The first of his own compositions that Anton Webern publicly acknowledged— in other words the first to which he assigned an opus number— was the orchestral Passacaglia, Op.1 of 1908. But a single-movement Piano Quintet (sometimes known by its tempo indication, Mässig) composed the year before had come quite close to gaining the honor. This Quintet seems to have been a work for which Webern's personal feelings were not entirely clear. He surely recognized that the degree to which it relied on a heavy quasi-Brahmsian style for its melodic and structural effect (and affect) was not perhaps altogether healthy or forward-looking— and looking forward was a matter of real significance to the Schoenberg circle during these early years of the twentieth century (later, many members of the circle, Schoenberg himself most certainly included, would start looking backwards in musical time for inspiration). The Quintet is not, however, a contemptible piece by any standard, and Webern knew it. Most of his early pieces he summarily and collectively disowned; this one, though, he even considered revising for publication in the 1930s. It is possible that his reluctance to simply toss the piece out had roots in the fact that it was a performance of the Quintet that resulted in one of the very first reviews of Webern's music: Viennese music critic Gustav Grube, writing in 1907 for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, noted that Webern, almost alone among the Schonberg students, had talent, and that the Quintet, while often too complex and prohibitively dissonant (if only Grube knew then what would yet come from Schoenberg and his disciples!), was "not ill-conceived".



The Quintet is in one extended movement, marked Mässig or Moderato at the start but subject to all kinds of speedings-up and speedings-down as it goes along, and cast as a large three-part form (somewhat of a sonata-allegro form) in a chromatically-extended C major. Webern's disenchantment with traditional diatonic idioms was by 1907 quite palpable, and can be heard right from the start: the fifteen-bar phrase for viola with piano accompaniment that begins the Quintet is not long for C major; by the second bar it has begun to sprout modulatory wings, and by bars five and six Gustav Grube really had something to complain about! When the rest of the strings join in (with some hushed but anxious imitation), things begin to heat up, rhythmically, and before long our starting Moderato has polymorphed into a Molto vivace ed agitato. When the time comes, though, for a reprise or recapitulation of the opening, Webern returns to the original lightly pulsing tempo, and this time gives both melody and accompaniment to the pianist. If Webern had no fear of dissonance, neither did he fear bombast. The Quintet ends with a triple-forte tutti explosion of C major.



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