Title: Rondo (ca. 1906)
Description: The Rondo for String Quartet belongs to a large group of works written in that idiom by Anton von Webern during his years of study under Arnold Schönberg. Two of these, Langsamer Satz and String Quartet, both written in 1905, have been available in print through Carl Fischer (O4528 and O4529 respectively). There exist autograph scores of an entire series of additional string quartets. Unfortunately, the havoc that befell Webern's library at the end of World War II caused the loss of salient manuscript portions, so that these quartets are extant only as torsos. Very extensive in some cases, they afford a fascinating insight into a period of fundamental change in harmonic concepts. The autograph score of the Rondo, as well as a complete set of parts in the composer's hand, belonged to a cache of manuscripts discovered on October 26, 1966, in an old house in Perchtoldsdorf, the picturesque village near Vienna. During the Russian occupation, the composer's daughter-in-law, Hermine, had salvaged various belongings from Webern's abandoned home in Maria Enzersdorf, storing them in the attic of her childhood home. Although the family had repeatedly surveyed the accumulation, the manuscripts, buried under a stack of books, escaped notice. Only a full twenty years later did the hunt for a portrait sculpture of Webern lead, coincidentally, to their discovery by this writer. The high degree of chromaticism characterizing the Rondo places the work, written about 1906, close to the threshold of atonality, that still uncharted domain which was about to open new vistas for musical expansion in the twentieth century. The first performance was given on August 1, 1968 by the Philadelphia String Quartet during the Fourth International Webern Festival, held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. - Hans Moldenhauer - Program notes.