The Beeb  3's Essential Classics - 2

From the album Quartettsätze/ Quartet Movements (2011)


LANGSAMER SATZ (1905) by Anton Webern (1883-1945)

Anton von Webern's Langsamer Satz (1905) had to wait almost 60 years before receiving its first performance. Arguing that the language of new music must be securely anchored in traditional forms, Arnold Schoenberg sought to discipline his abundantly talented pupil, Webern, by pushing him to write single movements for string quartet. Webern wrote many such pieces, but the Langsamer Satz transcends by far its "assignment" status. Webern biographer Malcolm Hayes has described it as "an exercise in late Romantic soulfulness; its underlying mood of sweet serenity looks back to the tranced, dreamlike mood of Im Sommerwind as well as forward to the new leaner style that Webern was already developing."

The nature-loving Webern took as his inspiration a hiking holiday he made with his cousin (and future wife) Wilhelmine Mortl in the spring of 1905. They visited the Waldwinkel in Lower Austria, a picturesque stretch of countryside to the west of Vienna. Webern later wrote of the trip in his diary, impressing himself with literary flourishes (...): "We wandered through forests. It was a fairyland! High tree trunks all around us, a green luminescence in between, and here and there floods of gold on the green moss. The forest symphony resounded... A walk in the moonlight on flowery meadows - Then the night - [here Webern quotes poet Detlev von Liliencron] "What the night gave to me, will long make me tremble' - Two souls had wed." 

(Programme note taken from: http://www.prx.org/pieces/100448/transcripts/224721)

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