The Langsamer Satz, was written in June 1905 when Webern was both finishing his doctoral dissertation on Heinrich Isaac and completing his first year as a composition student of Schoenberg. The existence of the single-movement work only came to light in the early 1960s when a number of previously unknown manuscripts were discovered by Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, the majority of them in the attic of a house in Perchtoldsdorf near Vienna. The musical language of the Langsamer Satz is the lush late-Romantic language of his teacher’s Verklärte Nacht (1898) and while, unlike the Schoenberg, the Webern piece has no programme, its subject is nonetheless love, since the 21-year-old Webern had spent the spring of that year hiking in Lower Austria with his cousin Wilhelmine and had fallen desperately in love with her. The work is, therefore, a love song to the woman he would later marry.

from notes by Douglas Jarman © 2022