String Quartet

Webern’s String Quartet Op. 28, completed in 1938, is one of the masterpieces of his late style. It combines his trademark modernist chromaticism with the 12-note composing method devised by his former teacher Schoenberg. And there is another element besides. At Vienna University the young Webern had studied of the music of the Netherlands Renaissance choral composers, Josquin Des Prez and Heinrich Isaac, whose style he much admired for its distilled purity of line and technique. All these aspects come together in the three movements of the String Quartet. Rather than sounding either traditionally tonal or dissonantly modern, the work’s idiom flows smoothly in a harmonic world poised somewhere between the two. And the music feels more expansive than the Quartet’s mere eight-minute duration might imply. The first and longest movement generates a sustained musical span from its close interplay of two-note chromatic cells. The second movement resembles a traditional scherzo and trio; and the third is a moderately paced, more intricately worked finale.