Webern Form

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Thus Spoke the Early Modernist: Zarathustra and

Rotational 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 Form
in 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, 225251
doi: 10.1017/S1478572215000043
Thus Spoke the Early Modernist: Zarathustra and Rotational

Form in Weberns String Quartet (1905)
SEBASTIAN WEDLER
Abstract
The large-scale structure of Anton Weberns String Quartet (1905) is an ongoing conundrum in music scholarship.
Initially inspired by Giovanni Segantinis 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 be
further explored, with reference to Weberns 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 Weberns later development.
In his essay on Anton Weberns landscape composition Im Sommerwind (1904), Derrick
Puffett lamented Weberns decision shortly after the works completion to take up
compositional studies with Arnold Schoenberg:
Obviously it would be absurd to blame Schoenberg for everything that went wrong
in Weberns 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 Weberns compositional technique matured largely under
Schoenbergs 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
<sebastian.wedler@music.ox.ac.uk>
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 this article in 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), 658.
225
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226 Wedler Zarathustra and Rotational Form in Weberns 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 Johnsons 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 Weberns decision to step
under Schoenbergs wings in the autumn of 1904, Puffett and this is how I would suggest his
regret may be turned into a productive perspective sensitizes us to the inconsistencies inherent
in Weberns later self-historiographical account as put forward in his 193233 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, Weberns 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 Schoenbergs
D minor Quartet, Op. 7),3 Weberns 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 signifier4 of what
he himself later famously described as his path to the New Music. Deeply indebted to an
orthodox understanding of Theodor W. Adornos 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 Weberns 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 was not 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 Fortes study on The Atonal Music of Anton Webern. Aligning himself completely with
Metzgers assessment of the works historical significance, Forte reasoned that the harmonic
vocabulary to which the opening music [of the string quartet] refers [ . . . ] strongly suggests
that of Schoenbergs 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 Weberns sketches with Walter
Frischs analysis and dating of Schoenbergs sketches in Thematic Form and the Genesis in Schoenbergs 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 (18831945). Masters diss., University of Kansas, 1967, 2226; 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 (PhD
diss., University of London, 2014), 59.
5 Metzger, Uber
Anton Weberns Streichquartett 1905, 80ff.
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Wedler Zarathustra and Rotational Form in Weberns String Quartet (1905) 227
some three years the emergence of Schoenbergs own fully atonal music.6 While both Metzger
and Forte, basing themselves on the works chromaticism, implicitly reinforce Weberns selfhistoriographical 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 works engagement with modernism in a very
different light.
Since the discovery of Weberns quartet by Moldenhauer in 1965, the works 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 Segantinis 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 Weberns initial inspiration. In particular, it is the works
supposed tripartite structure that has been considered to correlate with Segantinis triptych.7
Yet this take on the works formal organization is somewhat unsatisfying; by merely mapping
Segantinis triptych onto the quartets formal structure this approach all too readily avoids
grappling with the works inner form and the Formprobleme therein articulated. In critical
distance to such a heteronomous understanding of the quartets form, I shall argue that just
as one does not need to be aware of the private programme which inspired Schoenbergs D
minor Quartet in order to make sense of its formal structure, so too can the autonomous
side of Weberns 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
Weberns 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 Fortes historiographical interpretations of
the work as a crucial precursor to high modernism. Renegotiating the heuristic value of
the works initial programme with reference to some of Weberns manuscripts and sketches
archived at the Paul Sacher Foundation, in the second part of this article I shall argue that
Weberns programmatic concern did not lie in actually representing Segantinis 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 Weberns 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).
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the musikalische Moderne was later in Weberns The Path to the New Music deprived of any
historiographical significance: Richard Strauss.8
Analysis of the rotational form

Rotational 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 Weberns string quartet. If we take the stance, which I shall later substantiate, that the
initial programmatic reference to Segantinis triptych from the formal draft has only little
significance for our understanding of the works formal structure, we may come to expect that
in this piece Webern, in one way or another, engaged with sonata thought. Carl Dahlhauss
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 genre10
may serve here as our guiding premise.
To my knowledge there has hitherto been only a single attempt to understand Weberns
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, 236. 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 Mahlers
Sixth Symphony, 19th-Century Music 25/1 (2001), 52, n. 9; see also Andrew Davis and Howard Pollack, Rotational
Form in the Opening Scene of Gershwins Porgy and Bess, Journal of the American Musicological Society 60/2 (2007), 386,
n. 26. Most recently, rotational theory has served as the analytical focal point in a variety of studies concerned with early
musical modernism, including J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), ch. 4; idem., Our True North: Waltons First Symphony, Sibelianism, and the Nationalization of Modernism
in England, Music & Letters 89/4 (2008), 576ff.; Seth Monahan, Mahlers Sonata Narratives (PhD diss., Yale University,
2008), published in a revised version as Mahlers Symphonic Sonatas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); idem.,
Success and Failure in Mahlers Sonata Recapitulations, Music Theory Spectrum 33/1 (2011); Daniel M. Grimley, Carl
Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), ch. 7; idem., Landscape and Distance: Vaughan
Williams, Modernism and the Symphonic Pastoral, in British Music and Modernism, 18951960, ed. Matthew Riley
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); James Hepokoski, Clouds and Circles: Rotational Form in Debussys Nuages, Dutch
Journal of Music Theory 15/1 (2010), 117; and Michael J. Puri, Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6779.
10 Carl Dahlhaus, Analysis and Value Judgment, trans. Siegmund Levarie (New York: Pendragon Press, 1983), 823.
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22
37
Development or actual S-space?
Exposition
Introduction
44
69
S (?)
E [-66]
73
79
90
80
TR
thematic spaces:
introductory
rotation
C [-112]
F
actual
EEC?
MC or
Fugato [ ;
1&2
2]
actual
ESC?
126
131
143
Introductory Rotation
Figure 1
S (?)
152
178
E [-185]
D [-221]
E [-end]
TR
180
Recapitulatory Rotation
187
200
222
249
260
Coda or S-replacement?
Webern, String Quartet (1905): macro-rotation.
thus it seems appropriate, first of all, to begin by critically engaging with his analysis. The
quintessence of Gerlachs reading is that he sees the quartet as being divided into the following
sonata spaces: exposition (bb. 179), development (bb. 80125), recapitulation (bb. 12685),
and coda (bb. 186279).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 works formal parts with the sonata
paradigm. It is precisely in this that the proton pseudos of Gerlachs 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. Marxs reading
of the middle-period Beethoven) that is ultimately too rigid, too narrowly conceived to be
actually able to account for the quartets 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 works fundamental rotational structure, or what
I shall refer to as its macro rotation. The motivic-thematic spaces are shown, in accordance
with Gerlachs analysis, in Example 1.13
Unlike Gerlach, I see the first impression of a primary theme crystallizing with the onset
of the thematic space in b. 44 (P), corroborated by the instruction Mit grossem Schwung
11 Reinhard Gerlach, Musik und Jugendstil der Wiener Schule, 19001908 (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.
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Example 1
Webern, String Quartet (1905): motivic-thematic chart.
(see Example 2). This is also the first passage where E major sticks out as the tonic (established
via the harmonic progression IIIIV64 [ . . . ]I),14 clearly indicating that the two preceding
motivic-thematic spaces, (bb. 121) and (bb. 2243), serve an introductory function due
to 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 Weberns quartet as a tonal piece requires reflection upon the limitations of this
assumption, the more so since my interpretation of the works formal organization critically relies upon the
identification of cadential articulations. My use of the word tonal targets those aspects of the quartets 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 Hyers 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 Weberns quartet is (still) a piece of tonal or (already) atonal music.
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Example 2 Webern, String Quartet (1905): bb. 4460 (bb. 538 omitted).
By Anton Webern/Arranged by James Beale
Copyright 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. 6979 (labelled in Example 1 as ),
which Gerlach, while identifying this to be a new motivic-thematic entity, nonetheless
does not consider to function as S. Indeed, the role of 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: is
15 James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-EighteenthCentury Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49.
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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 as a function
of 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. 767), 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 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 in textural terms, its tempo is notably rather slow (furthermore we
may note the accompanying instructions weich and sehr zart, played mit Dampfer in pp and
ppp); moreover, it gives rise to an authentic cadence in C major (bb. 10411) 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 . 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.
809). 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 and 2 . Moreover, there is a long tradition of fugatos
constituting the development section, perhaps most notably in Mephistopheles from Franz
Liszts Faust Symphony or the beginning of the Von der Wissenschaft section in Strausss Also
sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 (the latter of which I shall go on to argue may serve us as a fruitful
hermeneutic window16 for Weberns quartet).17 An understanding of the fugatos overall
formal function as the development section has far-reaching implications: it would mean that
the exposition has not simply failed because both 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, 18001900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1993), ch. 1.
17 See John Williamson, Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7980.
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inverted expository
rotation in the
expected order
(but incomplete)
inverted exposition
inverted expository
rotation in the
expected order
(but incomplete)
1&2
1&2
44
E [-66]
S (?)
S (?)
Introduction
Figure 2
152
22
69
expository rotation
now complete (!)
Exposition
159
173
175
178
[Steigerungsform]
S (?)
180
E [-185]
S (?)
(!)
Recapitulatory Rotation
Webern, String Quartet (1905): sub-rotations.
Indeed, in the recapitulatory rotation we are presented with a strategy of compensation

for 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 level could be considered to incrementally take
over the supposed S-function of in the recapitulatory rotation, as if the actual expository
space was to be understood as an inverted exposition.
What brings the possibility of an inverted exposition into play is the fact that the recurrence
of (b. 152), despite being presented in F major instead of E major clearly suggestive of the
onset of the recapitulatory rotation, is followed by (b. 159), not . This seems to suggest a
reading of (bb. 15972) as a stand-in for the lack of S. But 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, is relaunched in b. 173 which, followed by a brief
restatement of once more, turns into a Steigerungsform that surprisingly culminates in b.
178 in (note, mit grosster 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 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. 1805 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 that we get an authentic cadence (bb. 20721), complementary to the cadential
articulation towards the end of the fugato section (bb. 10412), but in the wrong key of D
major. This ambivalence is complicit with the function of as both mirroring the supposed
fugato stand-in for S as some kind of S-replacement in the recapitulatory rotation, while also
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Example 3 Webern, String Quartet (1905): bb. 15285 (bb. 15577 omitted).18
By Anton Webern/Arranged by James Beale
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 quartets generic sonata form strata while at the same time setting up an immanent
logic 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
cc e from the upbeat and the first bar (with a fermata) resolves to the augmented triad
ceg (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 Weberns autograph bb. 178 and 181 are notated in G major; Example 3 cites Beales edition (New
York: Carl Fischer, 1965) where this passage is enharmonically respelled as A major; another important enharmonic
respelling concerns b. 74 (not reproduced here but reflected in Example 5), which in Weberns autograph is notated
as C major, in Beales edition as D major. I am grateful to Dr Thomas Ahrend for pointing this out to me.
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Example 4
Weitzmann, Der u bermaige 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 Weberns quartet consistently applies Weitzmanns
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 ceg, Webern obtained
the three major chords which we are nowadays familiar with as the hexatonic cycle H0 (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, Weberns 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), 197200.
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 Die Wiener Schule, ed. Rudolf Stephan (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), 301; 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 Wagners 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 u bermaige Dreiklang (Berlin: Verlag der T. Trautweinschen 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 Saslaws translation and reproduction (2004). The significance of Weitzmanns study
for neo-Riemannian theory has been discussed by Richard Cohn, Weitzmamns Regions, My Cycles, and Douthetts
Dancing Cubes, Music Theory Spectrum 22/1 (2000); and idem., Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Consonant
Triads Second Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 568.
22 Richard Cohn, Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic
Progressions, Music Analysis 15/1 (1996), 17ff.
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T4
(44-66)
(69-79)
T2
T4
T2
(90-112)
T4
(152)
T2
T4
(178)
T2
(180-85)
T4
(200-21)
T4
(249-end)
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 G major 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 cdefg (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
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the one hand and the Urlinienterzzug paradigm on the other.23 Arguably Weberns 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 the one hand, the orthodox, diatonic, prolongation of the tonic triad, and on the
other hand constructions of musical space which tend to cut against diatonic prolongation.24
The effect obtained in Weberns 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 ), 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 . 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 with
Adornos 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 works sonata
deformation (in the sense of a second form) that what erstwhile appeared in Gerlachs 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 trope

Our analysis of the rotational form has revealed the quartets 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 Weberns
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 Strausss 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 Weberns string
quartet to the opening motive cc e.26
23 For Hepokoski and Darcys 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 19001950: 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
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Example 6 Comparison of the three-note fugal subjects in (a) Webern, String Quartet (1905), bb. 906;
and (b) Richard Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra, op. 30, bb. 2015.
(a) By Anton Webern / Arranged by James Beale
All rights assigned to Carl Fischer, LLC
All rights reserved. Used with permission.
(b) Extract from Also sprach Zarathustra, op. 30 by Richard Strauss

C Copyright by C. F. Peters, Leipzig
Reproduced 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 Strausss work in his quartet? Indeed, just
as in Weberns 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
introductorys 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 Beethovens
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. Charles
Youmans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 100.
28 Hepokoski, The Second Cycle of Tone Poems, 101.
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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 Weberns quartet.30 Seeing Weberns 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 works complex form?
My impression is that Weberns reception of Strauss in this period was much more multilayered 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
read the fugato rather as an attempt to construct Strausss Also sprach Zarathustra as a paratext
intended to make the philosophical authority of Strausss tone poem reverberate in his own
quartet. Thus Strausss work offered Webern the possibility to buy himself, arguably in line
with Alexander Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, into what had crystallized towards the end of the
nineteenth century as the Zarathustra trope.31 As the paragon of a pantheistic worldview
in which, in Kevin Karness words, redemption was attainable through the individuals
realization of the essential relatedness, even oneness, of humanity and the natural world, the
Zarathustra trope owes its place right at the centre of turn-of-the-century musical modernism,
not least due to its famous antipodal constellation to Schopenhauers and Wagners vision of
redemption grounded in metaphysical transcendence of ones 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
Strausss 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 musics potential to
29 Charles Youmans, Richard Strausss Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of
Musical Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 199200.
30 While making such a comparison one may not neglect the fact that in Weberns quartet, unlike in Also sprach
Zarathustra, the supposedly S-space, , 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-Si`ecle Vienna
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1326. In particular Karnes points out Zemlinskys Turmwachterlied, op.
8, no. 1 (1899), 13740, and Schoenbergs Gurrelieder (190011), 15262, as crucial cases in point. For an in-depth
discussion of Nietzsches concept of Eternal Recurrence in relationship to modernity, see Matthew Rampley, Nietzsche,
Aesthetics and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 14852.
32 Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World, 128. See also Charles Youmans, The Development of Richard Strausss
Worldview, in The Richard Strauss Companion, ed. Mark-Daniel Schmid (Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2003),
813.
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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 Strausss 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 Segantinis 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 Nietzsches Zarathustra had some crucial impact
on Segantini echoed throughout the reception history of the painters work,36 and was in
33 The German originals read: den Modernsten der Modernen; glanzendsten Nebensonne am deutschen Musikhimmel
der Gegenwart; die Ausdrucksfahigkeit der Musik selbst fur metaphysische Probleme erprobte. The transcription of
this diary entry was kindly provided by Barbara Schingnitz; her complete transcription of Weberns 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, Lelevation en musique: Anton Webern
et Segantini, Revue de lArt 96 (1992), 82; he has also provided a transcription, albeit incomplete, on page 84; see
also Eric Frederick Jensen, Webern and Giovanni Segantinis 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 201314, which was invaluable in the preparation of my own
transcriptions as provided in Examples 79 of this article. Any errors are, of course, my own.
35 In this context see Weberns 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
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particular advanced with regard to his painting Lannunciazione del nuovo verbo, completed
in 1896 just before he began producing the triptych. On a more general level, the way nature
was transfigured in Segantinis late work as a whole is often considered to reflect Nietzsches
pantheistic vision of redemption. Both Luigi Villari and Franz Servaes, the authors of the
first extensive monographs on the painter, broadly adumbrated Segantinis late work as the
synthesis 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. Segantinis] 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 whom
she 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.
Segantinis] 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 Villaris interpretation are (i) Segantinis 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 paintings
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 Segantinis 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 Weberns 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, 196201. See also Franz Servaes, Giovanni Segantini: Sein Leben und sein
Werk (Vienna: M. Gerlach, 1902), 10411; Alfred Peltzer, Giovanni Segantini (Betrachtungen bei Gelegenheit der
Ausstellung zu Ehren des Verstorbenen in Mailand), in Die Kunst fur alle, ed. Friedrich Pecht (Munich: Verlagsanstalt
F. Bruckmann A.-G., 1900), 2924.
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[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 mans role in it41 ), gives contour to the pivotal
aesthetic concern by which Nietzsches concept of redemption could be considered to have
been redeemed in Segantinis 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 Segantinis triptych as such, which
fuelled Weberns primary programmatic concern. This perspective has been opened up by
Johnson who, in distance to those commentators who have aimed at showing the congruencies
that apparently exist between Segantinis triptych and the quartets formal structure, instead
sensed that Weberns 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 Schoenbergs initial programme for his D minor Quartet
which Ethan Haimo has argued served the composer more [as] an aide-memoire than a
detailed blueprint43 ).
That Webern right from the start was concerned with redeeming the supposedly
Zarathustrian qualities which could be perceived in Segantinis 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 Weberns 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 Kunstler Osterreichs

Secession, or from the local
45
press. This suggests that Webern did not derive the idea of the circle of life from Segantinis
40 Villari, Giovanni Segantini, 164. See also Jaro Springer, Giovanni Segantini, in Die Kunst fur alle, ed. Friedrich Pecht
(Munich: Verlagsanstalt F. Bruckmann A.-G., 1900), 70; Franz Wolter, Erinnerungen an Giovanni Segantini, in Die
Kunst fur alle, ed. Friedrich Pecht (Munich: Verlagsanstalt F. Bruckmann A.-G., 1900), 297.
41 Jensen, Webern and Giovanni Segantinis Trittico della natura, 12.
42 Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature, 767 (both quotes); italics in the original.
43 Ethan Haimo, Schoenbergs 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 Kunstler: Illustrierte
Monatsschrift fur 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 Kunstler 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 Segantinis triptych. I am aware of two main
threads of speculation. Based on Weberns diary entry from 1 August 1902, it has become something of a common
place to point out Weberns visit to the Neue Pinakothek in Munich in July 1902, where Webern, as he reported, saw
Segantinis Alpenlandschaft and which made a distinctive impression on him. (Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern, 51;
apparently Moldenhauer was not sure which of Segantinis paintings Webern actually referred to; in all likelihood he
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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-WiederkunftsGedanke).46
Weberns 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
quartets third part, Vergehen. Webern evokes the notion of return and circularity which
was apparent already in the formal draft by prominently restating both in the transition
(bb. 18799) 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 the
Library of Congress, Washington, and which formed the basis for James Beales 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,
Weberns 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. 278 finally show the three-note motive
had seen Laratura (see Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature, 73).) Susanne Rode-Breymann, rightly,
suspicious of this Exhibition as the place where Webern encountered Segantinis triptych instead raised the 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 . . . , 1114. However, to my knowledge none of the
issues of Der Kunstwart actually published a reproduction of Segantinis triptych.
46 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch fur Alle und Keinen, in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe
VI:3, ed. Giorgio Kolli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1969), 333.
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Example 8 Webern, sketch of the String Quartet (1905), Paul Sacher Foundation, Basle, Anton Webern
Collection; 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 presented
in small size, pencil is presented in normal size; non-bracketed bar numbers correspond to the bars of the
revised 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. 812
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.
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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 works inner form. This is already foregrounded by the rather static
characteristic of the three-note fugato whereas the fugue initially sketched clearly had the
momentum of an organic unfolding, an aesthetic understanding of the fugue all too familiar
from Schoenbergs 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 Danusers interpretation of the opening of the Von der Wissenschaft section from
Richard Strausss 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 Durchfuhrungstechniken] to criticism. Given that the common
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.
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Example 9 Webern, sketch of the String Quartet (1905), Paul Sacher Foundation, Basle, Anton Webern
Collection; my transcription.
It may be due to Weberns extensive change of strategies to translate what he believed

to be the triptychs headings Werden, Sein, and Vergehen to music, which ultimately
led him to produce a work which was barely charged with Segantinis triptych in any
concrete-programmatic sense after all. In fact the final version, the Reinschrift, no longer
bears any reference to Segantinis triptych; he assigned a mysterious quote from the
Christian theosophist Jacobus Boehme (15751624) to the Reinschrift instead, which notably
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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
Conclusion
In a way, this article has embarked upon a journey to defend Weberns quartet against a
reception that reads the composers later path to the New Music back into it. As I have
tried to show, it is possible to tease out aspects from Weberns quartet that cannot simply be
attributed to Schoenbergs direct influence but which are more generally rooted in the context
of the musikalische Moderne. Despite the profusion of biographical evidences well covered
in Moldenhauer and Kathryn Baileys biographies which draw a complex and variegated
picture of Weberns 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 Weberns
high modernism still casts Weberns 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
Schoenbergs wings, equipped with firm aesthetic ideals as well as the compositional skills to
express them.50
That Weberns 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, Schoenbergs
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, Weberns 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 Schoenbergs
49 Cit. in translation after Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern, 87; Moldenhauer identified this excerpt 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 Segantinis art, was trying to
convey.
50 Puffett, Gone with the Summer Wind; or, What Webern Lost. See also Christopher Hailey, Defining Home: Bergs
Life on the Periphery, in The Cambridge Companion to Berg, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 1415.
51 See Felix Worner, Nachahmung und Uberbietung

durch Webern: Aspekte einer komplexen Interaktion, in
Autorschaft als historische Konstruktion: Arnold Schonberg Vorganger, Zeitgenossen, Nachfolger und Interpreten, ed.
Andreas Meyer and Ullrich Scheideler (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2001), 204.
IP address: 216.17.119.80
tutelage in deterministic terms: Ive come to realize that for me nothing other than studying
with you was an option, that it had to happen that way.52 (That Pfitzner nonetheless continued
to be a significant influence upon Webern, something Webern himself remained tellingly silent
about, can be glimpsed in Egon Welleszs anecdote, according to which the Klang-oscillation
found in the first piece of Weberns Funf Orchesterstucke, Op. 10 was directly inspired by the
Prelude to Pfitzners Die Rose vom Liebesgarten, conducted by Mahler in Vienna in 1905.53 )
The deterministic nature of Weberns 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 Weberns 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 Weberns 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 decision
of 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: Im 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, da dies zu groer Unsinn sei und da ich nach Wien zuruckmusse, um Ihr Schuler zu werden.
Ich mochte Ihnen damit nur sagen, da es mir ganz klar ist, da fur mich u berhaupt nichts anderes moglich gewesen
ware, da es einfach so kommen mute. Letter from Webern to Schoenberg, 2 September 1907, published in Opus
Anton Webern, ed. Dieter Rexroth (Berlin: Quadriga, 1983), 81; my translation.
53 Egon Wellesz and Emmy Wellesz, Egon Wellesz: Leben und Werk, ed. Franz Endler (Vienna and Hamburg: Paul Zsolnay,
1981), 279.
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), 1405.
56 Arnold Schonberg: Mit Beitragen 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 this letter was kindly provided by Simone Hohmaier; 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 (18621930). Von den Muhen der Zeitenwende Eine Dokumentation, ed. Eike Rathgeber, Christian Heitler and
Manuela 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
IP address: 216.17.119.80
a letter to Berg on 1 November 1911, had by then done absolutely nothing which might
have increased Schoenbergs reputation,59 a frustration which ultimately led him to question
Horwitzs loyalty towards Schoenberg in toto. Most certainly telling us more about Weberns
own relationship to Schoenberg than Horwitzs, this kind of frustration notably, arising
four years after completing his studies with Schoenberg in a way epitomizes Weberns
transformation from being Schoenbergs student to a Schoenberg student, a self-identity from
which he would never depart.
All this suggests, in turn, that there are elements in Weberns 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 Weberns 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 Weberns
physiognomy of early modernism.
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Thus Spoke the Early Modernist: Zarathustra and

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

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C Cambridge University Press, 2015

Thus Spoke the Early Modernist: Zarathustra and Rotational

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Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Uber

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Analysis of the rotational form

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Development or actual S-space?

Webern, String Quartet (1905): macro-rotation.

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

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

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Webern, String Quartet (1905): sub-rotations.

Indeed, in the recapitulatory rotation we are presented with a strategy of compensation

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Weitzmann, Der u bermaige Dreiklang: reproduction of Example, 15 (1853).

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Webern, String Quartet (1905): hexatonic space.

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Webern and the Zarathustra trope

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IX. Exhibition of the Vereinigung Bildender Kunstler Osterreichs

45 Katalog der IX. Kunstausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Kunstler Osterreichs

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It may be due to Weberns extensive change of strategies to translate what he believed

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51 See Felix Worner, Nachahmung und Uberbietung

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