Composed in the summer of 1905 outside the penumbra of Arnold Schoenberg’s teaching, and inspired by Giovanni Segantini’s Trittico della natura, Webern’s String Quartet M. 79 has garnered much scholarly attention since its posthumous publication in 1965. While some commentators discerned in the work the critical turning point at which Webern self-consciously began to embark upon his famous ‘path’ to atonality, others have sought to explain its ostensibly tripartite form in programmatic terms. Drawing on recent developments in sonata theory and harmonic analysis, as well as new insights into the manuscripts and sketches, this chapter considers the quartet in terms of a complex dialogue between ‘programmatic’ and ‘absolute’ meaning strata, mediated by the contemporaneous reception of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this way, it challenges those interpretations that deem the work either as merely a blueprint of Segantini’s triptych or as the inception of Webern’s ‘high modernism’.