Composed 1905; 10 minutes  

In 1905, Austrian composer Anton Webern was head-over-heels in love with his cousin, Wilhelmine Mörtl (soon to become his wife), with whom he took a walking vacation to Lower Austria, just west of Vienna.  The 21-year-old composer wrote effusive diary entries about their idyllic time together.  Webern composed the lushly romantic Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement) in Vienna that summer, likely as an expression of his love.  At the time, he had almost completed the first of four years of intensive private composition studies with Schoenberg.  It was one of well over 100 finished and sketched student compositions and exercises that he would complete during his time with Schoenberg, most of it remaining unpublished.  A documented 24 of his unpublished movements are for string quartet, with only the Langsamer Satz, String Quartet from 1905, and a Rondo from 1906 having been posthumously published.

The single movement Langsamer Satz, published in 1965, has a three-part A-B-A structure plus coda.  It inhabits the intense, nocturnal, emotionally charged landscape of his teacher’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigued Night) of six years earlier.  Webern’s interweaving, polyphonic lines reveal a close study of Brahms, while the intoxicating, last-gasp, late romantic harmonies are a path that Webern would soon leave behind.  Of his chosen medium for this love song, Webern was shortly to write to his brother-in-law: “Quartet playing is the most glorious music-making there is.”