which had been subject to previous sketching, considerably more

ad hoc corrections.47

47 I am grateful to Dr Thomas Ahrend for drawing my attention to this.






Example 8 Continued.

This is something of a philological pitfall for all those commentators who have aimed at

interpreting the fugato in the light of the formal draft. While the initial plan of the ‘outer

form’ is maintained, each fugue is constitutive of a different coherence of significance and

function within the work’s ‘inner form’. This is already foregrounded by the rather static

characteristic of the three-note fugato whereas the fugue initially sketched clearly had themomentum of an organic unfolding, an aesthetic understanding of the fugue all too familiar

from Schoenberg’s D minor Quartet.48 The contents of the ‘Sein’ section, it turns out, are

thus refurnished to the extent that we may even consider Webern to have fundamentally

changed his conception of this in its entirety.

48 Consider in this context Hermann Danuser’s interpretation of the opening of the Von der Wissenschaft section from

Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra , put forward in Hermann Danuser, Weltanschauungsmusik (Berlin: Edition

Argus, 2009), 404 (my translation): ‘Strauss uses the ambivalences of the fugue in an idiosyncratic way in order to

subject its use as a developmental technique [ fugenhafte Durchf uhrungstechniken ] to criticism. Given that thecommon

fugal technique had become petrified since the early nineteenth century, in so doing he allegorically opposed any positivistic philology as well as criticized the “academic” understanding of the sonata form in which the development

section is usually conceived to be a suitable place for fugal parts.’






Example 9 Webern, sketch of the String Quartet (1905), Paul Sacher Foundation, Basle, Anton WebernCollection; my transcription.

It may be due to Webern’s extensive change of strategies to translate what he believed

to be the triptych’s headings ‘Werden’, ‘Sein’, and ‘Vergehen’ to music, which ultimately

led him to produce a work which was barely charged with Segantini’s triptych in any

concrete-programmatic sense after all. In fact the final version, the Reinschrift , no longerbears any reference to Segantini’s triptych; he assigned a mysterious quote from the

Christian theosophist Jacobus Boehme (1575–1624) to the Reinschrift instead, which notably






encapsulates the notion of circularity and the ongoing spirit in a single short paragraph:

‘The sense of Triumph that prevailed within my Spirit I cannot write nor speak about; it can

with naught be compared, save only where, in the midst of Death, Life is born, like unto the

Resurrection of the Dead. In this Light did my Mind forthwith penetrate all Things: and in

all living Creatures, even in Weeds and Grass, did I perceive God, who He may be and how He may be and what His Will is.’49

ConclusionIn a way, this article has embarked upon a journey to defend Webern’s quartet against a

reception that reads the composer’s later ‘path’ to the New Music back into it. As I have

tried to show, it is possible to tease out aspects from Webern’s quartet that cannot simply be

attributed to Schoenberg’s direct influence but which are more generally rooted in the context

of the musikalische Moderne . Despite the profusion of biographical evidences well coveredin Moldenhauer and Kathryn Bailey’s biographies which draw a complex and variegated

picture of Webern’s early fascination and admiration for composers such as Strauss, Mahler,

Wagner, Wolf, Pfitzner, and Puccini, just to name a few, this perspective has been insufficiently

thought through in music-analytical and music-hermeneutic terms. The jargon of Webern’s

‘high modernism’ still casts Webern’s pre-opus repertoire in the light of not-yet-fully fledged

works of juvenilia and so merely as a parergon to what was yet to come – entirely neglecting

the fact that, as Puffett has most impressively demonstrated with regard to Im Sommerwind ,

Webern was in an emphatic sense a composer of the Moderne well before he stepped under

Schoenberg’s wings, equipped with firm aesthetic ideals as well as the compositional skills to

express them.50

That Webern’s quartet would reflect this hardly comes as a surprise. Not only did Webern

produce the quartet outside the usual teaching context, but also – and this is most often too

indifferently looked upon – in that same year Webern was, first and foremost, Schoenberg’s

student (in a factual sense); he only began to construct his identity as a Schoenberg student (in

an idealistic sense) towards the end of his studies.51 To trace this genealogy, Webern’s letter

to Schoenberg on 2 September 1907 provides an important reference. Claiming that while

meeting Pfitzner in Berlin in 1904 he had come to the realization that his aspiration to study

with that composer was ‘utter nonsense’ and that he must instead return to Vienna in order

to study with Schoenberg, Webern constructed a narrative of his years under Schoenberg’s

49 Cit. in translation after Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern , 87; Moldenhauer identified thisexcerpt as the one ‘that Wille

had used as the opening motto for his novel Offenbarungen des Wacholderbaums ’ and added that ‘it now appeared to

the composer as a fitting literary formulation of everything that his music, evoked by Segantini’s art, was trying to

convey’.

50 Puffett, ‘Gone with the Summer Wind; or, What Webern Lost’. See also Christopher Hailey, ‘Defining Home: Berg’s

Life on the Periphery’, in The Cambridge Companion to Berg , ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997), 14– 15.

51 See Felix Worner, ‘“Nachahmung” und “Uberbietung” durch Webern: Aspekte einer komplexen Interaktion’, inAutorschaft als historische Konstruktion: Arnold Sch¨ onberg – Vorg¨ anger, Zeitgenossen, Nachfolger und Interpreten , ed.

Andreas Meyer and Ullrich Scheideler (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2001), 204.






tutelage in deterministic terms: ‘I’ve come to realize that for me nothing other than studying

withyouwasanoption,thatithadtohappenthatway.’52 (That Pfitznernonethelesscontinued

to be a significant influence upon Webern, somethingWebern himselfremained tellingly silent

about, can be glimpsed in Egon Wellesz’s anecdote, according to which the Klang -oscillation

found in the first piece of Webern’s F unf Orchesterst ucke , Op. 10 was directly inspired by thePrelude to Pfitzner’s Die Rose vom Liebesgarten , conducted by Mahler in Vienna in 1905.53)

The deterministic nature of Webern’s narrative is an early manifestation of what would in

the years thereafter fully develop into a psychological dependency on Schoenberg.54 As is

evidenced by letters to Heinrich Jalowetz, by 1911 Webern’s dependency had reached such

intensity that Webern fundamentally suffered under the threat of rejection from Schoenberg,

from even the slightest of potential disagreements and alienations.55

How closely this psychological dependency was intertwined with Webern’s identity

construction as Schoenberg student can be observed particularly well in the context of his

preparation of the 1912 festschrift in honour of Schoenberg.56 When making the decisionof who should take a major role in the production of this festschrift, behind the scenes

Webern began to narrow down the members of the inner Schoenberg circle. In a letter to

Berg from 11 February 1912, Webern wrote: ‘I’m telling you, we are actually only four: you,

Koniger, Jalowetz and I. After that we have Stein and Linke. ’57 What strikes me here is not

only that Webern seems to have created a ‘second-tier’ of Schoenberg students, but also that

he deprived Karl Horwitz a place at all. This is surprising not only given that Horwitz was,

and continued to be, an essential member of the Schoenberg circle, but all the more so if

what Wilhelm von Wymetal reported to Conrad Ansorge on 5 October 1904 proves to be an

accurate recollection: that Webern, only eight years previously, had travelled with Horwitz

to Berlin in order to study with Pfitzner.58 But Horwitz, as Webern angrily complained in

52 The full quote reads: ‘[I]ch [wollte] ja nach Berlin gehn [sic] zu Pfitzner, aber kaum war ich in Berlin[,] ist es mir

ganz klar geworden, daß dies zu großer Unsinn sei und daß ich nach Wien zuruckmusse, um Ihr Schuler zu werden.

Ich mochte Ihnen damit nur sagen, daß es mir ganz klar ist, daß f ur mich uberhaupt nichts anderes moglich gewesen

w are, daß es einfach so kommen mußte.’ Letter from Webern to Schoenberg, 2 September 1907, published in Opus

Anton Webern , ed. Dieter Rexroth (Berlin: Quadriga, 1983), 81; my translation.

53 Egon Welleszand Emmy Wellesz, Egon Wellesz: Leben und Werk , ed. FranzEndler (Vienna andHamburg:Paul Zsolnay,

1981), 27–9.54 See, for example, Anne C. Shreffler, ‘Anton Webern’, in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second

Viennese School , ed. Bryan R. Simms (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 261.

55 See the letters from Webern to Jalowetz, 23 and 25 April 1911, published in Briefe an Heinrich Jalowetz , ed. Ernst

Lichtenhahn. Veroffentlichungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, 7 (Mainz: Schott, 1999), 140–5.

56 Arnold Sch onberg: Mit Beitr agen von Alban Berg [et. al] (Munich: R. Piper & Co, 1912).

57 The original quote reads: ‘Ich sage Dir, wir sind jetzt eigentlich nur mehr vier, Du, Koniger, Jalowetz und ich. Dann

kommen Stein und Linke.’ The transcription of thisletter was kindly provided by SimoneHohmaier;the transcription

is forthcoming in Briefwechsel Anton Webern – Alban Berg , ed. Rudolf Stephan and Simone Hohmaier. Briefwechsel

der Wiener Schule, 4 (Mainz: Schott Music, forthcoming).

58 I was kindly provided with a transcription of this letter by Eike Rathgeber; the transcription is forthcoming in Conrad

Ansorge (1862–1930). Von den M uhender Zeitenwende– Eine Dokumentation , ed.Eike Rathgeber, Christian Heitler andManuela Schwartz. Wiener Veroffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte (Vienna: Bohlau, forthcoming). Moldenhauer,

basing himself on a letter from Josef Polnauer from 11 September 1966, reported that Webern travelled to Berlin






a letter to Berg on 1 November 1911, had by then done absolutely nothing which might

have increased Schoenberg’s reputation,59 a frustration which ultimately led him to question

Horwitz’s loyalty towards Schoenberg in toto. Most certainly telling us more about Webern’s

own relationship to Schoenberg than Horwitz’s, this kind of frustration – notably, arising

four years after completing his studies with Schoenberg – in a way epitomizes Webern’stransformation from being Schoenberg’s student to a Schoenberg student , a self-identity from

which he would never depart.

All this suggests, in turn, that there are elements in Webern’s musical language still to be

discovered, not only before the autumn of 1904 but also in his quartet from 1905 and arguably

even beyond this time, which do not stem from the ‘anxiety of influence’ that Webern, as

Schoenberg student , later undoubtedly felt. To bring out these other – repressed – voices

in Webern’s work, as I have attempted to do in this article on his String Quartet (1905),

means nothing less than to explore what I, for heuristic reasons, like to think of as Webern’s

physiognomy of early modernism.

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