Webern wrote the Op. 5 Five Movements (or Five Pieces, as they are sometimes called) in the spring of 1909, the year after he had been given his first official musical post, as a conductor of operettas at the Austrian spa of Bad Ischl. A pick-up group gave the Movements their first performance on February 8, 1910.

His compositions of this time betray barely a hint of the light operettas that he so disliked conducting. Webern was continuing his explorations of the atonality also being employed by his compatriots Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, while beginning to incorporate the spare gestures and concision of thought which became so pronounced in his works of the early 1910s. A talented cellist, Webern also had a full knowledge of the techniques available to string players, and the Op. 5 Movements feature all manner of pizzicati, harmonics, tremolos, and other textures.

The first of the Movements—in sonata form, with a pair of themes followed by their development and a reprise—is the most expansive of the five, moving quickly from a bittersweet theme to harsh pizzicati and quiet, ghostly gestures. The brusque, occasionally playful third movement shares some of the energy of the first. The hushed second movement, the lyrical and spare fourth, and the spectral fifth (with its almost despairing cello line and the play between the high and low extremes of register) are all quiet and almost aphoristic in their briefness.

In the summer of 1928 Webern revisited the Five Movements, arranging them for string orchestra. Aside from a few octave doublings, solo and tutti markings, and some redistribution of notes between the cellos and basses, the actual changes in the score were fairly minimal, although the increased body of strings (Webern felt that an orchestra of 80 players was desirable) lent a more dramatic, even melodramatic, air to some of the music. After working on his Quartet, Op. 22, Webern decided he was unsatisfied with the orchestral arrangement of Op. 5 and made a new one, with more extensive changes, in the early months of 1929. This arrangement was introduced in Philadelphia on March 26, 1930, by the Philadelphia Chamber String Sinfonietta under the direction of Fabien Sevitzky.

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