Composed between 1906 and 1908, Webern’s Dehmel songs have turned into something of a playground for scholars keen to unravel the origins of atonality. Drawing on hitherto unexamined sketches, this chapter offers new insights into the harmonic strategies and devices through which Webern interpreted Dehmel’s poetry. Analytical focal points to be considered include Webern’s use of modal mixture, common-tone tonality, and the SLIDE transformation. In particular, it is argued that, in these songs, voice leading is roped into the business of, quite literally, ‘envoicing’ absence. Extending the scope of these considerations, the chapter concludes with a discussion of Webern’s George setting Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen, completed in 1908, with a focus on the way the choir renders the poem’s semantic juxtaposition of ‘sorrow’ and ‘spring’ in terms of a double-bind. In this way, this chapter provides fresh glimpses into the complex relationship between poetological and harmonic ideas in Webern’s compositional imagination.

Composed in the summer of 1905 outside the penumbra of Arnold Schoenberg’s teaching, and inspired by Giovanni Segantini’s Trittico della natura, Webern’s String Quartet M. 79 has garnered much scholarly attention since its posthumous publication in 1965. While some commentators discerned in the work the critical turning point at which Webern self-consciously began to embark upon his famous ‘path’ to atonality, others have sought to explain its ostensibly tripartite form in programmatic terms. Drawing on recent developments in sonata theory and harmonic analysis, as well as new insights into the manuscripts and sketches, this chapter considers the quartet in terms of a complex dialogue between ‘programmatic’ and ‘absolute’ meaning strata, mediated by the contemporaneous reception of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this way, it challenges those interpretations that deem the work either as merely a blueprint of Segantini’s triptych or as the inception of Webern’s ‘high modernism’.

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.

This chapter situates Webern’s early works within the discourses of Stimmungsmusik, a genre of musical composition concerned with the evocation of moods or atmosphere. Through a discussion of selected early songs and the symphonic idyll Im Sommerwind, it argues that for the young Webern the idea of Stimmung was tied to a specific set of compositional choices and expressive strategies geared at conjuring notions of depth. This perspective is corroborated with reference to the aesthetic ideas Webern inherited from Ferdinand Avenarius’s poetry and Richard Wagner’s music dramas. Ultimately, it is suggested that by dissolving the subject–object epistemology in favour of a more ‘phenomenological’ conception of the world, Webern’s early works can be understood as offering a radical critique of ‘Romantic’ landscape aesthetics.

A stylistic shibboleth of musical romanticism and early modernism, the breakthrough figures as a salient expressive device in many of Webern’s tonal compositions. This chapter sheds light on the aesthetic function that energetic thresholds fulfil in Webern’s early work, through a close analysis of the Piano Quintet (1907). Described by Theodor W. Adorno as an ‘amalgamation of Brahmsian with Wagnerian elements’, the quintet engages a complex dialectic between ‘formal’ and ‘material’ meaning strata. Linking this dialectic to what is termed the ‘agitating impulse’, a motivic idea set up in the opening bars that adamantly strives towards its resolution yet which is consistently frustrated, this chapter construes the various waves pervading the work not as emancipatory gestures but corporeal manifestations of a subcutaneous anxiety. As such, it is suggested that the quintet offers an original contribution to ‘Romantic’ sonata form practices, and a novel interpretation of the breakthrough.