Psappha Ensemble
Benedict Holland and Sophie Rosa, violins
Vicci Wardman, viola
Jennifer Langridge, cello

The film of this performance was made possible through the support of the Granada Foundation.
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I Mässig
II Gemächlich
III Sehr fliessend

'I am working on a string quartet' wrote Webern on 3 February 1937 to Hildegard Jone, the poet whose texts Webern set in the op.23 and 25 songs, Das Augenlicht and the two Cantatas. In fact he had been thinking about a string quartet since November 1936 but would not complete it until 1938. It was a work that gave him considerable difficulty and not only the nature but the order of the three movements changed continually- indeed even after its completion the Kolisch Quartet performed the work a number of times, playing the present second movement as the first.

The note row of the work is built on two transpositions of BACH (that is B flat - A - C - B natural) with an inversion of the same four notes at the centre - although the Bach motif is obscured by the fact that, especially in the first and third movements, the intervals are often displaced by almost two octaves. The rigour of the row construction - in which the second half is the mirror of the first and the retrograde and the inversion are identical - is typical of Webern's twelve -note works: as he himself said, quoting Goethe's description of the primal plant, ’all shapes are similar and yet none are the same - that is the secret law'.

The op.28 quartet is one of the few works by Webern for which there exists an extensive essay by the composer himself - an essay that is too long to quote in its entirety but which defines the form of Movement 1 as a variation movement, Movement II ( a double canon) as a scherzo and trio and Movement III as a 'fugue' but , since traditional fugues depended on the key contrast between subject and answer, a fugue that involves rhythmic retrogrades.

As a result of the historical importance which the composers of the 1950s and 1960s invested in Webern - as expressed, for example, in the essays published by Boulez around 1952 which emphasised the purity and the serial rigour of Webern's music - we perhaps forget the deeply personal, programmatic aspects of much of his music. In this piece , for example, the first movement, was inspired by the landscape ('spruce forest, source of the brook' read his annotations in his sketchbook) of the Koralpe in Carinthia and by the villages of Schwabegg and Annabichil where his parents were buried, while the other movements have the initials of his children written next to them.

As he was completing the quartet on 12 March 1938, writing to Jone that he was ‘deeply engrossed in work and could not be disturbed', Germany annexed Austria. After he had completed the quartet Webern received a commission from the great American patron of chamber music Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and it received its first performance in the United States in September 1938, by which time it could no longer be performed in Austria. Webern's music was classified as 'degenerat', the Jewish executives at U.E., his publishers, were dismissed and the firm published no more of his music. Thanks to Erwin Stein, who had left Vienna for England, the quartet was published by Boosey and Hawkes.

About the Composer: Anton Webern
Born in 1883 Anton Webern studied musicology at the University of Vienna with Guido Adler (his doctorate in 1906 was for an edition of Heinrich Isacc’s Choralis Constantinus) and composition privately with Arnold Schoenberg from 1904-08. Although his published output at his death (he was accidentally shot by an American soldier in 1945) consisted of only 31 works – most of them very short – he became perhaps the most influential composer on the following generation of composers, that included Stockhausen and Boulez, which saw in Webern’s music a purity, logic and the possibility of organizing music in a new way that led to a period in the 1950s and 1960s of what became known as total serialism.

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