Anton Webern's youthful Rondo for string quartet of 1906 is something of a companion piece to the better-known Langsamer Satz, or Slow Movement, for string quartet of the same year. Both were composed at the prompting of Webern's teacher Arnold Schoenberg, and they appeared in near-proximity to one another, chronologically speaking. But whereas the Langsamer Satz has long been familiar to musicologists, performers, and audiences, the Rondo disappeared for many years and was only brought back to the light of musical life when scholar Hans Moldenhauer dug it up in 1965.



Webern was about 23 years old when he composed the Rondo, and had been composing music for seven years, the last two of them guided by Schoenberg while Webern was pursuing a doctorate in musicology from the University of Vienna. While two more years would go by before Webern felt like admitting his status as a composer to the world by allowing the Passacaglia for orchestra to carry the label Opus 1, this Rondo is by no means an unaccomplished or immature work. The style of the part-writing is not at all what we are used to from listening to music written by Webern later on— the lines are rhythmically regular, rounded as opposed to blunt and fractured, and altogether traditional in sound and flow. But there is, underneath this benign skin, a restless, even agonized harmonic strain that carries the Rondo from the nineteenth-century into a limbo-region that is not post-Romantic in the proper sense nor effectively "twentieth century" yet. D minor, which is the key in which the Rondo begins and ends, had in 1906 not yet grown used to carrying this kind of chromatic load in its back!



Weber was himself a reasonably skilled cellist— he learned the instrument as a young man, and continued playing to one degree or another throughout his adult life— and it is clear from the sometimes thick and complex textures of the Rondo that he understands the medium of the string quartet very well indeed. The rondo theme, given by the first violin at the start, comes back in a fine array of new clothing as the piece moves along. One time the viola plays it pianissimo as the first violin offers ghostly, stratospheric harmonics atop bouncing background dialogue from the second violin and cello; another time the cello begins it all alone, inviting the rest of the instruments to take it up, in turn, as a fugue. The music heard in-between these various statements of the rondo refrain is far more outgoing, and more ingratiatingly-textured, then the stringent rondo theme could ever find the character to be. And in the end, it is that stringency, in the shape of a pair of plucked octave D naturals, that gets the last say.



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