Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern[lower-alpha 1] (German: [ˈantoːn ˈveːbɐn] (listen)), was an Austrian composer whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and steadfast embrace of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School.[lower-alpha 2]

Anton Webern
Webern in Stettin, October 1912
Born	3 December 1883 Vienna
Died	15 September 1945(1945-09-15) (aged 61) Mittersill
Occupation	Composer, conductor
Notable work	List of compositions
Signature

Little known in the earlier part of his life, mostly as a student and follower of Schoenberg, but also as a peripatetic and often unhappy theater music director with a mixed reputation as an exacting conductor, Webern came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher[lower-alpha 3] during Red Vienna. With Schoenberg away at the Prussian Academy of Arts (and with the benefit of a publication agreement secured through Universal Edition), Webern began writing music of increasing confidence, independence, and scale during the latter half of the 1920s—his mature chamber and orchestral works, music that, perhaps more than his earlier expressionist works, would later decisively influence a generation of composers. Amid Austrofascism, Nazism, and World War II, Webern remained nevertheless committed to taking the "path to the new music," as he styled it in a series of private lectures delivered in 1932–1933 (but unpublished until 1960). He continued to write some of his most mature and later celebrated music while being increasingly ostracized from official musical life as a "cultural Bolshevist," being reduced to taking occasional copyist jobs from his publisher as he lost students and his conducting career.

Following his death shortly after World War II, Webern became more widely celebrated and influential than ever before, albeit initially through pedagogy often lacking full context, and the thread of his work was taken by composers in directions far beyond any residual post-Romanticism and Expressionism that had remained in his style. His gradual innovations in schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and melodic contour; his later adaptation and generalization of imitative contrapuntal techniques such as canon and fugue; and his inclination toward athematicism, abstraction, and lyricism all greatly informed and oriented European, typically serial or avant-garde composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Henri Pousseur, and György Ligeti. Later, both Brian Ferneyhough and Helmut Lachenmann also found much in Webern on the way to complexity in the case of the former and musique concrète instrumentale in the case of the latter, engaging particularly with his atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism. Less so in the United States, his music attracted the interest of Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland, whose critical ambivalence was marked by a certain enthusiasm and fascination nonetheless;[2] Milton Babbitt, who ultimately derived more inspiration from Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice than that of Webern; and particularly Igor Stravinsky, to whom it was very fruitfully reintroduced by Robert Craft, and without which Stravinsky's late works might have taken different shape. Indeed, Stravinsky staked his contract with Columbia Records to see that Webern's "complete" music was first both recorded and widely distributed.[3][4] Among the more interdisciplinary New York School, John Cage and Morton Feldman both cited the staggering effect of its sound on their own music, first meeting at a performance of the Symphony, Op. 21, and even singing the praises of Christian Wolff distinctly as "our Webern." A richer and more historically informed understanding of Webern and his music began to emerge during the latter half of the 20th century onward in the work of scholars Kathryn Bailey Puffett, Julian Johnson, Felix Meyer, and Anne Shreffler as archivists, biographers, and musicologists, most importantly Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, gained access to sketches, letters, lectures, audio recordings, and other articles of or associated with Webern's estate.

Biography

Youth, education, and other early experiences in Austria-Hungary

Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern was born in Vienna, then in Austria-Hungary. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a descendent of minor nobility [de], civil servant, mining engineer,[5] and owner of the Lamprechtsberg copper mine in the Koralpe; and Amalie (née Geer), a competent pianist, accomplished singer, and possibly the only obvious source of the future composer's talent.[6] He never used his middle names and dropped the "von" in 1919 as directed by the Austrian government's reforms after World War I.

He lived in Graz and Klagenfurt for much of his youth. But his distinct and lasting sense of Heimat was shaped by readings of Peter Rosegger;[8] and moreover by frequent and extended retreats with his parents, sisters, and cousins to his family's country estate, the Preglhof, which Webern's father had inherited upon the death of Webern's grandfather in 1889.[9][10]

Webern memorialized the Preglhof in a diary poem "An der Preglhof" and in the tone poem Im Sommerwind (1904), both after Bruno Wille's idyll. Once Webern's father sold the estate in 1912,[11] Webern referred to it nostalgically as a "lost paradise".[12] He continued to revisit the Preglhof,[13] the family grave at the cemetery in Schwabegg, and the surrounding landscape for the rest of his life;[14] and he clearly associated the area, which he took as his home, very closely with the memory of his mother Amelie, who had died in 1906 and whose loss also profoundly affected Webern for decades.[15]

Art historian Ernst Dietz, Webern's cousin and at that time a student at Graz, may have introduced Webern to the work of the painters Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, whom Webern came to admire.[16] Segantini's work was a likely inspiration for Webern's 1905 single-movement string quartet.[17]

In 1902, Webern began attending classes at Vienna University. There he studied musicology with Guido Adler, writing his thesis on the Choralis Constantinus of Heinrich Isaac. This interest in early music would greatly influence his compositional technique in later years, especially in terms of his use of palindromic form on both the micro- and macro-scale and the economical use of musical materials. With the help of friends and colleagues, Webern later began working peripatetically as a conductor and musical coach in various towns and cities, among them Ischl, Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic), Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), and Prague, before finally moving back to Vienna.

As might be expected, the young Webern was enthusiastic about the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), Hugo Wolf, and Richard Wagner, visiting Bayreuth in 1902. He also enjoyed the music of Hector Berlioz and Georges Bizet. In 1904, he reportedly stormed out of a meeting with Hans Pfitzner, from whom he was seeking instruction, when the latter criticized Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.[18] In 1908, Webern wrote rapturously to Schoenberg about Claude Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande. He conducted some of Debussy's music in 1911.

It may have been at Guido Adler's advice that he paid Schoenberg for composition lessons. Webern progressed quickly under Schoenberg's tutelage, publishing his Passacaglia, Op. 1, as his graduation piece in 1908. He also met Berg, then another of Schoenberg's pupils. These two relationships would be the most important in his life in shaping his own musical direction.

Some of Webern's earlier thoughts (from 1903) are as amusing as they might be surprising: besides describing some of Alexander Scriabin's music as "languishing junk," he wrote of Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 4 that it was "boring," that Carl Maria von Weber's Konzertstück in F minor was passé, and that he found Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 3 (which struck Eduard Hanslick as "artistically the most nearly perfect") "cold and without particular inspiration, ... badly orchestrated—grey on grey."[19] These youthful impressions are in some, but not complete or altogether necessarily very significant, contrast to the considered opinions of Webern in the 1930s, by then a decided nationalist who, as Roland Leich described, "lectured at some length on the utter supremacy of German music, emphasizing that leading composers of other lands are but pale reflections of Germanic masters: Berlioz a French Beethoven, Tchaikovsky a Russian Schumann, Elgar an English Mendelssohn, etc."[20] After all, even when young, Webern had described one of Alexander Glazunov's symphonies as "not particularly Russian" (in contrast to some of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's music at the same all-Russian concert) in the same passage as he praised it.[19]

Red Vienna in the First Austrian Republic

From 1918 to 1921, Webern helped organize and operate the Society for Private Musical Performances, which gave concerts of then recent or new music by Béla Bartók, Berg, Ferruccio Busoni, Debussy, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Mahler, Maurice Ravel, Max Reger, Erik Satie, Strauss, Stravinsky, and Webern himself. After their Society performances in 1919 (and while working on his own Opp. 14–15), Webern wrote to Berg that Stravinsky's Berceuses du chat "[move] me completely beyond belief," describing them as "indescribably touching," and that Stravinsky's Pribaoutki were "something really glorious"; like the Berceuses du chat, Webern's subsequent Five Canons, Op. 16, were only several measures long each and scored for vocalist accompanied by clarinets (or in the case of Nos. 2 and 4, a clarinet).

After the dissolution of the Society amid catastrophic hyperinflation in 1921, Webern obtained work as director not only of the Wiener Schubertbund, but also, from 1922 until the dissolution of these institutions after the failed February Uprising, of the Singverein der Sozialdemokratischen Kunstelle[lower-alpha 4] and the Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte[lower-alpha 5] through his relationship with D.J. Bach, Director of the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle.[lower-alpha 6] His performances in this capacity were broadcast on Austrian radio no fewer than twenty times starting in 1927.

Webern's music began to be performed more widely during and after the 1920s, yet he found no great success such as Berg enjoyed with Wozzeck nor even as Schoenberg did, to a lesser extent, with Pierrot lunaire or Verklärte Nacht. His Symphony, Op. 21, was performed in New York through the League of Composers in 1929 and again in Oxford at the ninth festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and he was later awarded Music Prize of the City of Vienna. By the early 1930s, Webern had become President of the Vienna section of the ISCM and was developing a close working friendship with Krenek, alongside whom Webern lectured, whose music (taking a twelve-tone turn) Webern conducted, and with whom Webern shared certain affinities during what was again becoming an increasingly difficult time for both. As Stefan Zweig wrote before his suicide in 1942, "the short decade between 1924 and 1933, from the end of German inflation to Hitler's seizure of power, represents—in spite of all—an intermission in the catastrophic sequence of events whose witnesses and victims our generation has been since 1914."[21]

In 1926, Webern had noted his voluntary resignation as chorusmaster of the Mödling Men's Choral Society, a paid position, in controversy over his hiring of a Jewish singer, Greta Wilheim, to replace a sick one. Letters document their correspondence in many subsequent years, and she (among others) would in turn provide him with facilities to teach private lessons as a convenience to Webern, his family, and his students.[22][23]

Fascism and World War II

Webern's music, along with that of Berg, Křenek, Schoenberg, and others, was denounced as cultural Bolshevism and proscribed as Entartete Kunst by the Nazi Party in Germany, and both publication and performances of it were banned soon after the Anschluss in 1938, although neither did it fare well under the preceding years of Austrofascism.[28][29][30] As early as 1933, an Austrian gauleiter on Bayerischer Rundfunk mistakenly and very likely maliciously characterized both Berg and Webern as Jewish composers.[31] As a result of official disapproval throughout the '30s, both found it harder to earn a living; Webern lost a promising conducting career which might have otherwise been more noted and recorded and had to take on work as an editor and proofreader for his publishers, UE.[32] His family's financial situation deteriorated until, by August 1940, his personal records reflected no monthly income.[33] It was thanks to the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart that Webern was able to attend the festive premiere of his Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30, in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1943. Reinhart invested all the financial and diplomatic means at his disposal to enable Webern to travel to Switzerland. In return for this support, Webern dedicated the work to him.[34]

Webern's attitude towards Nazism has been variously described. This may reflect Webern's own vacillations, ambivalence, or cognitive dissonance no less than the different contexts in which, or the audiences to whom, his views were expressed: a very wide variety of differences were represented in his friends, family, and colleagues, from active members of the Nazi Party within his family to the Zionist Schoenberg and the left-leaning Berg.[35][lower-alpha 7] Nazism itself, "not a coherent doctrine or body of systemically interrelated ideas, but rather a vaguer worldview made up of a number of prejudices with varied appeals to different audiences which could scarcely be dignified with the term 'ideology,'"[38] has been variously described.

There is, moreover, political complexity to complicate individual culpability.[32] After World War I, the center-left Social Democrats had governed with the right-wing nationalist Social Christians in increasingly tenuous coalition, with the emergence of paramilitaries and disorder culminating in civil war. As a matter of Realpolitik and self-determination, prominent Austromarxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, among other Social Democrats, endured in their support of a German-Austrian Anschluss or Großdeutsche Lösung after its unanimous passage by the Provisional National Assembly in 1918 as opposed to the post-Habsburg rump state ("ce qui reste, c'est l'Autriche") stipulated by peace treaty. With their party outlawed and some members interned under Austrofascism, some Social Democrats, at least initially, viewed National Socialists as no worse than what had become of Social Christians, merged by Engelbert Dollfuss into the clericofascist Vaterländische Front in concert with appeals to Austrians' Catholic identity and imperial history in order to maintain independence of Nazi Germany through alliance with Fascist Italy and Hungary;[39] thus Bauer, Renner, and others supported the Anschluss referendum even under Nazi occupation[40] following years of deteriorating German-Austrian relations and Austrian weakening, including the failed Austrian Nazi coup d'état and continuing economic warfare and destruction of infrastructure. Likewise, as an expression more of pan-nationalism and populism than frank Nazism, many Austrians hoped for post-Anschluss political stability and prosperity. Bailey Puffett explains that Webern may well have hoped to be able again to conduct and to be better able to secure a future for his family under a new regime that proclaimed itself "socialist" no less than nationalist.[32]

In broad terms, Webern's attitude seems to have first warmed to a degree of characteristic fervor and later, in conjunction with widespread German disillusionment, cooled to Hitler and the Nazis to such an extent that by 1945 he had resolved to emigrate to England.[41][42] On the one hand, Willi Reich [de] notes that Webern attacked Nazi cultural policies in private lectures given in 1933, whose hypothetical publication "would have exposed Webern to serious consequences" later.[43] On the other, Webern's correspondence may attest to Nazi sympathies: Webern's patriotism led him to endorse the Nazi regime in a series of letters to Joseph Hueber, who was serving in the army and himself held such views.[44] On 2 May 1940, Webern described Hitler as "this unique man" who created "the new state" of Germany;[45] thus Alex Ross characterizes him as "an unashamed Hitler enthusiast".[46]

Violinist Louis Krasner painted not a sentimental portrait but one imbued with a wealth of factual and personal detail for its publication in 1987, describing Webern as clearly naive and idealistic but not entirely without his wits, shame, or conscience; Krasner carefully contextualizes Webern as a member of Austrian society at the time, one departed by Schoenberg and one in which the already pro-Nazi Vienna Philharmonic had even refused to play the late Berg's Violin Concerto.[47] As Krasner vividly recalled, he and Webern were visiting at the latter's home in Maria Enzersdorf when the Nazis invaded Austria; Webern, uncannily seeming to anticipate the timing down to 4 o'clock in the afternoon, turned on the radio to hear this news and immediately warned Krasner, urging him to flee, whereupon he did (first to Vienna). Whether this was for Krasner's safety or to save Webern the embarrassment of Krasner's presence during a time of possible celebration in the pro-Nazi Webern family (or indeed in most of pro-Nazi Mödling, by Krasner's description as well as one even more vivid of Arnold Greissle-Schönberg),[48] Krasner was ambivalent and uncertain, withholding judgment. Only later did Krasner himself realize how self-admittedly "foolhardy" he had been and in what danger he had placed himself, revealing an ignorance perhaps shared by Webern. Krasner had even revisited frequently, hoping to convince friends (e.g., Schoenberg's daughter Gertrude and her husband Felix Greissle) to emigrate before time ran out. Krasner eventually left more permanently, after a 1941 incident wherein he felt only his US passport saved him from both locals and police.[49]

Krasner retold from a story related to him in long discussion with Schoenberg's son Görgi, for whom Schoenberg was unable to secure passage to the US despite many attempts, that the Weberns, much to their risk and credit, had provided Görgi and his family with food and shelter toward the end of the war at the Weberns' home in a Mödling apartment belonging to their son-in-law.[50][51] Görgi and his family were left behind for their safety when Webern fled on foot with his family to Mittersill, about 75 km. away, for safety of their own in light of the coming Russian invasion; Amalie, one of Webern's daughters, wrote of '17 persons pressed together in the smallest possible space' upon their arrival.[52] Ironically, the Russians pronounced Görgi a "Nazi spy" when he was discovered due to the Nazi munitions and propaganda in the Weberns' basement store-room. Görgi is said to have saved himself from execution by protesting and drawing attention to his clothes, sewn as specified by the Nazis with the yellow Star of David. He continued to live in this apartment with this family until 1969.[50]

Webern also aided Josef Polnauer, a Jewish colleague and fellow early Schoenberg pupil who managed to survive the Holocaust as an albino.[49][53] Polnauer, an historian and librarian for whom Schoenberg was also unable to secure passage to the US,[51] later edited a 1959 publication by UE of Webern's correspondence from this time with Hildegard Jone [de], Webern's then lyricist and collaborator, and her husband, sculptor Josef Humplik.[54][55]

However, Krasner was particularly troubled by a 1936 conversation with Webern about the Jews, in which Webern expressed his vague but unambiguously anti-Semitic opinion that "Even Schoenberg, had he not been a Jew, would have been quite different!" Krasner remembered that "Jews ... were at the center of the difficulty. Those who wanted to, put the blame for all this calamity, for all this depraved condition, on the Jews who had brought it with them—along with a lot of radical ideas—from the East. People blamed the Jews for their financial worries. The Jews were, at the same time, the poverty-stricken people who came with nothing, and the capitalists who controlled everything."[56]

Webern sought to allay Schoenberg's concerns when asked once about his feelings toward the Nazis; similarly, when in 1938 Eduard Steuermann asked Krasner about rumors of Webern's possible "interest in and devotion to the Nazis" on Schoenberg's behalf, Krasner lied by denying the rumors categorically and entirely. As a result, Schoenberg's Violin Concerto of 1934 (or 1935)–36 continued to bear a dedication to Webern, although worded very simply ("to Anton von Webern"), as a result of Schoenberg's continuing suspicions or, indeed, on Webern's behalf, i.e., to protect Webern from further Nazi suspicion and persecution. Schoenberg and Webern continued to correspond at least through 1939.[57][58][59]

In 1947, writing in nostalgic remembrance of both Berg and Webern only four years before his own death, two years after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, and on the cusp of the post-war discovery of Webern's twelve-tone works in particular (made possible in large part by René Leibowitz as he championed, performed, promulgated, and published "Schoenberg et son école"), Schoenberg was magnanimous, discerning, forward-looking, and resolute in tone: "Let us—for the moment at least—forget all that might have at one time divided us. For there remains for our future what could only have begun to be realized posthumously: One will have to consider us three—Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern—as a unity, a oneness, because we believed in ideals, once perceived, with intensity and selfless devotion; nor would we ever have been deterred from them, even if those who tried might have succeeded in confounding us." This statement was prepared for publication as a handwritten inscription by facsimile reproduction in the 1948 Editions Dynamo didactic score with analyses especially prepared by Leibowitz of Webern's then unpublished Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, which Webern had in 1934 dedicated to Schoenberg for his sixtieth birthday. The last clause, "even if those who tried might have succeeded in confounding us," for Krasner clearly and wistfully refers to Webern, who, he thereby infers Schoenberg understood, "had been taken in, misled—had fallen into the Nazi trap"; yet this official statement moreover "puts 'Vienna's Three Modern Classicists' into historical perspective" nonetheless, and Krasner summarizes it as "what bound us together was our idealism."[60][61]

Musicologist Richard Taruskin describes Webern as a pan-German nationalist before specifically claiming that Webern joyfully welcomed the Nazis with the Anschluss,[28] referring to the aforementioned interview of Krasner. However, Krasner told Fanfare that Webern "packed [him] off quickly" as soon he turned on the radio and heard the news break. Krasner explained: "I'm sure it was for my safety. But perhaps it was also to avoid the embarrassment which my presence would have caused had his family arrived, or friends celebrating the Nazi entry into Austria."[49] Taruskin's authority on this and like matters is not without controversy: he has been described as polemical in general[62][lower-alpha 8] and hostile in particular to the Second Viennese School,[64][lower-alpha 9] of whom Webern is often considered the most extreme and difficult for listeners.[67][lower-alpha 10] New Complexity composer and performer Franklin Cox not only faults Taruskin as an inaccurate and unreliable historian but also critiques Taruskin as an "ideologist of tonal restoration" (musicologist Martin Kaltenecker similarly refers to the "Restoration of the 1980s," but he also describes a paradigm shift from structure to perception). Taruskin's "reactionary historicist" project, Cox argues, stands in opposition to that of the Second Viennese School, viz. the "progressivist historicist" emancipation of the dissonance.[69] Taruskin himself admits to having acquired a "dubious reputation" on the Second Viennese School and notes that he has been described in his work on Webern as "coming, like Shakespeare's Marc Anthony, 'to bury Webern, not to praise him'".[70]

In contradistinction to Taruskin's methods and pronouncements, musicologist Pamela M. Potter advises that "[i]t is important to consider all the scholarship on musical life in the Third Reich that, taken together, reveals the complexity of the day-to-day existence of musicians and composers", as "[i]t seems inevitable that debates about the political culpability of individuals will persist, especially if the stakes remain so high for composers, for whom an up or down vote can determine inclusion in the canon".[71] In this vein, Bailey Puffett notes that Webern wrote to Humplik and Jone on the day of Anschluss not to invite celebration or to observe developments but to be left alone: "I am totally immersed in my work [composing] and cannot, cannot be disturbed";[72] Krasner's presence could have been a disturbance to Webern for this reason, and Bailey Puffett speculates that this may indeed be why he was rushed off by Webern.[73]

Webern's 1944–1945 correspondence is strewn with references to bombings, deaths, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order; but also noted are the births of several grandchildren.[52] At the age of sixty (i.e., in Dec. 1943), Webern writes that he is living in a barrack away from home and working from 6 am to 5 pm, compelled by the state in a time of war to serve as an air-raid protection police officer.[52] On 3 March 1945, news was relayed to Webern that his only son, Peter, died on 14 February of wounds suffered in a strafing attack on a military train two days earlier.[74]

Allied-administered Austria

On 15 September 1945, following the arrest of his son-in-law for black-market activities, Webern was shot and killed by a US soldier. He was smoking a cigar outside his home so as not to disturb his sleeping grandchildren about one hour before curfew. The soldier responsible for his death was US Army cook PFC Raymond Norwood Bell of North Carolina, who was overcome by remorse and died of alcoholism in 1955.[75]

Wilhelmine "Minna" Mörtl, Webern's wife, died in 1949 and was buried beside her husband. Her last years were marred by grief, illness, loneliness (as friends and family continued to emigrate), and continuing poverty and consequent embarrassment. She worked to get the 1907 Piano Quintet finally published by Bomart via Kurt List and Opp. 17, 24–25, and 29–31 published by UE at the behest of Alfred Schlee [de], who solicited her urgently for Webern's manuscripts, stowed behind in Vienna, with the passing of the Entartete Kunst ban. Some news of performances abroad made her wish that Webern had lived to experience more successes than he had, and her grief was compounded by the lack of commemoration in Vienna: in 1948 she wrote to Jone, asking, "Should Anton have already been forgotten? Or is it the fault of the dreadful time in which we live?" In 1947 she wrote to Dietz, who had emigrated to the US, that "during the summer of 1945 [Webern] became convinced that he could not live here [in Austria] any more. He was firmly resolved to go to England and he would have carried it out, too"; likewise, in 1946, she wrote to DJ Bach, who had emigrated to London: "How difficult the last eight years had been for him. [He] was so embittered that he had only the one wish: to flee from this country. But one was caught, without a will of one's own. ... It was close to the limit of endurance what we had to suffer."[76]

Music

Webern's compositions are concise, distilled, and select; just thirty-one of his compositions were published in his lifetime, and when Pierre Boulez later oversaw a project to record all of his compositions, including some of those without opus numbers, the results fit on just six CDs.[80] Although Webern's music changed over time, as is often the case over a long career, it is typified by spartan textures, in which every note can be heard; carefully chosen timbres, often resulting in very detailed instructions to the performers and use of extended instrumental techniques (flutter tonguing, col legno, and so on); wide-ranging melodic lines, often with leaps greater than an octave; and brevity: the Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913), for instance, last about three minutes in total.[81]

A very general feature of Webern's music, as much of Schoenberg's, is a predilection toward the use of minor seconds, major sevenths, and minor ninths, as noted with some insight in 1934 by microtonalist Alois Hába, writing of his and his students' affinities with Schoenberg in particular,[82] and later by both Valentina Kholopova and Yuri Kholopov in formulations more specific to Webern[83] and with a more unifying emphasis on the semitone in the context of axial inversional symmetry and octave equivalence (i.e., interval class 1, or ic1), approaching Allen Forte's more generalizing pitch-class set analysis.[84] Indeed, as noted by music theorist Philip Ewell, Webern's consistent and distinctive use of ic1 in particular within small subsets of other intervals, sometimes derived from a given twelve-tone row in his later practice, is something that was heard (or at least seen) and noted by Erhard Karkoschka, Walter Kolneder, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Pousseur, and Stockhausen.[85] Webern often actually expresses ic1 as a major seventh or minor ninth in his music.[86] Webern's intervallic practices may be more globally understood as the outcome of an axially symmetrical treatment of pitch in a manner comparable to other modernists, including Berg, Bartók, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, or more nascently even Liszt and Wagner.[87] In Webern, the axis may shift, or there may be multiple axes.

Formative juvenilia and emergence from study, Opp. 1–2, 1899–1908

Webern published little of his early work in particular; like Brahms, Webern was meticulous and revised extensively.[88][89] Many juvenilia remained unknown until the work and findings of the Moldenhauers in the 1960s, effectively obscuring and undermining formative facets of Webern's musical identity, highly significant even more so in the case of an innovator whose music was crucially marked by rapid stylistic shifts.[90][91][92] Thus when Boulez first oversaw a project to record "all" of Webern's music, not including the juvenilia, the results fit on three rather than six CDs.[93]

Webern's earliest works consist primarily of lieder, the genre that most testifies to his roots in Romanticism, specifically German Romanticism; one in which the music yields brief but explicit, potent, and spoken meaning manifested only latently or programmatically in purely instrumental genres; one marked by significant intimacy and lyricism; and one which often associates nature, especially landscapes, with themes of homesickness, solace, wistful yearning, distance, utopia, and belonging. Robert Schumann's "Mondnacht" is an iconic example; Eichendorff, whose lyric poetry inspired it, is not far removed from the poets (e.g., Richard Dehmel, Gustav Falke, Theodor Storm) whose work inspired Webern and his contemporaries Alban Berg, Max Reger, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, and Alexander Zemlinsky.[95] Wolf's Mörike-Lieder were especially influential on Webern's efforts from this period. But well beyond these lieder alone, all of Webern's music may be said to possess such concerns and qualities, as is evident from his sketches, albeit in an increasingly symbolic, abstract, spare, introverted, and idealized manner.[96]

Webern's first piece after completing his studies with Schoenberg was the Passacaglia for orchestra (1908). Harmonically, it is a step forward into a more advanced language, and the orchestration is somewhat more distinctive than his earlier orchestral work. However, it bears little relation to the fully mature works he is best known for today. One element that is typical is the form itself: the passacaglia is a form which dates back to the 17th century, and a distinguishing feature of Webern's later work was to be the use of traditional compositional techniques (especially canons) and forms (the Symphony, the Concerto, the String Trio, and String Quartet, and the piano and orchestral Variations) in a modern harmonic and melodic language.[97]

Atonality, aphorism, and lieder, Opp. 3–16, 1908–1924

Webern wrote freely atonal music somewhat in the style of Schoenberg starting with Op. 3, and the two were so close in their artistic development that in 1951 Schoenberg reflected that he had sometimes no longer known who he was. But Webern did not merely follow Schoenberg.[99] Musicologist Ethan Haimo marks the swift, radical influence in 1909 of Webern's novel and arresting Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, on Schoenberg's subsequent piano piece Op. 11, No. 3; Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16; and monodrama Erwartung, Op. 17.[100] In 1949 Schoenberg still remembered being "intoxicated by the enthusiasm of having freed music from the shackles of tonality" and believing with his pupils "that now music could renounce motivic features and remain coherent and comprehensible nonetheless".[101]

"Fahr hin, o Seel, zu deinem Gott"

"Fahr hin, o Seel, zu deinem Gott" (1917) from Fünf geistliche Lieder, Op. 15, bears the influence of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire (1912), Op. 21, but Webern is characteristically earnest, not ironic. Whereas in "Heimfahrt," Schoenberg employs the rhythms of a barcarolle with recurrent arcing melodies ("good wind for traveling") and tonal inflections ("the stream hums deep scales") to represent Pierrot's journey home to Bergamo playfully on a water lily, in Webern's lied the journey is spiritual and the music hymnal, comprising a chromatic double canon in contrary motion of chorale-like stepwise melodic motifs and more fixed ostinati, all rising prominently in this excerpt as "God compassionately receives you." The singer continues, "into that better life" (an allusion to heaven above) to music that softly swells on a flute briefly flutter-tonguing over a melody in the clarion register of the clarinet (like a distant trumpet), before the ensemble fades away, exposing the muted trumpet's faint but bright timbre in its ascent to C₅ and completely baring a final C♯₆ on the harp alone.

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With Opp. 18–20, Schoenberg began to gradually turn back. In Pierrot lunaire (1912), Op. 21, there are elements of Kabarett, neoclassicism, and neo-Romanticism with, for example, canon and passacaglia in "Nacht," canon and fugue in "Der Mondfleck," waltz in "Serenade," barcarolle in ("Heimfahrt"), and triadic harmony in "O alter Duft," as befits the text and character. With its contrapuntal procedures and innovative textural treatment of instruments in small ensembles, Pierrot was received by Webern as a direction for the composition of his own Opp. 14–16.[102]

Of some fifty-six songs on which Webern worked during and after World War I (1914–1926), he ultimately finished and later published only thirty-two, carefully ordered into sets as Opp. 12–19.[103] "How much I owe to your Pierrot", he wrote Schoenberg upon completing a setting of Georg Trakl's "Abendland III", Op. 14, No. 4,[104] in which, distinctly, there is no silence or rest until a pause at the concluding gesture. A recurring theme is that of the wanderer, estranged or lost and seeking return to or at least retrieval from an earlier time and place. This wartime theme of wandering in search of home or rest fits with two complex, interrelated concerns more broadly evident in Webern's work: first, the loss and memory of his mother, father, and nephew, usually from a religious perspective; and second, Webern's broad and spiritual sense of Heimat in the form of abstracted and idealized rural landscapes, such as that of the lost Preglhof esate or the Alps.[105] In a stage play he wrote in October 1913, Tot, Webern drew on Emanuel Swedenborg's notion of correspondence to explore these concerns over the course of six alpine scenes of reflection and self-consolation.

Johnson argues that the whole of Webern's music takes on the nature of such dramatic and visual tableaux, if in a more abstract and formal manner in some of the late works. Melodies frequently begin and end on weak beats, settle into or arise out of ostinati, or otherwise dynamically and texturally emerge or fade away.[106] Tonality, useful for communicating direction and narrative in programmatic pieces, becomes more tenuous, fragmented, static, symbolic, and visual or spatial in function, thus mirroring the concerns and topics, explicit or implicit, of Webern's music and his textual selections for lieder, especially from the poetry of Stefan George and Trakl. Expanding on the orchestration of Mahler, Webern sought a colorful and novel but idiosyncratically fragile and intimate sound, not infrequently bordering on silence at a typical ppp, whether evocative of the female or an angelic voice (e.g., the use of solo violin),[107] to inward or outward luminosity or darkness (e.g., the use of the entire range of register within the ensemble;[108] registral compression and expansion;[109] the use of celesta, harp, and glockenspiel;[110] the use of harmonics and sul ponticello),[111] or to angels and heaven (e.g., the use of harp and trumpet in the circling ostinati of Op. 6, No. 5,[112] and winding to conclusion at the very end of Op. 15, No. 5).[113]

Technical consolidation and formal coherence and expansion, Opp. 17–31, 1924–1943

"Sehr langsam"

A sample from Webern's String Trio (1926–1927), Op. 20, "Sehr langsam", Webern's first published purely instrumental use of twelve-tone technique

With the Drei Volkstexte (1925), Op. 17, Webern used Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique for the first time, and all his subsequent works used this technique. The String Trio (1926–1927), Op. 20, was both the first purely instrumental work using the twelve-tone technique (the other pieces were songs) and the first cast in a traditional musical form.[116]

Webern's music, like that of both Brahms and Schoenberg, is marked by its emphasis on counterpoint and formal considerations; and Webern's commitment to systematic pitch organization in the twelve-tone method is inseparable from this prior commitment.[117] Webern's tone rows are often arranged to take advantage of internal symmetries; for example, a twelve-tone row may be divisible into four groups of three pitches which are variations, such as inversions and retrogrades, of each other, thus creating invariance. This gives Webern's work considerable motivic unity, although this is often obscured by the fragmentation of the melodic lines. This fragmentation occurs through octave displacement (using intervals greater than an octave) and by moving the line rapidly from instrument to instrument in a technique referred to as Klangfarbenmelodie.[118]

Webern's late cantatas seem to indicate new developments in style, which Webern himself noted ecstatically in letters to the Humpliks,[119] or at least a thoroughgoing synthesis of the formal rigors of his mature instrumental works with the word painting of his lieder on a larger scale.[120] They are texturally somewhat denser and more homophonic at the surface through nonetheless contrapuntal polyphonic means,[119] with "Schweigt auch die Welt" culminating in a twelve-tone simultaneity.

Arrangements and orchestrations

In his youth (1903), Webern orchestrated at least five of Franz Schubert's various lieder, giving the piano accompaniment to an appropriately Schubertian orchestra of strings and pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns: "Der Vollmond Strahlt auf Bergeshöhn" (the Romanze from Rosamunde), "Tränenregen" (from Die schöne Müllerin), "Der Wegweiser" (from Winterreise), "Du bist die Ruh", and "Ihr Bild";[121] in 1934, he did the same for Schubert's six Deutsche Tänze (German Dances) of 1824.

For Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1921, Webern arranged, among other things,[122] the 1888 Schatz-Walzer (Treasure Waltz) of Johann Strauss II's Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) for string quartet, harmonium, and piano.

In 1924, Webern arranged Franz Liszt's Arbeiterchor (Workers' Chorus, c. 1847–1848)[123] for bass solo, mixed chorus, and large orchestra; it was premièred for the first time in any form on 13 and 14 March 1925, with Webern conducting the first full-length concert of the Austrian Association of Workers Choir. A review in the Amtliche Wiener Zeitung (28 March 1925) read "neu in jedem Sinne, frisch, unverbraucht, durch ihn zieht die Jugend, die Freude" ("new in every respect, fresh, vital, pervaded by youth and joy").[124] The text, in English translation, reads in part: "Let us have the adorned spades and scoops,/ Come along all, who wield a sword or pen,/ Come here ye, industrious, brave and strong/ All who create things great or small." Liszt, initially inspired by his revolutionary countrymen, had left it in manuscript at publisher Carl Haslinger [de]'s discretion.[125][123]

Performance style

Webern insisted on lyricism, nuance, rubato, sensitivity, and both emotional and intellectual understanding in performance of music;[127] this is evidenced by anecdotes, correspondence, extant recordings of Schubert's Deutsche Tänze (arr. Webern) and Berg's Violin Concerto under his direction, many such detailed markings in his scores (including a specially marked score of the Piano Variations),[128] and finally by his compositional process as both publicly stated and later revealed in the musical and extramusical metaphors and associations everywhere throughout his sketches. As both a composer and conductor, he was one of many (e.g., Wilhelm Furtwängler, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Hermann Scherchen) in a contemporaneous tradition of conscientiously and non-literally handling notated musical figures, phrases, and even entire scores so as to maximize expressivity in performance and to cultivate audience engagement and understanding.[129] Felix Galimir, of the Galimir Quartet, told The New York Times in 1981: "Berg asked for enormous correctness in the performance of his music. But the moment this was achieved, he asked for a very Romanticized treatment. Webern, you know, was also terribly Romantic—as a person, and when he conducted. Everything was almost over-sentimentalized. It was entirely different from what we have been led to believe today. His music should be played very freely, very emotionally."[130]

This aspect of Webern's work had been typically missed in his immediate post-war reception, however, even as it may radically affect the music's reception. For example, Boulez's "complete" recording of Webern's music yielded more to this aesthetic the second time after largely missing it the first; but Eliahu Inbal's rendition of Webern's Symphony, Op. 21 with the hr-Sinfonieorchester is still far more within the spirit of the late Romantic performance tradition (which Webern seemingly intended for his music),[lower-alpha 11] nearly slowing to half-tempo for the whole of first movement and taking care to delineate and shape each melodic strand and expressive gesture throughout the entirety of the work.[132]

Reception, influence, and legacy

In part because he had largely remained obscure and arcane during his own lifetime,[134] interest in Webern's music increased in the aftermath World War II[135] as it came to represent a universally or generally valid, systematic, and compellingly logical model of new composition,[136] with his œuvre acquiring what Alex Ross calls "a saintly, visionary aura".[134] When Webern's Piano Variations were performed at Darmstadt in 1948, young composers listened in a quasi-religious trance.[134] In 1955, the second issue of Eimert and Stockhausen's journal Die Reihe was devoted to Webern's œuvre, and in 1960 his lectures were published by UE.[135] Well through the 1960s, the effect of Webern's music was influential, if not decisive, on many composers and musicians, even as far removed as Joel Thome and Frank Zappa.[137] Analysis of his Cantanta No. 2, Op. 31, by a composer seated at the piano was even dramatized in Pousseur's mobile-form opera Votre Faust (1960–1968), which quotes the opening of "Schweigt auch die Welt" in the first scene.

Meanwhile, Webern's characteristically passionate pan-German nationalism and consequent politics were not widely known or went unmentioned,[134] likely due to his personal associations in fin-de-siècle and Red Vienna, his degradation and mistreatment under fascism and Gleichschaltung, his unwavering loyalty and assistance to his Jewish friends and colleagues (especially after Kristallnacht),[138][139] and his mysterious fate in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Significantly as relates to his reception, Webern never compromised his artistic identity and values, as Stravinsky was later to note.

Somewhat independently and singularly, Luigi Dallapiccola found inspiration in Webern's lesser-known middle-period lieder, with the 1953 Goethe-Lieder especially recalling Webern's Op. 16 in style.[140] A later work, Dialoghi (1959–1960), testifies to his intimate familiarity with not only with Webern's procedures and works in particular, but also those of Schoenberg as well.[141]

It has been suggested that the early 1950s serialists' fascination with Webern was concerned not with his music as such so much as enabled by its concision and some its apparent plainness in the score, thereby facilitating musical analysis;[142] indeed, composer Gottfried Michael Koenig speculates on the basis of his personal experience that since Webern's scores represented such a highly concentrated source, they may have been considered the better for didactic purposes than those of other composers. Composer Robert Beyer [de] thus criticized the approach of early serialists to Webern's music as reductive and narrowly focused on some of Webern's apparent methods rather than on his music more generally, especially neglecting timbre in their typical selection of Opp. 27–28. Composer Karel Goeyvaerts recalled that at least on first impression, the sound of Webern's music reminded him of "a Mondrian canvas," explaining that "things of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality."[143][142] Expressing a related opinion, noted contemporaneous German music critic and contributor to Die Reihe, Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski wrote in the Darmstädter Tagblatt (3 September 1959) that some of the later and more radical music at Darmstadt was "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing"; several days later, one of his articles in the Der Kurier was similarly headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at."[144]

Both Ferneyhough and Lachenmann sympathetically expanded upon and poetically went further than Webern in attention to the minutest of details and the use of ever more radically extended techniques, engaging particularly with his earlier atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism: for example, Ferneyhough's 1967 Sonatas for String Quartet comprise both serial and especially atonal sections much after Webern's Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Op. 9, except at greater length and intended intensity; and Lachenmann wrote in the 1985 essay, "Hearing [Hören] is Defenseless—without Listening [Hören]," of "a melody made of a single note [...] in the viola part" in mm. 2–4 of Webern's Five Pieces for orchestra, Op. 10 amid "the mere ruins of the traditional linguistic context," in a comparison to his own 1969 Air, in which even "the pure tone, now living in tonal exile, has in this new context no aesthetic advantage over pure noise."

To composers in the then Communist Bloc in Central and Eastern Europe, Webern's music and its techniques promised an exciting, unique, and challenging alternative to socialist realism, with its perceived tendency to kitsch and its nationalist and traditionalist overtones. Whereas Berg's Lyric Suite may have influenced the third and fourth string quartets of Bartók in 1927 via an ISCM concert (in which Bartók himself performed his own Piano Sonata),[145] Webern's influence on later composers from what became the Hungarian People's Republic and from other countries behind the Iron Curtain was sometimes mediated or obstructed by politics. As Ligeti explained to a student in 1970, "In countries where there exists a certain isolation, in Eastern Europe, one cannot obtain correct information. One is cut off from the circulation of blood."[146] Nonetheless, Webern's work was a seminal influence on that of both Endre Szervánszky and György Kurtág following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956,[147] as well as on Ligeti himself. Later still and farther east, Sofia Gubaidulina, for whom music was an escape from the socio-political atmosphere of post-Stalinist Soviet Russia, cited the influence of both J. S. Bach and Webern in particular.[148]

In 2013, the Moldenhauers' dogged investigation of Webern's once mysterious death and the experiences and testimony of those involved were portrayed in a one-act opera, The Death of Webern, which, though written in the eclectic style of its composer Michael Dellaira, paraphrases and quotes from Webern's music (e.g., the Passacaglia, Op. 1 in the third and final scenes, klangfarbenmelodie in the sixth scene).

Recordings by Webern

• Webern conducts "Berg – Violin Concerto" ASIN B000003XHN
• Webern conducts his arrangement of Schubert's German Dances ASIN B000002707

See also

• List of Austrians in music

Notes

References

Bibliography

Further reading

• Ahrend, Thomas, and Stefan Münnich. 2018. Anton Webern. Oxford Bibliographies in Music. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/obo/9780199757824-0238.}}{{subscription
• Ahrend, Thomas, and Matthias Schmidt (eds.). 2015. Der junge Webern. Texte und Kontexte. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 2b. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-083-6.
• Ahrend, Thomas, and Matthias Schmidt (eds.). 2016. Webern-Philologien. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 3. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-084-3.
• Cavallotti, Pietro, and Simon Obert, and Rainer Schmusch (eds.). 2019. Neue Perspektiven. Anton Webern und das Komponieren im 20. Jahrhundert. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 4. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-098-0.
• Ewen, David. 1971. "Anton Webern (1883–1945)". In Composers of Tomorrow's Music, by David Ewen, 66–77. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. ISBN 978-0-396-06286-8.
• Forte, Allen. 1998. The Atonal Music of Anton Webern New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-07352-2.
• Galliari, Alain. 2007. "Anton von Webern". Paris: Fayard. ISBN 978-2-213-63457-9.
• Kröpfl, Monika, and Simon Obert (eds.). 2015. Der junge Webern. Künstlerische Orientierungen in Wien nach 1900. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 2a. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-082-9.
• Mead, Andrew. 1993. "Webern, Tradition, and 'Composing with Twelve Tones'". Music Theory Spectrum 15, no. 2:173–204. doi:10.2307/745813
• Moldenhauer, Hans. 1966. Anton von Webern Perspectives. Edited by Demar Irvine, with an introductory interview with Igor Stravinsky. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
• Needham, Alex. 2012. Brahms Piano Piece to Get Its Premiere 159 Years After Its Creation. The Guardian (Thursday 12 January).
• Noller, Joachim. 1990. "Bedeutungsstrukturen: zu Anton Weberns 'alpinen' Programmen". Neue Zeitschrift für Musik151, no. 9 (September): 12–18.
• Obert, Simon (ed.). 2012. Wechselnde Erscheinung. Sechs Perspektiven auf Anton Weberns sechste Bagatelle. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 1. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-080-5.
• Perle, George. 1991. Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Sixth ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Peyser, Joan. 2007. To Boulez and Beyond. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-1-4616-9776-3.
• Rockwell, John. 1983. All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Alfred Knopf. Reprinted New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-306-80750-3, ISBN 978-0-306-80750-3.
• Tsang, Lee. 2002. "The Atonal Music of Anton Webern (1998) by Allen Forte". Music Analysis 21, no. 3 (October): 417–427.
• Wildgans, Friedrich. 1966. Anton Webern. Translated by Edith Temple Roberts and Humphrey Searle. Introduction and notes by Humphrey Searle. New York: October House.

External links

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• Free scores by Anton Webern at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Free scores by Anton Webern in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Anton Webern biography and works on the UE website (publisher)
• Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe (Complete Edition)

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[de] Anton Webern

[es] Anton Webern

[ru] Веберн, Антон