In the 1960s, Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer discovered a wealth of hitherto unknown manuscripts and sketches by Webern, including source materials for more than 130 works and arrangements dating from his earliest compositional beginnings to the year he completed his formative studies with Arnold Schoenberg (c. 1899–1908). This introduction outlines how this monograph seeks to contribute to ongoing scholarly efforts to understand Webern’s early work more than a half-century after the Moldenhauers’ sensational finds. Moreover, it makes a case that Webern’s early compositions provide a pertinent opportunity to rethink the category of earliness. An uncritical shibboleth in Webern scholarship, and neglected in musicological discourse at large, earliness, it is suggested, poses an attractive counter-paradigm to the well-established category of lateness, especially when conceived of as explicating the essence of a body of so-called juvenilia and its constitutive tensions.