This chapter, concerned with earliness as an aesthetic category, elicits a productive tension between Webern’s fascination for the ‘purely phenomenological’ dimensions of new-symbolist poetry and Jugendstil architecture on the one hand, and the impact Schoenberg’s ‘dialectic-material’ musical thought had on him as a student on the other – a tension that had crystallised as essentially irreconcilable in fin de siècle philosophical discourse yet in many ways formed the matrix through which much of Webern’s compositional imagination was shaped. From this perspective, it is argued that there is a need to reorient discussion of the works Webern produced under Schoenberg’s tutelage, from questions concerned with style towards a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which the new stylistic means and devices Webern encountered during his studies with Schoenberg enabled the young composer to (re)voice his concern for presence and immediacy.

Building on the discussion of earliness in the Prelude and Interlude, this chapter examines how Webern began to forge a narrative of earliness in relation to his own compositional development. It argues that this narrative solidified fully only as a result of the psychological dependency on Schoenberg that Webern developed in the years after completing his studies with him in 1908. This argument is grounded in an analysis of how Webern, between 1909 and 1914, increasingly distanced himself from certain influences that once had shaped his musical thinking, most notably those of Richard Strauss. That said, there is evidence that Webern continued to engage with his early compositions at later stages in life and even reworked parts of the String Quartet M. 79. In the light of these findings, this chapter suggests that the category of earliness is inherently porous, yet shining through the category’s porousness is its critical-heuristic potential.

Completed in 1905 as one of the earliest large-scale works that Webern produced under Arnold Schoenberg’s tutelage, the Langsamer Satz for string quartet has been deemed ‘disarmingly conventional’ (James Beale), as no more than an ‘exercise’ (Walter Kolneder) through which the young composer honed his compositional craft. Challenging this mode of interpretation, this chapter attends to what is perhaps the movement’s most salient feature: its exuding sense of lyricism. Through a combination of voice-leading and transformational perspectives, it is argued that the lyricism pervading the work is rooted in an audacious dual-tonic practice. The movement’s tonal disposition is further illuminated with reference to contemporaneous debates that erupted in post-Riemannian music-theoretical discourse, especially Georg Capellen’s conception of Doppelklänge (‘hybrid chords’). The picture emerging from these considerations is that the Langsamer Satz features compositional strategies that seem rather unusual for an ‘exercise’, and which cannot be explained with reference to Schoenberg’s musical thought alone.

Entering into Anton Webern’s twelve-tone music and its complex reception history is like entering into a combat with the Hydra: cleave off one head of the Webern myth, and two more grow in its place. Taking a step back from the embattled scenes of the past in search of a broader vantage point, this chapter argues that the crux in understanding late Webern lies in understanding that the competing, often contradictory images of the composer that have emerged pose no real contradictions after all. Instead, in the same way that the Hydra’s separate heads are essentially connected entities, these different images are best understood as mediated with one another on a deeper level, representing different aspects of one and the same aesthetic concern: musical lyricism.

As one of the inventors of the twelve-tone technique and the first well-known composer of twelve-tone music, it makes eminent sense that Arnold Schoenberg would be understood by scholars and musicians as a traditionalist. This chapter explores an important, but often neglected, way Schoenberg preserved tradition in his serial music: through the use of a ‘musical idea’ that involves the introduction and elaboration of a problem and its eventual solution. The chapter presents two analyses: of the Prelude op. 25 and the Piano Piece op. 33a. Both pieces illustrate problems and elaborations that stem from the differences between a symmetrical pitch-class or interval pattern (presented or implied at the beginning) and various close or distant approximations of it. The symmetrical pattern is then reasserted at or near the end, and the approximations are connected to it in significant ways, as a solution.

Gustav Klimt’s Mahlerian knight in his Beethoven Frieze (1902), produced for the opening of the Secession building, represented Mahler as an allegorical, even mythical figure, building on the painter’s already a considerable reputation for allegorical paintings on topics ranging from philosophy and jurisprudence to love. A remarkable feature of Mahler reception in Vienna in the early 1900s is that so many other creative artists and intellectuals in the composer’s orbit likewise framed his impact on music or society in allegorical terms. These included figures who had known the composer personally since youth, and others who barely knew him at all, and in both groups were thinkers not otherwise prone to public displays of romantic imagining. Three main figures are considered here – the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the musicologist Guido Adler, and the critic Max Brod – who together established the generally current image of Mahler as a saint, a visionary, and a cementer and proclaimer of community.