5 Movements for String Quartet

Composed in 1909, Webern’s Five Movements was his first work to announce fully his individual style of modernist chromaticism. The main features of this are extreme musical concentration and compression; brevity of musical forms to match; and a fixation on extremely quiet sonorities (often marked “verlöschend”—“dying away”). Himself an accomplished cellist, Webern searched out the full range of sonorities that a string quartet can deliver (though the work is sometimes performed and recorded with a full string orchestra). The Five Movements are packed with indications to play pizzicato (plucked), am Steg (bowed close to the bridge, producing a strangely nasal effect), col legno (with the wood of the bow, making a thin or clicking sound), and with or without mutes, often with rapid changes between all these. The first movement contrasts two groups of ideas, one with fast and frenetic mood-switches, the second slower and more lyrical. Between the slow, short and ultra-quiet second and fourth movements is a manic, high-speed scherzo. Finally comes a longer finale, again slow and mostly very quiet, eventually dying away into silence.