[4] The two-movement work lasts 10–20 minutes and is full of Alpine topics, abstraction, and intricate musical form, including some fixed register.

Replying to her suggestion that "progress is made only inwards", he concurred, "I understand 'Art' to mean the faculty of bringing a thought into the clearest, simplest, i.e. 'most comprehensible' form."

The material is even more cohesive because the second half of the row is derived from the first, a technique Webern relied on extensively.

Webern's rhythms and orchestration for the second canon are less homogenous with ornaments, double stops, mutes, harmonics, pizzicati, and plucked harp.

From Mahler's opening, Webern borrowed the texture of horns, harp, and low strings designed to evoke an Alpine expanse.

[32] The opening horn call establishes a motif that is recognizable in subsequent phrases, even as the material is transposed and accelerated.

The horn's opening A is the center of a symmetrical axis that expands outwards in increasing intervals, beginning with chromatic minor seconds and ending with fourths.

[35] This organization of the musical space is another of the work's mirrors in that it reverses the interval relationships of the tonal overtone series.

[41] In fact, the development section ends on the highest note in the entire movement, a pianississimo 8th-note C♯ in the harp (mm.

[20] Webern's Fünf Geistliche Lieder also ends with a single, high, quiet harp harmonic.

It is more melodically fragmented, ornamented (with acciaccature), registrally expansive (by a tritone), rhythmically erratic, and timbrally varied (with harmonics and mutes) despite sharing the same tone-row structure.

It plays the same four notes the horn did to begin the piece, but their character is far removed from its atonal alpine call.

[46] The motivic material is reduced to a wisp of two notes and finally one muted tone marked with a diminuendo, an ending quite common in the slow movements of Romantic symphonies.

[52] There is another echo of Mahler in the violin solo that makes the last sustained statement in Webern's Symphony.

[53] The reported duration of Webern's Symphony varies substantially from approximately ten to perhaps as many as twenty minutes.

[54] Conductors' approaches have varied significantly, but Webern's ideas about his music having a longer duration or slower tempi have generally not been realized in practice.

[54] This problem is not exclusive to the Symphony, as Webern gave conductor Edward Clark estimates of seventeen minutes for the Op.

[54] Alexander Smallens and the Orchestra of the League of Composers gave the world premiere at New York's Town Hall on 18 December 1929, meeting jeers.

They report, "The audience laughed it out of court..."[56] The same month, Webern wrote to Schoenberg that Otto Klemperer, Hermann Scherchen, and Leopold Stokowski had all expressed interest.

Josef Reitler [de] wrote in the Neue Freie Presse that "barbaric ... soullessness is foreign [to Webern]", contrasting him with Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and the Ernst Krenek of Jonny spielt auf.

[61] Scherchen conducted the London premiere at the summer 1931 International Society for Contemporary Music Festival.

There was also low remuneration, recent bad press, and as noted in his diary earlier that year: "Need for quiet and reflection.

"[62] Klemperer programmed the Symphony again in 1936 Vienna, likely on Schoenberg's advice, but did not adhere to Webern's desired performance practice.

[64] He carefully read and published a review of René Leibowitz's Schoenberg et son école, which described Webern's techniques in the Symphony, like its double-inverted canons and palindromes.

[65] Dallapiccola's subsequent music featured axial symmetry, canons, and four-part tone-row writing likely modeled in part on Webern's Symphony.

[68] Parole di San Paolo (1964) and the second movement of Webern's Symphony both deploy a rest or fermata at their center (m. 50 in both cases).

[69] Karel Goeyvaerts noted proto-serial schemes of articulations, dynamics, and register in Webern's Symphony.

[70] George Rochberg noted the "objectified, mensural" relation of pitch and time in Webern's later instrumental writing.