Anton Webern

Anton WebernTemplate:Efn (; 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its lyrical, poetic concision and use of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. His approach was typically rigorous, inspired by his studies of the Franco-Flemish School under Guido Adler and by Arnold Schoenberg's emphasis on structure in teaching composition from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the First Viennese School, and Johannes Brahms. Webern, Schoenberg, and their colleague Alban Berg were at the core of what became known as the Second Viennese School.

Webern was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in an aphoristic and expressionist style, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process.Template:Sfn He treated themes of loss, love, nature, and spirituality, working from personal experiences. Unhappily peripatetic and often assigned light music or operetta in his early conducting career, he aspired to conduct what was seen as more respectable, serious music at home in Vienna. Following Schoenberg's guidance, Webern attempted to write music of greater length during and after their World War I service, relying on the structural support of texts in many .

He rose as a choirmaster and conductor, championing Gustav Mahler's music in Red Vienna and abroad. With Schoenberg based in Berlin, Webern began writing music of increasing confidence, independence, and scale using twelve-tone technique. Marginalized as a "cultural Bolshevist" in Fascist Austria and Nazi Germany, he maintained "the path to the new music", enjoyed international recognition, and relied more on teachingTemplate:Efn for income. He opposed fascist cultural positions but always espoused pan-Germanism and was torn, like divided friends and family, among uncertainties. His hope for moderate, stable, and successful governance of Austria within Nazi Germany proved misplaced, and he helped Jewish friends emigrate and hide while repeatedly considering emigrating himself.

A soldier accidentally killed Webern after World War II. In a phenomenon known as post-Webernism, his music was celebrated by composers, musicians, and scholars. René Leibowitz, Pierre Boulez, Robert Craft, and Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer established it as an important part of modernism through performance, study, and advocacy. Igor Stravinsky assimilated it. To many, it represented a path to serialism. Broader understanding of Webern's expressive agenda, performance practice, and complex sociocultural and political context lagged. An historical edition of his music is underway.

Biography

1883–1908: Upbringing between late Imperial Vienna and countryside

Bucolic

Webern, of the Template:Ill, was born 3 December 1883 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a decorated army veteran, high-ranking civil servant, and mining engineer who owned the Lamprechtsberg copper mine. He grew up mainly in Graz (1890–1894) and Klagenfurt (1894–1902), with one stay in Olomouc and more in Vienna for his father's work. He excelled only in the humanities and likely sang in choir at school.Template:Sfn

He began piano and sang opera with his mother Amalie (née Geer), a trained pianist and accomplished singer, danced with his sisters Rosa and Maria, and received drums, then a trumpet, and later a violin as Christmas gifts.Template:Sfn Local musician Edwin Komauer also taught him piano, cello, and likely counterpoint from Bach's music and cello suites.Template:Sfnm The family played chamber music, including Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven, and Webern played in local orchestras.Template:Sfn

The children spent Easter holidays () and summer vacations () at the Preglhof, the extended family's country estate near Schwabegg in Carinthia. They played in forests under the Koralpe and on a high meadow by the parish church, where cattle grazed pasture under the care of herders. Webern drove horses to a fair in Bleiburg, fought a wildfire, and saved Rosa from drowning in the bathing pond. In winter, they ice-skated the Template:Ill to the Wörthersee. These experiences, and reading Peter Rosegger, an Austrian contributor to the broader (Template:Lit) movement, shaped his distinct and lasting sense of (Template:Lit).Template:Sfnm

University

Before studying at the University of Vienna (1902–1906), Webern immersed himself in concerts, operas, plays, galleries, and cultural history, visiting the Bayreuth Festival, Musikverein, Neue Pinakothek, Prinzregententheater, and Wahnfried. He took counterpoint with Karel Navrátil, harmony with Hermann Graedener, cello with Template:Ill, and piano, in which he was less proficient, with an unidentified Theodor Leschetizky pupil.Template:Sfn

While enrolled, he kept attending many performances to learn the standard and emerging repertoire at the Burgtheater, Vienna Court Opera, and other venues, listening to many works by Brahms, Mahler, Schumann, Strauss, Wagner, and Wolf. He encountered singers like Theodor Bertram, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, and Hermann Winkelmann and conductors like Mahler, Strauss, Arthur Nikisch, and Felix Weingartner. He sang under Siegfried Wagner in Bruckner's Te Deum as a Wagner Society member and visited the Munich Kammerspiele for Frank Wedekind's Hidalla.Template:Sfnm

At school, he analyzed Beethoven's late quartets at the piano with classmate Egon Wellesz, took a Wagner seminar, and learned the historical development of musical styles and techniques mainly from Guido Adler, an acquaintance of Wagner and Liszt,Template:Efn pupil of Bruckner,Template:Efn and friend of Mahler.Template:Sfnm For his musicology doctorate under Adler, he edited the Choralis Constantinus II.Template:Efn As a composer, he would emulate its "subtle organization in the interplay of parts", which he described at length:

The voices proceed ... in [much] equality[, each with] its own development [as] a completely self-contained, separately comprehensible, wonderfully animated structural unit [...]. ... [C]anonic devices [are used] in the greatest profusion [with] the keenest observation of tone colourings in the various registers of the human voice [and] frequent ... interlacing of voices ... by leaps.Template:Sfn

He also studied art history and philosophy with Max Dvořák, Template:Ill, and Franz Wickhoff,Template:Sfnm and joined the Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft (Template:Lit) in 1903, later serving on its board.Template:Sfn His cousin Template:Ill, then a University of Graz art history student,Template:Sfn may have introduced him to the work of Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, which he admired along with that of Ferdinand Hodler and Moritz von Schwind.Template:Sfn He prized Segantini's landscapes as highly as Beethoven's music, diarying in 1904:

File:Giovanni segantini, pascoli di primavera, 1896, 01.jpg

Spring Pastures, 1896, by Giovanni Segantini

I long for an artist in music such as Segantini was in painting ... far away from all turmoil of the world, in contemplation of the glaciers, of eternal ice and snow, of the sombre mountain giants. ... [A]n alpine storm, ... the radiance of the summer sun on flower-covered meadows—all these would have to be in the music, born ... of alpine solitude. That man would then be the Beethoven of our day.Template:Sfn

Finally, Webern studied Catholic liturgy and nationalism, shaped by his upbringing.Template:Sfnm He first found those in his new milieu smug, alien, and distinctly Jewish amid antisemitic reaction to the December Constitution's 1867 Jewish emancipation. By 1902, he had close Jewish friends like fellow student Heinrich Jalowetz, likely altering his views.Template:Sfnm

Schoenberg and his circle

Adler pupil Karl Weigl brought Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande to class in 1903, riveting Webern, who attended performances of his songs and Verklärte Nacht in 1903–04.Template:Sfn In 1904, Webern tried Hans Pfitzner's composition lessons in Berlin but left over attacks on Mahler and R. Strauss.Template:Sfn Adler admired and may have recommended Schoenberg,Template:Sfn or Webern may have seen his Schwarzwald School newspaper ads before starting lessons in fall 1904, perhaps as his first Vienna pupil.Template:Sfn

Thus Webern met Berg as another Schoenberg pupil, and Schoenberg's brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky, through whom he may have worked as an assistant coach at the in Vienna (1906–1909).Template:Sfn Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern became lifelong friends following similar musical paths.Template:Sfn Adler, Jalowetz, and Webern played Schoenberg's quartets under the composer, accompanying Gutheil-Schoder in rehearsals for Op. 10.Template:Sfn

Also through Schoenberg, who painted and had a 1910 solo exhibition at Template:Ill's bookstore, Webern met Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer (with whom he corresponded on terms), Egon Schiele, and Emil Stumpp.Template:Sfn In 1920, Webern wrote Berg about the "indescribable impression" Klimt's work made on him, "that of a luminous, tender, heavenly realm".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn He also met Karl Kraus, whose lyrics he later set, but only to completion in Op. 13/i.Template:Sfn

1908–1918: Early adulthood in Austria-Hungary and German Empire

Marriage

Webern married Wilhelmine "Minna" Mörtl in a 1911 civil ceremony in Danzig. She had become pregnant in 1910 and feared disapproval, as they were cousins. Thus the Catholic Church only solemnized their lasting union in 1915, after three children.Template:Sfn

They met in 1902,Template:Sfn later hiking along the Kamp from Rosenburg-Mold to Allentsteig in 1905. He wooed her with John Ruskin essays (in German translation), dedicating his Langsamer Satz to her. Webern diaried about their time together "with obvious literary aspirations":

We wandered [...]. The forest symphony resounded. ... A walk in the moonlight on flowery meadows—Then the night—"what the night gave to me, will long make me tremble."—Two souls had wed.Template:Efn

File:Anton webern.jpg

Photograph of Webern (1912)

Early conducting career

Webern conducted and coached singers and choirs mostly in operetta, musical theater, light music, and some opera in his early career. Operetta was in its Viennese Silver Age.Template:Sfn Much of it was regarded as "low-"Template:Sfn or "middlebrow"; Kraus, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Krenek found it "uppity" in its pretensions.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn In 1924 Ernst Décsey recalled he once found operetta, with its "old laziness and unbearable musical blandness", beneath him.Template:Sfn J. P. Hodin contextualized the opposition of the "youthful intelligentsia" to operetta with a quote from Hermann Bahr's 1907 essay Wien:Template:Sfn

[E]veryone knows ... it is always Sunday in Vienna ... one lives in a world of half-poetry which is very dangerous for the real thing. They can recognize a few waltzes by Lanner and Strauss ... a few Viennese songs ... It is a well-known fact that Vienna has the finest cakes ... and the most cheerful, friendly people. ... But those who are condemned to live here cannot understand all this.

"What benefit ... if all operettas ... were destroyed", Webern told Diez in 1908.Template:Sfn But by 1912, he told Berg that Zeller's Vogelhändler was "quite nice" and Schoenberg that J. Strauss II's Nacht in Venedig was "such fine, delicate music. I now believe ... Strauss is a master."Template:Sfn A summer 1908 engagement with Bad Ischl's Template:Ill was "hell".Template:Sfn Webern walked out on an engagement in Innsbruck (1909), writing in distress to Schoenberg:

[A] young good-for-nothing ... my 'superior!' ... what do I have to do with such a theatre? ... do I have to perform all this filth?Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

Webern wrote Zemlinsky seeking work at the Berlin or Vienna Volksoper instead.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn He started at Bad Teplitz's Civic Theater in early 1910, where the local news reported his "sensitive, devoted guidance" as conductor of Fall's Geschiedene Frau, but he quit within months due to disagreements.Template:Sfn His repertoire likely included Fall's Dollarprinzessin, Lehár's Graf von Luxemburg, O. Straus's Walzertraum, J. Strauss II's Fledermaus, and Schumann's Manfred.Template:Sfn There were only 22 musicians in the orchestra, too few to perform Puccini's operas, he noted.Template:Sfn

Webern then summered at the Preglhof, composing his Op. 7 and planning an opera.Template:Sfn In September, he attended the Munich premiere of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand and visited with his idol,Template:Efn who gave Webern a sketch of "".Template:Efn Webern then worked with Jalowetz as assistant conductor in Danzig (1910–1911), where he first saw the "almost frightening" ocean.Template:Sfn He conducted von Flotow's Wintermärchen, George's Försterchristl, Jones' Geisha, Lehár's Lustige Witwe, Lortzing's Waffenschmied, Offenbach's Belle Hélène, and J. Strauss II's Zigeunerbaron.Template:Sfn He particularly enjoyed Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann and Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia, but only Jalowetz was allowed to conduct this more established repertoire.Template:Sfn

Webern soon expressed homesickness to Berg; he could not bear the separation from Schoenberg and their world in Vienna.Template:Sfn He returned after resigning in spring 1911, and the three were pallbearers at Mahler's funeral in May 1911.Template:Sfn Then in summer 1911, a neighbor's antisemitic abuse and aggression caused Schoenberg to quit work, abandon Vienna, and go with his family to stay with Zemlinsky on the .Template:Sfn Webern and others fundraised for Schoenberg's return, circulating more than one hundred leaflets with forty-eight signatories, including G. Adler, H. Bahr, Klimt, Kraus, and R. Strauss, among others.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn But Schoenberg was resolved to move to Berlin, and not for the first or last time, convinced of Vienna's fundamental hostility.Template:Sfn

Webern soon joined him (1910–1912), finishing no new music in his devoted work on Schoenberg's behalf, which entailed many editing and writing projects.Template:Sfn He gradually became tired, unhappy, and homesick.Template:Sfn He tried to persuade Schoenberg to return home to Vienna, continuing the fundraising campaign and lobbying for a position there for Schoenberg, but Schoenberg could not bear to return to the due to his prior experiences in Vienna.Template:Sfnm At the same time, Webern began a cycle of repeatedly quitting and being rehired by Zemlinsky at the (1911–1918).Template:Sfn

He had a short-lived conducting post in Stettin (1912–1913), which, as all the others, kept him from composing and alienated him.Template:Sfn On the verge of a breakdown, he wrote Berg shortly after arriving (Jul. 1912):Template:Sfnm

I find myself under the dregs of mankind ... with ... absurd music; I'm ... seriously ill. My nerves torture me [...]. I want to be far away [...]. In the mountains. There everything is clear, the water, the air, the earth. Here everything is dismal. I'm poisoned by drinking the water.

"Old song" of "lost paradise"

Webern's father sold the Preglhof in 1912, and Webern mourned it as a "lost paradise".Template:Sfn He revisited it and the family grave in nearby Schwabegg his entire life, associating these places with the memory of his mother, whose 1906 loss profoundly affected him.Template:Sfnm In July 1912, he confided in Schoenberg: Template:Multiple image

I am overwhelmed with emotion when I imagine everything [...]. My daily way to the grave of my mother. The infinite mildness of the entire countryside, all the thousand things there. Now everything is over. ... If only you could ... have seen [...]. The seclusion, the quiet, the house, the forests, the garden, and the cemetery. About this time, I had always composed diligently.Template:Sfnm

Shortly after the anniversary of his mother's death, he wrote Schoenberg in September 1912:Template:Sfnm

When I read letters from my mother, I could die of longing for the places where all these things have occurred. How far back and ... beautiful. ... Often a ... soft ... radiance, a supernatural warmth falls upon me— ... from my mother.Template:Sfnm

For Christmas in 1912, Webern gifted Schoenberg Rosegger's Template:Ill (Forest HomelandTemplate:Sfn), from which Julian Johnson highlighted:

Childhood days and childhood home!
It is that old song of Paradise. There are people for whom ... Paradise is never lost ... in them God's kingdom ... rises ... more ... in ... memory than ... ever ... in reality; ... children are poets and retrace their steps.Template:Sfn

Rosegger's account of his mother's death at the book's end ("An meine Mutter") resonated with Webern, who connected it to his Op. 6 orchestral pieces.Template:Sfn In a January 1913 letter to Schoenberg, Webern revealed that these pieces were a kind of program music, each reflecting details and emotions tied to his mother's death.Template:Sfn He had written Berg in July 1912, "my compositions ... relate to the death of my mother", specifying in addition the "Passacaglia, [String] Quartet, most [early] songs, ... second Quartet, ... second [orchestral pieces, Op. 10] (with some exceptions)".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

Johnson contended that Webern understood his cultural origins with a maternal view of nature and , which became central themes in his music and thought.Template:Sfn He noted that Webern's deeply personal idea of a maternal homeland—built from memories of pilgrimages to his mother's grave, the "mild", "lost paradise" of home, and the "warmth" of her memory—reflected his sense of loss and his yearning for return.Template:Sfn Drawing loosely on V. Kofi Agawu's semiotic approach to classical music, specifically his idea of musical topics, Johnson held that all of Webern's music, though rarely directly representational, was enriched by its associative references and more specific musical and extra-musical meanings.Template:Sfn In this he claimed to echo Craft, Jalowetz, Krenek, the Moldenhauers, and Webern himself.Template:Sfn

File:1908 Mürzzuschlag.png

Mürzzuschlag, 1908 postcard photograph

In particular, Webern associated nature with his personal (often youthful and spiritual) experiences, forming a topical nexus that recurred in his diaries, letters, and music, sometimes explicitly in sketches and set texts. He frequented the surrounding mountains, summering in resort towns like Mürzzuschlag and backpacking (sometimes summiting) the Gaisstein, Grossglockner, Hochschober, Hochschwab, and Schneealpe (among others) throughout his life. The alpine climate and föhn, glaciers, pine trees, and springs "crystal clear down to the bottom" fascinated him. He treasured this time "up there, in the heights", where "one should stay".Template:Sfnm

He collected and organized "mysterious" alpine herbs and cemetery flowers in pressed albums, and he tended gardens at his father's home in Klagenfurt and later at his own homes in the Mödling District (first in Mödling, then in Maria Enzersdorf).Template:Sfnm Karl Amadeus Hartmann remembered that Webern gardened "as a devotion" to Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants, and Johnson drew a parallel between Webern's gardening and composing, emphasizing his connection to nature and his structured, methodical approach in both pursuits.Template:Sfn Johnson noted that gardens and cemeteries are alike in being cultivated, closed spaces of rebirth and quiet reflection.Template:Sfn

These habits and preoccupations endured in Webern's life and .Template:Sfn In 1933, Joseph Hueber recalled Webern stopped in a fragrant meadow, dug his hands into the soil, and breathed in the flowers and grass before rising to ask: "Do you sense 'Him' ... as strongly as I, 'Him, Pan'?"Template:Sfn In 1934, Webern's lyricist and collaborator Hildegard Jone described his work as "filled ... with the endless love and delicacy of the memory of ... childhood". Webern told her, "through my work, all that is past becomes like a childhood".Template:Sfn

Psychotherapy

In 1912–1913, Webern had a breakdown and saw Alfred Adler, who noted his idealism and perfectionism.Template:Sfnm There were many factors involved.Template:Sfn Webern had little time (mostly summers) to compose.Template:Sfnm There were conflicts at work (e.g., he emphasized that a director called him a "little man").Template:Sfn His ambivalence toward sales-oriented popular music theater contributed ("I ... stir the sauce", he wrote).Template:Sfn "It appears ... improbable that I should remain with the theatre. It is ... terrible. ... I can hardly ... adjust to being away from home", he had written Schoenberg in 1910.Template:Sfn Miserably ill and alienated, he first had sought medical advice and taken rest at a sanatorium in Template:Ill.Template:Sfnm Adler later evaluated his symptoms as psychogenic responses to unmet expectations.Template:Sfnm Webern wrote Schoenberg that Adler's psychoanalysis was helpful and insightful.Template:Sfnm

World War I

As World War I broke out and nationalist fervor swept Europe, Webern found it "inconceivable", he wrote Schoenberg in August 1914, "that the German Reich, and we along with it, should perish."Template:Sfnm Yielding in his distrust of Protestant Germany, he compared Catholic France to "cannibals" and expressed pan-German patriotism amid wartime propaganda.Template:Sfnm He cited his "faith in the German spirit" as having "created, almost exclusively, the culture of mankind".Template:Sfn Despite his high regard of French classical music, especially Debussy's, Webern revered the tradition as centered on counterpoint and form, and as mainly German since Bach.Template:Sfn

Webern served intermittently for nearly two years.Template:Sfn The war cost him professional opportunities, much of his social life, and the necessary leisure time to compose (he completed only nine ).Template:Sfn Moving frequently and tiring,Template:Sfn he began to despair, explaining to Schoenberg in November 1916 that the reality of war was "Old Testament" and "'Eye for eye'", "as if Christ had never existed".Template:Sfnm Webern was discharged in December 1916 for myopia, which had disqualified him from frontline service.Template:Sfn

His 1917 show that he reflected on his patriotism and processed his sorrow.Template:Sfn He treated the loss of life and, with the 1916 death of Franz Joseph I of Austria, the end of an era.Template:Sfn In "Fahr hin, o Seel'", he selected a lament sung at a funeral in a Rosegger novel.Template:Sfn In "Wiese im Park", he selected a text from Kraus recognizing that the day was "dead", Template:Sfn ("and everything ... so old"). Webern also set several disturbing poems of Georg Trakl, not all of which he could finish.Template:Sfn With uninterrupted contrapuntal density, by turns muscular and murmured, he word painted Trakl's "great cities" and "dying peoples", "leafless trees", "violent alarm", and "falling stars" in "Abendland III".Template:Sfn

Austrian defeat and socioeconomic strain

During and after the end of the war, Webern, like other Austrians, contended with food shortages, insufficient heating, socioeconomic volatility, and geopolitical disaster in defeat.Template:Sfn He had considered retreating to the countryside and purchasing a farm since 1917, specifically as an asset better than war bonds at shielding his family's wealth from inflation.Template:Sfn (In the end, he lost all that remained of his family's wealth to hyperinflation by 1924.)Template:Sfn He proposed to Schoenberg that they might be smallholders together.Template:Sfn

Despite Schoenberg's and his father's advice that he not quit conducting, Webern followed to Schoenberg to Mödling in early 1918, hoping to be reunited with his mentor and to compose more.Template:Sfnm But Webern's finances were so poor that he soon explored a "voluntary exile" to Prague again.Template:Sfn Nonetheless, he continued to raise funds, including his own, for Schoenberg,Template:Sfn with whom he spent every day.Template:Sfn

Yet soon after he arrived, Webern broke his friendship with Schoenberg.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn The break was multifactorialTemplate:Sfn but involved Webern's dissatisfaction with his careerTemplate:Sfn and financial turmoil.Template:Sfn Berg learned of the Weberns' ill temperaments and "latent antisemitism" from Schoenberg,Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn and noted that Schoenberg "wouldn't explain" further than "'Webern wants to go to Prague again'".Template:Sfn Bailey Puffett argued that Webern's actions in and after the 1930s suggested that he was not antisemitic, at least in his maturity.Template:Sfn She noted that Webern later wrote Schoenberg that he felt "a sense of the most vehement aversion" against German-speaking people who were.Template:Sfn

After meeting with Webern, Berg saw "the matter in a different light", considering Webern "by and large innocent" in light of what Webern said was Schoenberg's "kick in the teeth": after laying plans for a New Music society, Schoenberg angrily called Webern "secretive and deceitful" upon learning that Webern was instead considering Prague again.Template:Sfnm They reconciled in October 1918, not long before Webern's father died in 1919.Template:Sfnm Webern was changed by these events; he slowly began to grow more independent of Schoenberg, who was like a father to him.Template:Sfnm For his part, Schoenberg was not infrequently dubious of Webern, who he still considered his closest friend.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

1918–1933: Rise in (Interwar Vienna)

Society for Private Musical Performances

Webern stayed in Vienna and worked with Berg, Schoenberg, and Erwin Stein at the Society for Private Musical Performances (1918–1921), promoting new music through performances and contests. Music included that of Bartók, Berg, Busoni, Debussy,Template:Efn Korngold, Mahler, Novák, Ravel, Reger, Satie, Strauss, Stravinsky, and Webern himself. Webern wrote Berg about Stravinsky's "indescribably touching" Berceuses du chat and "glorious" Pribaoutki, which Schoenberg conducted at a sold-out 1919 Society concert.Template:Sfn There was perhaps some shared influence among Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern at this time.Template:Sfnm The Society dissolved amid hyperinflation in 1921, having boasted some 320 members and sponsored more than a hundred concerts.Template:Sfn

Mature conducting career

File:Anton Webern (1883–1945) 1927 © Georg Fayer (1891–1950) OeNB 10450290.png

Webern, 1927, portrait by Georg Fayer

Webern obtained work as music director of the 1921, having made an excellent impression as the vocal coach Schoenberg recommended for their 1920 performance of Gurre-Lieder.Template:Sfn They nearly abandoned this project before Webern stepped in.Template:Sfn He led them in performances of Brahms, Mahler, Reger, and Schumann, among others.Template:Sfn But low salary, mandatory touring, and challenges to Webern's thorough rehearsals prompted him to resign in 1922.Template:Sfn He was also chorusmaster of the Mödling Template:Efn (1922–1926) until he resigned in controversy over hiring a Jewish soprano, Greta Wilheim, as a stand-in soloist for Schubert's Mirjams Siegesgesang.Template:Sfnm

From 1922, Webern led the mixed-voice amateur Template:Efn and Template:Efn through David Josef Bach, Director of the .Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Webern won DJ Bach's confidence with a 1922 performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 3 that established his reputation, prompting Berg to praise him as "the greatest conductor since Mahler himself".Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Webern's Mahler interpretations continued to be widely celebrated.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn From 1927, RAVAG aired twenty-two of Webern's performances.Template:Sfn

He premiered Berg's Chamber Concerto with soloists Rudolf Kolisch and Eduard Steuermann in 1927Template:Sfn and led Stravinsky's Les Noces with Erich Leinsdorf among the pianists in 1933.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Armand Machabey noted Webern's regional reputation as a conductor of Template:Efn for his meticulous approach to then contemporary music, comparing him to Willem Mengelberg in Le Ménestrel (1930).Template:Sfn Some on the left, notably Template:Ill in Der Kampf (1929), criticized Webern's programming as more ambitious and bourgeois than popular and proletarian.Template:Sfn Webern seemed uneasy in his dependence on the Social Democrats for conducting work, perhaps on religious grounds, Krenek speculated.Template:Sfn But "[a]rtistic work for and with workers was [from] a ... Christian standpoint which Webern took very seriously", Walter Kolneder wrote.Template:Sfn

Relative success in a destabilizing society

Webern's finances were often precarious, even in his years of relative success. Relief came from family, friends, patrons, and prizes.Template:Sfn He twice received the Template:Ill.Template:Efn To compose more, he sought income while trying not to overcommit himself as a conductor.Template:Sfn He contracted with Universal Edition only after 1919, reaching better terms in 1927,Template:Sfn and he was not very ambitious or astute in business.Template:Sfn Even with a doctorate and Guido Adler's respect, he never secured a remunerative university position, whereas in 1925 Schoenberg was invited to the Prussian Academy of Arts, ending their seven years together in Mödling.Template:Sfn

Social Democrat–Christian Social relations polarized and radicalized amid the Template:Ill.Template:Sfnm Webern and othersTemplate:Efn signed an "Announcement of Intellectual Vienna"Template:Efn published on the front page of the Social Democrats' daily Arbeiter-ZeitungTemplate:Efn days before the 1927 Austrian legislative election.Template:Sfn On Election Day in Template:Ill, Ignaz Seipel of the Template:Ill officially applied the term "Red Vienna" pejoratively, attacking Vienna's educational and cultural institutions.Template:Sfn Social unrest escalated to the July Revolt of 1927 and beyond.Template:Sfn Webern's nostalgia for social order intensified with increasing civil disorder.Template:Sfn In 1928 friends fundraised for him, partly to fund a rest cure at the for his exhaustion and (possibly psychosomatic) gastrointestinal complaints.Template:Efn

In 1928, Berg celebrated the "lasting works" and successes of composers "whose point of departure was ... late Mahler, Reger, and Debussy and whose temporary end point is in ... Schoenberg" in their rise from "pitiful 'cliques'" to a large, diverse, international, and "irresistible movement".Template:Sfn But they were soon marginalized and ostracized in Central Europe with few exceptions,Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn and in 1929 Webern wrote Schoenberg that "it is getting worse and worse here".Template:Sfn He declined a RAVAG executive role, citing time constraints and fearing further affiliation with the Social Democrats.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn

Webern's music was performed and publicized more widely starting in the latter half of the 1920s.Template:Sfn Yet he found no great success as Berg enjoyed with WozzeckTemplate:Sfn nor as Schoenberg did, to a lesser extent, with Pierrot lunaire or in time with Verklärte Nacht. His Symphony, Op. 21, was performed as a chamber piece in New York by the League of Composers (1929) and separately in London at the 1931 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival. Louis Krasner sensed some resentment, noting that Webern had "very little".Template:Sfn Krenek's impression was that Webern resented his financial hardships and lack of wider recognition.Template:Sfn

1933–1938: Perseverance in (Austrofascist Vienna)

Marginalization at home

Financial crises, complex social and political movements, pervasive antisemitism, culture wars, and renewed military conflictsTemplate:Efn continued to shape Webern's world, profoundly circumscribing his life.Template:Sfnm Shortly after Webern conducted the Brecht–Eisler Solidaritätslied in 1933, Engelbert Dollfuss saw the Template:Ill passed, and choir singers' homes were raided.Template:Sfn In the 1934 Austrian Civil War, AustrofascistsTemplate:Efn executed, exiled, and imprisoned Social Democrats, outlawed their party, and abolished cultural institutions.Template:Sfnm

Stigmatized by his decade-long association with Social Democrats, Webern lost a promising domestic conducting career, which might have been better recorded.Template:Sfnm He eventually abandoned efforts with what remained of the workers' choir in the form of the much constrained in 1935,Template:Sfn instead working as a UE editor and Template:Ill board member and president (1933–1938, 1945).Template:Sfnm

By the late 1920s, antisemitism had become epidemic, and the socioculturally mixed milieu of Vienna's modern arts and entertainment, including the music of Webern, Schoenberg, Berg, and Mahler, was mocked as foreign and Jewish in a racialized sense, contrasting with what was touted as truly German (and typically conservative, traditional, or rural).Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Webern's admission to the Prussian Academy of Arts was withdrawn as Adolf Hitler rose in Germany,Template:Sfn and an Austrian labeled Berg and Webern "Jewish" on in 1933.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn In the late 1930s, theirs was exhibited as in Nazi GermanyTemplate:SfnmTemplate:Efn and later at the Vienna Künstlerhaus in Nazi Austria.Template:Sfnm

Webern delivered an eight-lecture series Template:Efn at Template:Ill's and her physician husband Rudolf Kurzman's home (Feb.–Apr. 1933).Template:Sfn He attacked fascist cultural policy, asking "What will come of our struggle?" He observed that "'cultural Bolshevism' is the name given to everything that is going on around Schoenberg, Berg, and myself (Krenek too)"Template:Efn and warned, "Imagine what will be destroyed, wiped out, by this hate of culture!"Template:Sfnm He lectured more at the Kurzmann-Leuchter home, privately in 1934–1935 on Beethoven's piano sonatas to about 40 attendees and later in 1937–1938.Template:Sfn

Persevering, Webern wrote Krenek that "art has its own laws ... if one wants to achieve something in it, only these laws and nothing else can have validity";Template:Efn upon completing Op. 26 (1935), he wrote DJ Bach, "I hope it is so good that (if people ever get to know it) they will declare me ready for a concentration camp or an insane asylum!"Template:Sfn The Vienna Philharmonic nearly refused to play Berg's Violin Concerto in 1936.Template:Efn Peter Stadlen's 1937 Op. 27 premieres were the last Viennese Webern performances until after World War II.Template:Sfnm The critical success of Hermann Scherchen's 1938 ISCM London Op. 26 premiere encouraged Webern to write more cantatas and reassured him after a cellist quit Op. 20 mid-performance, declaring it unplayable.Template:Sfnm

Besieged milieu and political uncertainty

Webern's milieu comprised increasingly vast differences.Template:Sfn Like most Austrians, he and his family were Catholic, though not church regulars; Webern was perhaps devout if unorthodox.Template:Sfnm They became politically divided.Template:Efn His friends (e.g., then Zionist Schoenberg,Template:Efn left-leaning BergTemplate:Efn) were of a mostly Jewish milieu from late Imperial to "red" (Social Democratic) Vienna.Template:Sfnm Alma Mahler, Krenek, Template:Ill, and Stein preferred or supported the "lesser evil"Template:Efn of the Austrofascists (or aligned Italian fascists) the Nazis.Template:Sfn Presuming power would moderate Hitler, Webern mediated among friends with an optimistic or self-soothing complacency, exasperating those who were at risk.Template:Sfnm

Webern found himself surrounded mostly by one side as Schoenberg immigrated to the US (1933), Rudolf Ploderer died by suicide (1933),Template:Efn Berg died (1935), and DJ Bach, among others (e.g., Greissle, Jalowetz, Krenek, Reich, Steuermann, Wellesz), fled or worse.Template:Sfnm Webern immediately considered following Schoenberg to the US, which Schoenberg discouraged despite seeking opportunities there for Webern.Template:Sfn Schoenberg knew that Webern was deeply attached to home, and he told Webern that conditions in the US were poor, mentioning the ongoing Great Depression.Template:Sfn

Webern's views of National Socialism have been variously described.Template:Efn His published itemsTemplate:Efn reflected his audience or context.Template:Sfnm Secondary literature reflected limited evidence or ideological orientationsTemplate:Efn and admitted uncertainty.Template:Sfnm Julie Brown noted hesitancy to approach the topic and echoed the Moldenhauers, considering the issue "vexed" and Webern a "political enigma".Template:Sfnm Bailey Puffett considered Webern's politics "somewhat vague" and his situation "complex", noting that he seemed to avoid definitive political association as a practical strategy.Template:Sfn Webern's apparent sympathies with some of the Nazis' program later became a sensation in his reception, but the matter was often oversimplified or decontextualized and rested on limited evidence (mostly letters), Johnson wrote, sometimes with the larger aim of politicizing Webern's music and his musical language.Template:Sfn

Krasner and the Moldenhauers surmised Webern's cognitive dissonance, finding him "idealistic and rather naive".Template:Sfnm In 1943 Kurt List described Webern as "utterly ignorant" and "perpetual[ly] confus[ed]" about politics, "a ready prey to the personal influence of family and friends".Template:Efn Johnson described him as "personally shy, a man of private feeling and essentially apolitical",Template:Sfn and as "prone to identify with Nazi politics as ... other ... Austrians".Template:Sfn Webern may have believed that the Nazis shared his own ideals, Johnson wrote, explaining that "it is possible that ... naiveté, ... ignorance and ... adherence to his own beliefs allowed Webern to see in Nazi ideology only ... elements ... he wanted to find".Template:Sfn

Visiting conducting career

Webern conducted nine concerts as a BBC Symphony visiting conductor (1929–1936). A talkie on his first London visit inspired him to ask Steuermann about writing film music, and Steuermann wrote his relatives in the film industry, Salka Viertel and Berthold Viertel, for their suggestions.Template:Sfn For the BBC, Webern selected then little-known Mahler (including both nocturnes from the Symphony No. 7 in 1934).Template:Sfn He insisted on rehearsing at the piano with vocalists and was criticized for coaching musical phrasing.Template:Sfn

In Barcelona, he withdrew from the 1936 world premiere of Berg's Violin Concerto, grief-stricken after Berg's death and overwhelmed by difficulties.Template:Sfnm There Krasner recalled,

[Webern] pleaded and exhorted the players to feel the inner expressive content of one, two, or three notes at a time—rehearsing repeatedly a single motif, one bar of music and only finally, a two- or four-bar phrase.

The two then played the concerto in London with BBC musicians, who rehearsed before Webern conducted. Kenneth Anthony Wright noted Webern's "funny little explanations of the varying dynamics and flexibility of tempo", but "every syllable and every gesture of Webern was understood and lovingly heeded", Krasner recalled. The musicians "all admired and respected Webern", according to Sidonie Goossens. But Felix Aprahamian, Benjamin Britten, and Berthold Goldschmidt criticized Webern's conducting, and BBC management did not invite him back after 1936.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn

1938–1939: Inner emigration in Nazi Germany

Anschluss

Krasner's last visit with Webern was interrupted by Kurt Schuschnigg's broadcast speech that the Anschluss was imminent.Template:Sfnm Krasner had been playing some of Schoenberg's Violin Concerto for Webern and trying to convince him to write a sonata for solo violin.Template:Sfn When Webern turned on the radio and heard this speech, he urged Krasner to flee.Template:Sfnm Because Webern's family included Nazis, Krasner wondered whether Webern had already known that the Anschluss was planned for that day.Template:Sfnm He also wondered whether Webern's warning had been solely for his safety or whether it had also been to save Webern the embarrassment of the violinist's presence in the event of celebration at the Webern home.Template:Sfn

Much of Austria did celebrate.Template:Sfnm But Webern made only a terse note of the Anschluss in his notebook without registering any clear emotion.Template:Sfn In fact, he wrote Jone and her husband Josef Humplik asking not to be disturbed as he was "totally immersed" in work on Op. 28.Template:Sfnm Thus, Bailey Puffett suggested that Webern may have received Krasner's visit as a distraction.Template:Sfn

By now, Hartmut Krones wrote, Webern likely realized his error in anticipating the Nazis' self-moderation.Template:Sfn Bailey Puffett proposed that Krasner, with the benefit of hindsight from the perspective of his 1987 account, may have resented Webern for "refusing to see the reality of Hitler's antisemitism", at least until after 1936.Template:Sfn That year, Webern had insisted that Krasner and he travel through Nazi Germany to stop at a Munich train station café, where Krasner said "anything untoward was the least likely to happen", in an attempt to demonstrate the lack of danger.Template:Sfnm

Support for the Anschluss rested on antisemitism, economic prospects,Template:Efn and the idea of a Greater Germany.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Under some duress, Theodor Innitzer ushered in Catholic support.Template:Sfnm The Austrian Nazis and Social Democrats, both outlawed, were linked in opposition to the Austrofascists.Template:Sfn Karl Renner supported unification as a matter of self-determination before the years (1933–1938) of and Nazi soft power,Template:Efn and he and others now supported (or accepted as inevitable) the 1938 Anschluss.Template:Sfnm Otto Bauer, in exile, expressed some acceptance with profound resignation and misgivings, having worked toward Austria's German incorporation since Provisional National Assembly's 1918 vote.Template:Sfn Webern had long shared in common pan-German sentiments, especially during wartime.Template:Sfn He also likely hoped to conduct again, securing a firmer future for his family under a new regime proclaiming itself "socialist" no less than nationalist.Template:Sfn According to what Josef Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian, told the Moldenhauers, Webern's optimism was not dispelled until 1941.Template:Sfn

Krasner emphasized Webern's "naiveté" but acknowledged that he himself had been "foolhardy" as to the danger of antisemitism, recalling "read[ing] in the papers ... denials" and "want[ing] to see for myself" in 1938.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Consensus had emerged on the center, left, and in some mainstream Jewish organizations that antisemitism was only a means to political power since its 1890s definition as the "socialism of fools".Template:Sfn The Frankfurt School first treated it within the rubric of class conflict (Adorno began to consider it otherwise in his 1939 "Fragments on Wagner"),Template:Sfn and Franz Neumann briefly contended that the Nazis would "never allow a complete extermination of the Jews" in his 1942 Behemoth (before revisions in 1944).Template:Sfn

Kristallnacht and recoil

shocked Webern,Template:Sfn who thought that reports of Nazi atrocities were politicized, unreliable propaganda.Template:Sfnm He visited and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach, Template:Ill, Polnauer, and Hugo Winter.Template:Sfn For Jokl, a former Berg pupil, Webern wrote a recommendation letter to facilitate emigration. When that failed, Webern served as his godfather in a 1939 baptism.Template:Sfn Polnauer, whose emigration Mark Brunswick, Schoenberg, and Webern were unable to secure,Template:Sfnm managed to survive the Holocaust as an albino; he later edited a 1959 UE publication of Webern's correspondence from this time with Humplik and Jone.Template:Sfnm Webern moved Humplik's 1929 gift of a Mahler bust to his bedroom,Template:Sfnm having told Template:Ill in 1936 or 1937 that Mahler's time would come within a German Template:Sfnm and DJ Bach that "not all Germans are Nazis".Template:Sfn

With "almost all his friends and old pupils ... gone",Template:Sfn Webern found himself increasingly alone,Template:Sfn and his financial situation was poor. He talked to Polnauer about emigrating but was reluctant to leave home and family.Template:Sfn He entered a period of "inward emigration" and focused on composition,Template:Sfnm writing to artist Franz Rederer in 1939, "We live completely withdrawn. I work a lot."Template:Sfn He corresponded extensively to maintain relationships, imploring his student George Robert to play Schoenberg in New YorkTemplate:Sfn and expressing his loneliness and isolation to Schoenberg.Template:Sfn Then war limited postal service,Template:Sfnm disrupting their direct correspondence completely by 1941.

1939–1945: Hope and disillusionment during World War II

Swiss and Reich prospects

Webern's mature music was performed mostly outside the , where only his tonal music and arrangements were allowed as works not in the style of a . His arrangement of two of Schubert's German Dances was performed in Leipzig and broadcast in the and Fascist Italy (1941).Template:Sfn His Passacaglia was considered for a Viennese contemporary music festival in 1942, Karl Böhm or Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting, but this did not happen.Template:Sfn Hans Rosbaud likely performed it in occupied Strasbourg that year, and Luigi Dallapiccola sought to have it performed in Venice in 1943.Template:Sfn Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt planned Webern's arrangement of the six-voice ricercar from Bach's Musical Offering at the in 1943, but war intervened.Template:Sfn

Supported by IGNM-Sektion Basel, the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur, and Werner Reinhart, Webern attended three Swiss concerts, his last trips outside the .Template:Sfn In 1940, Erich Schmid conducted Op. 1 in Winterthur; soprano Marguerite Gradmann-Lüscher sang Op. 4 and most of Op. 12 (not No. 3) at the Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel, Schmid accompanying. In Feb. 1943, Scherchen gave the world premiere of Op. 30 at the Template:Ill. Webern intimated to Willi Reich that he might immigrate there, joking (Oct. 1939) "Anything of the sort did seem quite out of the question for me!"Template:Sfn But Webern failed to find employment, even as a formality, likely due to anti-German sentiment in the context of Swiss neutrality and refugee laws.Template:Sfn

In the Reich, he met with former Society violist Othmar Steinbauer about a formal teaching role in Vienna in early 1940, but nothing materialized.Template:Sfn He lectured at the homes of Erwin Ratz and Template:Ill's widow Margaret (1940–1942).Template:Sfn Many private pupils came to him between 1940 and 1943, even from afar, among them briefly Hartmann.Template:Sfn Hartmann, who opposed the Nazis, remembered that Webern counseled him to respect authority, at least publicly, for the sake of order.Template:Sfn

Wartime hopes and reality

Sharing in wartime public sentiment at the height of Hitler's popularity (spring 1940), Webern expressed high hopes, crediting him as "unique" and "singular"Template:Efn for "the new state for which the seed was laid twenty years ago". These were patriotic letters to Joseph Hueber, an active soldier, baritone, close friend, and mountaineering companion who often sent Webern gifts.Template:Sfnm Indeed, Hueber had just sent Webern Mein Kampf.Template:Efn

Unaware of Stefan George's aversion to the Nazis, Webern reread Template:Ill and marveled suggestively at the wartime leader envisioned therein, but "I am not taking a position!" he wrote active soldier, singer, and onetime Social Democrat, Hans Humpelstetter.Template:Sfn For Johnson, "Webern's own image of a was never of this world; if his politics were ultimately complicitous it was largely because his utopian apoliticism played so easily into ... the status quo."Template:Sfn

By Aug. 1940, Webern depended financially on his children.Template:Sfnm He sought wartime emergency relief funds from and the Template:Ill (1940–1944), which he received despite indicating non-membership in the Nazi Party on an application.Template:Sfnm Whether Webern ever joined the party was unknown.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn This represented his only income after 1942.Template:Sfn He nearly exhausted his savings by 1944.Template:Sfn

His 1943–1945 letters were strewn with references to bombings, death, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order, but several grandchildren were born.Template:Sfn In Dec. 1943, aged 60, he wrote from a barrack that he was working 6 am–5 pm as an air-raid protection police officer, conscripted into the war effort.Template:Sfn He corresponded with Willi Reich about IGNM-Sektion Basel's concert marking his sixtieth, in which Paul Baumgartner played Op. 27, Walter Kägi Op. 7, and August Wenzinger Op. 11. Gradmann-Lüscher sang both Opp. 3 and the world premiere of 23.Template:Sfn For Schoenberg's 70th birthday (1944), Webern asked Reich to convey "my most heartfelt remembrances, ... longing! ... hopes for a happy future!"Template:Sfn In Feb. 1945, Webern's only son Peter, intermittently conscripted since 1940,Template:Sfn was killed in an air attack; airstrike sirens interrupted the family's mourning at the funeral.Template:Sfn

Refuge and death in Mittersill

File:Mittersill Webern-Grab 1.png

Grave of Webern and his wife Minna at the cemetery in Mittersill

The Weberns assisted Schoenberg's eldest son, Georg, during the war; with the Red Army's April 1945 arrival imminent, they gave him their Mödling apartment, the property and childhood home of Webern's son-in-law Benno Mattl.Template:Efn Georg later told Krasner that Webern "felt he'd betrayed his best friends."Template:Sfn The Weberns fled west, resorting to traveling partly on foot to Mittersill to rejoin their family of "17 persons pressed together in the smallest possible space".Template:Sfn

On the night of 15 Sept. 1945, Webern was outside smoking when he was shot and killed by a US soldier in an apparent accident.Template:Sfnm He had been following Thomas Mann's work, which the Nazis had burned, noting in 1944 that Mann had finished Joseph and His Brothers.Template:Sfn In his last notebook entry, Webern quoted Rainer Maria Rilke: "Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything."Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn

Webern's wife Minna suffered final years of grief, poverty, and loneliness as friends and family continued emigrating. She wished Webern had lived to see more success.Template:Sfn With the abolition of policies, Template:Ill solicited her for hidden manuscripts; thus Opp. 17, 24–25, and 29–31 were published.Template:Sfn She worked to get Webern's 1907 Piano Quintet published via Kurt List.Template:Sfn

In 1947 she wrote Diez, now in the US, that by 1945 Webern was "firmly resolved to go to England".Template:Sfn Likewise, in 1946 she wrote DJ Bach in London: "How difficult the last eight years had been for him. ... [H]e 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."Template:Sfn Minna died in 1949.Template:Sfn

Music

Tell me, can one at all denote thinking and feeling as things entirely separable? I cannot imagine a sublime intellect without the ardor of emotion.

Webern wrote to Schoenberg (June 1910).Template:Sfn Theodor Adorno described Webern as "propound[ing] musical expressionism in its strictest sense, ... to such a point that it reverts of its own weight to a new objectivity".Template:Sfnm

Webern's music was generally concise, organic, and parsimonious,Template:Efn with very small motifs, palindromes, and parameterization on both the micro- and macro-scale.Template:Sfnm His idiosyncratic approach reflected affinities with Schoenberg, Mahler,Template:Efn Guido Adler and early music; interest in esotericism and ; and thorough perfectionism.Template:Efn He engaged with the work of Goethe, Bach,Template:Efn and the Franco-Flemish School in addition to that of Wolf, Brahms,Template:Efn Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Beethoven, Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), and Mozart.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Stylistic shifts were not neatly coterminous with gradually developed technical devices, particularly in the case of his mid-period .Template:Efn

His music was also characteristically linear and song-like.Template:Sfnm Much of it (and Berg'sTemplate:Sfn and Schoenberg's)Template:Sfnm was for singing.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Johnson described the song-like gestures of Op. 11/i.Template:Sfn In Webern's mid-period , some heard instrumentalizing of the voiceTemplate:Sfnm (often in relation to the clarinet)Template:Sfn representing yet some continuity with .Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Lukas Näf described one of Webern's signature hairpins (on the Op. 21/i mm. 8–9 bass clarinet note) as a messa di voce requiring some rubato to execute faithfully.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Adventurous textures and timbres, and melodies of wide leaps and sometimes extreme ranges and registers were typical.Template:Sfnm

For Johnson, Webern's rubato compressed Mahler's "'surging and ebbing'" tempi; this and Webern's dynamics indicated a "vestigial lyrical subjectivity."Template:Sfn Webern often set carefully chosen lyric poetry.Template:Sfn He related his music not only to nostalgia for the lost family and home of his youth, but also to his Alpinism and fascination with plant aromatics and morphology.Template:Sfn He was compared to Mahler in his orchestration and semantic preoccupations (e.g., memory, landscapes, nature, loss, often Catholic mysticism).Template:Sfn In Jone, who he met with her husband Humplik via the , Webern found a lyricist who shared his esoteric, natural, and spiritual interests. She provided texts for his late vocal works.Template:Sfn

Webern's and Schoenberg's music distinctively prioritized minor seconds, major sevenths, and minor ninthsTemplate:Efn as noted in 1934 by microtonalist Alois Hába.Template:Sfn The Kholopov siblings noted the semitone's unifying role by axial inversional symmetry and octave equivalence as interval class 1 (ic1), approaching Allen Forte's generalized pitch-class set analysis.Template:Sfn Webern's consistent use of ic1 in cells and sets, often expressed as a wide interval musically,Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn was well noted.Template:Efn Symmetric pitch-interval practices varied in rigor and use by others (e.g., Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók, Debussy, Stravinsky; more nascently Mahler, Brahms, Bruckner,Template:Efn Liszt, Wagner). Berg and Webern took symmetric approaches to elements of music beyond pitch. Webern later linked pitches and other parameters in schemes (e.g., fixed or "frozen" register).Template:Sfnm

Relatively few of Webern's works were published in his lifetime. Amid fascism and Emil Hertzka's passing, this included late as well as early works (in addition to others without opus numbers). His rediscovery prompted many publications, but some early works were unknown until after the work of the Moldenhauers well into the 1980s,Template:Sfn obscuring formative facets of his musical identity.Template:Sfnm Thus when Boulez first oversaw a project to record Webern's music, the results fit on three CDs and the second time, six.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn An historical edition of his music has remained in progress.

1899–1908: Formative juvenilia and emergence from study

Webern published little juvenilia; like Brahms, he was meticulous and self-conscious, revising extensively.Template:Sfnm His earliest works were mostly Lieder on works of Richard Dehmel, Gustav Falke, and Theodor Storm.Template:Sfn He set seven Ferdinand Avenarius poems on the "changing moods" of life and nature (1899–1904).Template:Sfn Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf were important models. With its brief, potent expressivity and utopianization of the natural world, the (German) Romantic Lied had a lasting influence on Webern's musical aesthetic.Template:Sfn He never abandoned its lyricism, intimacy, and wistful or nostalgic topics, though his music became more abstract, idealized, and introverted.Template:Sfn

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. In Webern's Sommerwind, Derrick Puffett found affinities with Strauss's Alpensinfonie, Charpentier's Louise, and Delius's Paris.

At the Preglhof in summer 1905, Webern wrote his tripartite, single-movement string quartet in a highly modified sonata form, likely responding to Schoenberg's Op. 7.Template:Sfn He quoted Jakob Böhme in the prefaceTemplate:Sfn and mentioned the panelsTemplate:Efn of Segantini's Template:Efn as ""Template:Efn in sketches.Template:Sfnm Sebastian Wedler argued that this quartet bore the influence of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra in its germinal three-note motive, opening fugato of its third (development) section, and Nietzschean reading (via eternal recurrence) of Segantini's triptych.Template:Sfn In its opening harmonies, Allen Forte and Heinz-Klaus Metzger noted Webern's anticipation of Schoenberg's atonality in Op. 10.Template:Sfn

File:Danzig - Friedrich-Wilhelm-Schutzenhaus - Saal. 1906 (70940322).jpg

Danzig's Friedrich-Wilhelm-Template:Ill in a 1906 postcard photograph

In 1906, Schoenberg assigned Webern Bach chorales to harmonize and figure; Webern completed eighteen in a highly chromatic idiom.Template:Sfnm Then the Passacaglia, Op. 1 (1908) was his graduation piece, and the Op. 2 choral canons soon followed. The passacaglia's chromatic harmonic language and less conventional orchestration distinguished it from prior works; its form foreshadowed those of his later works.Template:Sfnm Conducting the 1911 Danzig premiere of Op. 1 at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Template:Ill, he paired it with Debussy's 1894 Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Ludwig Thuille's 1896 Romantische Ouvertüre, and Mahler's 1901–1904 Kindertotenlieder in a poorly attended Template:Efn concert. The Template:Ill critic derided Op. 1 as an "insane experiment".Template:Sfnm

In 1908 Webern also began an opera on Maeterlinck's Template:Ill, of which only unfinished sketches remained,Template:Sfnm and in 1912 he wrote Berg that he had finished one or more scenes for another planned but unrealized opera, Die sieben Prinzessinnen, on Maeterlinck's Template:Ill.Template:Sfnm He had been an opera enthusiast from his student days.Template:Sfn Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande enraptured him twice in Dec. 1908 Berlin and again in 1911 Vienna.Template:Sfn As a vocal coach and opera conductor, he knew the repertoire "perfectly ... every cut, ... unmarked cadenza, and in the comic operas every theatrical joke".Template:Sfn He "adored" Mozart's Il Seraglio and revered Strauss, predicting Salome would last. When in high spirits, Webern would sing bits of Lortzing's Zar und Zimmermann, a personal favorite. He expressed interest (to Max Deutsch) in writing an opera pending a good text and adequate time; in 1930, he asked Jone for "opera texts, or rather dramatic texts", planning cantatas instead.Template:Sfn

1908–1914: Atonality and aphorisms

Webern's music, like Schoenberg's, was freely atonal after Op. 2. Some of their and Berg's music from this time was published in Der Blaue Reiter.Template:Sfn Schoenberg and Webern were so mutually influential, the former later joked, "I haven't the slightest idea who I am".Template:Sfn In Op. 5/iii, Webern borrowed from Schoenberg's Op. 10/ii. In Op. 5/iv, he borrowed from Schoenberg's Op. 10/iv setting of "Ich fühle luft von anderen planeten".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

The first of Webern's innovative and increasingly extremely aphoristic Opp. 5–11 (1909–1914) radically influenced Schoenberg's Opp. 11/iiiTemplate:Efn and 16–17 (and Berg's Opp. 4–5).Template:Sfnm Here, Template:Ill considered, Webern did not seek "the new ... in [music of] the past but in the future".Template:Sfn In writing the Op. 9 bagatelles, Webern reflected in 1932, "I had the feeling that when the twelve notes had all been played the piece was over."Template:Sfn "[H]aving freed music from the shackles of tonality," Schoenberg wrote, he and his pupils believed "music could renounce motivic features".Template:Sfn This "intuitive aesthetic" arguably proved to be aspirational insofar as motives persisted in their music.Template:Sfn

Two enduring topics emerged in Webern's work: familial (especially maternal) loss and memory, often involving some religious experience; and abstracted landscapes idealized as spiritual, even pantheistic, (e.g., the Preglhof, the Eastern Alps).Template:Sfn Webern explored these ideas explicitly in his Symbolist stage play Tot: Sechs Bilder für die Bühne (Dead: Six Scenes for the Stage, Oct. 1913).Template:Sfnm The play comprises six tableaux vivantsTemplate:Efn set in the Alps, over the course of which a mother and father reflect on and come to terms with the loss of their son.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn The script specifies exact lighting, sounds, delivery, and gestures to match mood, time, and place, with birds, bells, and flowers as important elements of a still, holy world.Template:Sfn Webern drew so heavily from Swedenborg's theological doctrine of correspondences, quoting from Vera Christiana Religio at length, that Schoenberg considered the play unoriginal.Template:Sfn

It is known that Webern sublimated these concerns into his music, particularly in the case of his Op. 6.Template:Sfn Confiding in Berg and Schoenberg, Webern told the latter some about the programmatic narrative for that music in Jan. 1913, as Schoenberg prepared to premiere it at what would become the that March:Template:Sfnm

The first piece is to express my frame of mind ... already sensing the disaster, yet ... maintaining the hope that I would find my mother still alive. It was a beautiful day—for a minute I believed ... nothing had happened. Only during the train ride to Carinthia ... did I learn the truth. The third piece conveys ... the fragrance of the , which I gathered ... in the forest ... and ... laid on the bier.Template:Efn The fourth piece I later entitled . Even today I do not understand my feelings as I walked behind the coffin to the cemetery. ... The evening ... was miraculous. With my wife I went ... again to the cemetery ... . I had the feeling of my mother's ... presence.

As Webern's music took on the character of such static dramaticovisual scenes, his pieces frequently culminated in the accumulation and amalgamation (often the developing variation) of compositional material. Fragmented melodies frequently began and ended on weak beats, settled into or emerged from ostinati, and were dynamically and texturally faded, mixed, or contrasted.Template:Sfn Tonality became less directional, functional, or narrative than tenuous, spatial, or symbolic as fit Webern's topics and literary settings. Stein thought that "his compositions should be understood as musical visions".Template:Efn Oliver Korte traced Webern's Template:Efn to Mahler's "suspensions".Template:Efn

Expanding on Mahler's orchestration, Webern linked colorful, novel, fragile, and intimate sounds, often nearly silent at Template:Serif, to lyrical topics: solo violin to female voice; closed or open voicings, sometimes , to dark or light respectively; compressed range to absence, emptiness, or loneliness; registral expansion to fulfillment, (spiritual) presence, or transcendence;Template:Efn celesta, harp, and glockenspiel to the celestial or ethereal; and trumpet, harp, and string harmonics to angels or heaven.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn

With elements of ,Template:Efn neoclassicism,Template:Efn and ironic RomanticismTemplate:Efn in Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21 (1912), Schoenberg beganTemplate:Efn to distance himself from Webern's and latterly Berg's aphoristic expressionism, which provoked the . Alma recalled Schoenberg telling her and Franz Werfel "how much he was suffering under the dangerous influence of Webern", drawing on "all his strength to extricate himself from it".Template:Sfn

1914–1924: Mid-period Lieder

During and after World War I (1914–1926) Webern worked on some fifty-six songs.Template:Sfn He finished thirty-two, ordered into sets (in ways that do not always align with their chronology) as Opp. 12–19.Template:Sfn Schoenberg's recent vocal music had been motivated by the idea that "absolute purity" in composition couldn't be sustained,Template:Sfn and Webern took Schoenberg's advice to write songs as a means of composing something more substantial than aphorisms, often making earnest settings of folk, lyric, or spiritual texts.Template:Sfn The first of these mid-period was an unfinished setting of a passage ("In einer lichten Rose ...") from Dante's Paradiso, Canto XXXI.Template:Sfn

By comparison to melodic "atomization" in Op. 11, Walter Kolneder noted relatively "long arcs" melodic writing in Op. 12Template:Sfn and polyphonic part writing to "control the ... expression" in Opp. 12–16 more generally.Template:Sfn "How much I owe to your Pierrot", Webern told Schoenberg after setting Trakl's "Abendland III" (Op. 14/iv),Template:Sfn in which, distinctly, there was no silence until a pause at the concluding gesture. The contrapuntal procedures and nonstandard ensemble of Pierrot are both evident in Webern's Opp. 14–16.Template:Sfnm

Schoenberg "yearn[ed] for a style for large forms ... to give personal things an objective, general form."Template:Efn Berg, Webern, and he had indulged their shared interest in Swedenborgian mysticism and Theosophy since 1906, reading Balzac's Louis Lambert and Séraphîta and Strindberg's Till Damaskus and Jacob lutte. Gabriel, protagonist of Schoenberg's semi-autobiographical Die Jakobsleiter (1914–1922, rev. 1944)Template:Efn described a journey: "whether right, whether left, forwards or backwards, uphill or down – one must keep on going without asking what lies ahead or behind",Template:Efn which Webern interpreted as a conceptual metaphor for (twelve-tone) pitch space.Template:Sfn Schoenberg later reflected on "how enthusiastic we were about this."Template:Efn

On the journey to composition with twelve tones, Webern revised many of his mid-period in the years after their apparent composition but before publication, increasingly prioritizing clarity of pitch relations, even against timbral effects, as Anne C. ShrefflerTemplate:Sfn and Felix Meyer described. His and Schoenberg's music had long been marked by its contrapuntal rigor, formal schemes, systematic pitch organization, and rich motivic design, all of which they found in the music of Brahms before them.Template:Sfnm Webern had written music preoccupied with the idea of dodecaphony since at least the total chromaticism of his Op. 9 bagatelles (1911).Template:Sfnm and Op. 11 cello pieces (1914).Template:SfnTemplate:Efn He began preparing these aphoristic works for publication while composing most of his mid-period , which may have reoriented him to his own lyricism.Template:Sfnm

There are twelve-tone sets with repeated notes at the start of Op. 12/i and in some bars of Op. 12/iv, in addition to many ten- and eleven-tone sets throughout Op. 12.Template:Sfn Webern wrote to Jalowetz in 1922 about Schoenberg's lectures on "a new type of motivic work", one that "unfolds the entire development of, if I may say so, our technique (harmony, etc.)".Template:Sfn It was "almost everything that has occupied me for about ten years", Webern continued.Template:Sfn He regarded Schoenberg's transformation of twelve-tone rows as the "solution" to their compositional concerns.Template:Sfn In Op. 15/iv (1922), Webern first used a tone row (in the voice's opening twelve notes), charted the four basic row forms, and integrated tri- and tetrachords into the harmonic and melodic texture.Template:Sfn He systematically used twelve-tone technique for the first time in Op. 16/iv–v (1924).Template:Sfn

1924–1945: Formal coherence and expansion

With Schoenberg leaving Mödling in 1925 and this compositional approach at his disposal, Webern obtained more artistic autonomy and aspired to write in larger forms, expanding on the extreme concentration of expression and material in his earlier music.Template:Sfn Until the Kinderstück for piano (1924, intended as one of a set), Klavierstück (1925), and Satz for string trio (1925), Webern had finished nothing but since a 1914 cello sonata.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn The 1926–1927 String Trio, Op. 20, was his first large-scale non-vocal work in more than a decade. For its 1927 publication, Webern helped Stein write an introduction emphasizing continuity with tradition:Template:Sfn

The principle of developing a movement by variation of motives and themes is the same as with the classical masters ... [only] varied more radically here ... . One 'tone series' furnishes the basic material ... . The parts are composed in a mosaic-like manner ...

Schoenberg exploited combinatorial properties of particular tone rows,Template:Sfn but Webern focused on prior aspects of a row's internal organization. He exploited small, invariant pitch subsets (or partitions) symmetrically derived via inversion, retrograde, or both (retrograde inversion). He understood his compositional (and precompositional) work with reference to ideas about growth, morphology, and unity that he found represented in Goethe's Template:Ill and in Goethean science more generally.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn

File:Webern Variations op. 30 tone row.png

File:Webern Variations op. 30 tone row.mid

The tone row from Webern's Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30, has only two intervals (minor seconds and minor thirds) and is derived from two hexachords or three tetrachords, yielding half as many basic tone-row forms and ensuring a unity of chords and motives.Template:Sfn

Webern's large-scale, non-vocal music in more traditional genres,Template:Efn written from 1926 to 1940, has been celebrated as his most rigorous and abstract music.Template:Sfn Yet he always wrote his music and tried his new compositional procedures with concern for (or at least some latent reference to) expressivity and representation.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn In sketches for his Op. 22 quartet, Webern conceived of his themes in programmatic association with his experiences—as an "outlook into the highest region" or a "coolness of early spring (Anninger,Template:Efn first flora, primroses, anemones, pasqueflowers)", for example.Template:Sfnm Studying his compositional materials and sketches, Bailey Puffett wrote,Template:Sfn

... [Webern] seems perhaps not ... a prodigy whose music was the result of reasoned calculations [but a composer] who used his row tables as Stravinsky used his piano, to reveal wonderful surprises ... [like] he found on his walks in the Alps.

While writing the Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, Webern was inspired by the Sator square, which is like a twelve-tone matrix.Template:Sfn He concluded his with this magic square.

In Webern's late cantatas and songs,Template:Efn George Rochberg observed, "the principles of 'the structural spatial dimension' ... join[ed] forces with lyrico-dramatic demands".Template:Sfn Specifically in his cantatas, Bailey Puffett wrote, Webern synthesized the rigorous style of his mature instrumental works with the word painting of his Lieder on an orchestral scale.Template:Sfn Webern qualified the apparent connection between his cantatas and Bach's as general and referred to connections between the second cantata and the music of the Franco-Flemish School.Template:Sfnm His textures became somewhat denser yet more homophonic at the surface through nonetheless contrapuntal polyphonic means.Template:Sfn In Op. 31/i he alternated lines and points, culminating twiceTemplate:Efn in twelve-note simultaneities.Template:Sfn

At his death he left sketches for the movement of an apparent third cantata (1944–1945), first planned as a concerto, setting "Das Sonnenlicht spricht" from Jone's Lumen cycle.Template:Sfn

Arrangements and orchestrations

In his youth (1903), Webern orchestrated five or more Schubert for an appropriately Schubertian orchestra (strings and pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns). Among these were "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".Template:Sfn

After attending Hugo Wolf's funeral and memorial concert (1903), he arranged three for a larger orchestra, adding brass, harp, and percussion to the Schubertian orchestra. He chose "Lebe wohl", "Der Knabe und das Immlein", and "Denk es, o Seele", of which only the latter was finished or wholly survived.Template:Sfn

For Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1921, Webern arranged, among other music,Template:Sfn 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 Liszt's Arbeiterchor (Workers' Chorus, c. 1847–1848)Template:Sfn for bass solo, mixed chorus, and large orchestra; thus Liszt's work was finally premièredTemplate:Efn when Webern conducted the first full-length concert of the Austrian Association of Workers Choir (13 and 14 March 1925). A review in the 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").Template:Sfn The text (in English translation) read 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."

In orchestrating the six-voice ricercar from Bach's Musical Offering, Webern timbrally defined the internal organization (or latent subsets) of the Bach's subject.Template:Sfnm Joseph N. Straus argued that Webern (and other modernists) effectively recomposed earlier music, "projecting motivic density" onto tradition.Template:Sfn After more conservatively orchestrating two of Schubert's 1824 Six German Dances on UE commission in 1931, he wrote Schoenberg:

I took pains to remain on the solid ground of classical ideas of instrumentation, yet to place them into the service of our idea, i.e., as a means toward the greatest possible clarification of thought and context.Template:Efn

Reception, influence, and legacy

Webern's music was generally considered difficult by performers and inaccessible by listeners alike.Template:Sfnm "To the limited extent that it was regarded", Milton Babbitt observed, it represented "the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition".Template:Sfn

Composers and performers first tended to take Webern's work, with its residual post-Romanticism and initial expressionism, in mostly formalist directions with a certain literalism, departing from Webern's own practices and preferences in extrapolating from elements of his late style. This became known as post-Webernism.Template:Sfn A richer, more historically informed understanding of Webern's music and his performance practice began to emerge in the latter half of the 20th century as scholars, especially the Moldenhauers, sought and archived sketches, letters, lectures, recordings, and other articles of Webern's (and others') estates.Template:Efn

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Webern's marginalization under Gleichschaltung was appreciated, but his pan-Germanism, politics, and social attitudes (especially regarding antisemitism) were not as known or often mooted.Template:Sfnm For many, like Stravinsky, Webern never compromised his artistic identity and values, but for others the matter was less simple.Template:Efn

Performance practice

Eric Simon ... related ... : 'Webern was obviously upset by Klemperer's sober time-beating. ... [T]o the concert master [he] said: "... the phrase there ... must be played Tiiiiiiiiiii-aaaaaaaaa." Klemperer, overhearing ... said sarcastically: "... [N]ow you probably know exactly how you have to play the passage!"' Peter Stadlen ... [described Webern]'s reaction after the performance: ... '"A high note, a low note, a note in the middle—like the music of a madman!"'

The Moldenhauers detailed Webern's reaction to Otto Klemperer's 1936 Vienna performance of his Symphony (1928), Op. 21, which Webern played on piano for Klemperer "with ... intensity and fanaticism ... passionately".Template:Sfn

Webern notated articulations, dynamics, , and other musical expressions, coaching performers to adhere to these instructions but urging them to maximize expressivity through musical phrasing.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn This was supported by personal accounts, letters, and extant recordings of Schubert's Deutsche Tänze (arr. Webern) and Berg's Violin Concerto under Webern's direction. Ian Pace considered Peter Stadlen's account of Webern's coaching for Op. 27 as indicating Webern's "desire for an extremely flexible, highly diaphanous, and almost expressively overloaded approach".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

This aspect of Webern's work was often overlooked in his immediate post-war reception,Template:Sfnm which was roughly coterminous with the early music revival. Stravinsky engaged with Webern and Renaissance music in his later music; his amanuensis Craft performed Webern as well as Monteverdi, Schütz, Gabrieli, and Tallis.Template:Sfn Many musicians performed "music that is at the same time old and new", as Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople glossed it and as Richard Taruskin addressed. J. Peter Burkholder noted early and new music audience overlap.Template:Sfn

Felix Galimir of the Galimir Quartet told The New York Times (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."

Contemporaries

Artists

Many artists portrayed Webern (often from life) in their work. Kokoschka (1912), Schiele (1917 and 1918), Template:Ill (1920 and 1924), and Rederer (1934) made drawings of him. Oppenheimer (1908), Kokoschka (1914), and Template:Ill (1934) painted him. Stumpp made two lithographs of him (1927). Humplik twice sculpted him (1927 and 1928). Jone variously portrayed him (1943 lithograph, several posthumous drawings, 1945 oil painting). Rederer made a large woodcut of him (1964).Template:Sfn

Musicians

Schoenberg admired Webern's concision, writing in the foreword to Op. 9 upon its 1924 publication: "to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath—such concentration can only be present in proportion to the absence of self-indulgence".Template:Sfn But Berg joked about Webern's brevity. Hendrik Andriessen found Webern's music "pitiful" in this regard.Template:Sfn In their second (1925) AbbruchTemplate:Efn self-parody, Template:IllTemplate:Efn editors jested that "Webern's" (Mahler's) "extensive" Symphony of a Thousand had to be abbreviated.Template:Efn

Felix Khuner remembered Webern was "just as revolutionary" as Schoenberg.Template:Sfn In 1927, Hans Mersmann wrote that "Webern's music shows the frontiers and ... limits of a development which tried to outgrow Schoenberg's work."Template:Sfn

Identifying with Webern as a "solitary soul" amid 1940s wartime fascism,Template:Sfn Dallapiccola independently and somewhat singularlyTemplate:Efn found inspiration especially in Webern's lesser-known mid-period Lieder, blending its ethereal qualities and Viennese expressionism with .Template:Sfn Stunned by Webern's Op. 24 at its 1935 ISCM festival world première under Jalowetz in Prague, Dallapiccola's impression was of unsurpassable "aesthetic and stylistic unity".Template:Sfn He dedicated Sex carmina alcaeiTemplate:Efn "with humility and devotion" to Webern, who he met in 1942 through Schlee, coming away surprised at Webern's emphasis on "our great Central European tradition."Template:Sfn Dallapiccola's 1953 Goethe-lieder especially recall Webern's Op. 16 in style.Template:Sfn

In 1947, Schoenberg remembered and stood firm with Berg and Webern despite rumors of the latter's having "fallen into the Nazi trap":Template:Efn "... [F]orget all that might have ... 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 ... 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."Template:Efn For Krasner this put "'Vienna's Three Modern Classicists' into historical perspective". He summarized it as "what bound us together was our idealism."Template:Sfn

1947–1950s: (Re)discovery and post-Webernism

Webern's death should be a day of mourning for any receptive musician. We must hail ... this great ... a real hero. Doomed to ... failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference he ... kept on cutting ... dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had ... perfect knowledge.

Stravinsky lauded Webern in die ReiheTemplate:SfnmTemplate:Efn

After World War II, there was unprecedented engagement with Webern's music. It came to represent a universally or generally valid, systematic, and compellingly logical model of new composition, especially at the .Template:Sfnm René Leibowitz performed, promulgated, and published Schoenberg et son école;Template:Sfn Adorno,Template:Sfn Herbert Eimert, Scherchen,Template:Sfn and others contributed. Composers and studentsTemplate:Efn listened in a quasi-religious trance to Peter Stadlen's 1948 Op. 27 performance.Template:Sfn

Webern's gradual innovations in schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and melodic contour; his generalization of imitative techniques such as canon and fugue; and his inclination toward athematicism, abstraction, and lyricism variously informed and oriented European and Canadian, typically serial or avant-garde composers (e.g., Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Pousseur, Ligeti, Sylvano Bussotti, Bruno Maderna, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Barbara Pentland).Template:Sfn Eimert and Stockhausen devoted a special issue of die Reihe to Webern's in 1955. UE published his lectures in 1960.Template:Sfn

In the US, BabbittTemplate:Sfn and initially RochbergTemplate:Sfnm found more in Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice. Elliott Carter's and Aaron Copland's critical ambivalence was marked by a certain enthusiasm and fascination nonetheless.Template:Sfn Craft fruitfully reintroduced Stravinsky to Webern's music, without which Stravinsky's late works would have taken different shape. Stravinsky staked his contract with Columbia Records to see Webern's then known music first both recorded and widely distributed.Template:Sfnm Stravinsky lauded Webern's "not yet canonized art" in 1959.Template:Sfn

Among the New York School, John Cage and Morton Feldman first met in Carnegie Hall's lobby, ecstatic after a performance of Op. 21 by Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic. They cited the effect of its sound on their music.Template:Sfn They later sung the praises of Christian Wolff as "our Webern".

Gottfried Michael Koenig suggested some early interest in Webern's music may have been that its concision and apparent simplicity facilitated didactic musical analysis. Template:Interlanguage link criticized serial approaches to Webern's music as reductive, narrowly focused more on Webern's procedures than his music while neglecting timbre in their typical selection of Opp. 27–28.Template:Sfn Webern's music sounded like "a Mondrian canvas", "crude and unfinished", to Karel Goeyvaerts.Template:Sfnm Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski criticized some Darmstadt music as "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing" (Template:Ill, 1959); a Der Kurier article of his was headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at".Template:Sfn

1950s onward: Beyond (late) Webern

[H]ermetic constructivism seems infused with intense emotion, ... diffused across the ... surface of the music. Gone is the mono-directional thrust of Classical and Romantic music; in its place a world of rotations and reflections, opening myriad paths for the listener to trace through textures of luminous clarity yet beguiling ambiguity.

George Benjamin described Webern's Op. 21.Template:Sfn ManyTemplate:Efn noted floating, spatial, static, or suspended qualities in some of Webern's music. Johnson noted spatial metaphors.Template:Sfn

Through late 1950s onward, Webern's work reached musicians as far removed as Frank Zappa,Template:Sfn yet many post-war European musicians and scholars had already begun to look beyondTemplate:Sfn as much as back at Webern in his context. Nono advocated for a more humanistic understanding of Webern's music.Template:Sfn

Adorno lectured that in the prevailing climate "artists like Berg or Webern would hardly be able to make it" ("The Aging of the New Music", 1954). Against the "static idea of music" and "total rationalization" of the "pointillist constructivists," he advocated for more subjectivity, citing Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1911), in which Wassily Kandinsky wrote: "Schoenberg's [expressionist] music leads us to where musical experience is a matter not of the ear, but of the soul—and from this point begins the music of the future."

In the 1960s, many began to describe Webern and his like as a "dead end".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Rochberg felt "Webern's music leaves his followers no new, unexplored territory."Template:Sfn Stravinsky judged Webern "too original ... too purely himself. ... [T]he entire world had to imitate him [and] fail; of course it will blame Webern"; he blamed post-Webernism: "[T]he music now being charged to his name can neither diminish his strength nor stale his perfection."Template:Sfn

In Votre Faust (1960–1968), Pousseur quoted and his protagonist Henri analyzed Webern's Op. 31. Yet there were already several elements of late or postmodernism (e.g., eclecticism of historical styles, mobile form, polyvalent roles).Template:Sfn This coincided with a wider rapprochement with Berg,Template:Sfnm whose example Pousseur cited,Template:Sfnm from whose music he also quoted, and whose writings he translated into French in the 1950s.Template:Sfnm Boulez was "thrilled" by Berg's "universe ... never completed, always in expansion—a world so ... inexhaustible," referring to the rigorously organized, only partly twelve-tone Chamber Concerto.Template:Efn

Engaging with Webern's atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism, both Ferneyhough and Lachenmann expanded upon and went further than Webern in attention to the smallest of details and the use of ever more radically extended techniques. Ferneyhough's 1967 Sonatas for string quartet included atonal sections much in the style of Webern's Op. 9, yet more intensely sustained. In a comparison to his own 1969 Air, Lachenmann wrote of "a melody made of a single note ... in the viola part" of Webern's Op. 10/iv (mm. 2–4) amid "the mere ruins of the traditional linguistic context," observing that "the pure tone, now living in tonal exile, has in this new context no aesthetic advantage over pure noise" ("Hearing [Hören] is Defenseless—without Listening [Hören]", 1985).

Eastern Europe

In Eastern Europe, the Second Viennese School's music represented a professionally dangerous but sometimes exciting or inspiring alternative to socialist realism. Their influence on composers behind the Iron Curtain was mediated by anti-fascist and -German sentimentTemplate:Sfn as well as anti-formalist cultural policiesTemplate:Sfn and Cold War separation.Template:Efn Ligeti lamented the separation and left in 1956, noting that "after Bartók hardly any grass could grow".Template:Sfn

Eastern Bloc

Webern's influence predominated after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, bearing on Pál Kadosa, Endre Szervánszky, and György Kurtág.Template:Sfnm Among Czechs, Template:Ill attended the and wrote music with serial techniques in the late 1960s. He returned to tonality in Brno and was rewarded.Template:Sfn Marek Kopelent discovered the Second Viennese as an editor and was particularly taken by Webern.Template:Sfn Kopelent was blacklisted for his music and despaired, unable to attend international performances of his work.Template:Sfn

Soviet Russia

Official Soviet Russian condemnation eased in the post-Stalinist Khrushchev Thaw with the rehabilitation of some affected by the Zhdanov Doctrine. Sheet music and recordings entered via journalists, friends, family (e.g., from Nicolas to Sergei Slonimsky), and especially composers and musicians (e.g., Template:Ill, Gérard Frémy, Alexei Lubimov, Maria Yudina), who traveled more.Template:Sfn Stationed in Zossen as a military band arranger (1955–1958), Yuri Kholopov risked arrest for obtaining scores in West Berlin and from the Leipzig office of Schott Music.Template:Sfn

Philip Herschkowitz, poverty-stricken, taught privately in Moscow with cautious emphasis on Beethoven and the tradition from which Webern emerged.Template:Sfnm His pupil Nikolai Karetnikov taped Glenn Gould's 1957 Moscow Conservatory performance of Webern's Op. 27.Template:Sfn In practice like that of Webern, Karetnikov derived the tone row of his Symphony No. 4 from motives as small as two notes related by semitone.Template:Sfn

In Soviet Music, Marcel Rubin criticized "Webern and His Followers" (1959), by contrast to Berg and Schoenberg, for going too far.Template:Sfn Alfred Schnittke complained in an open letter (1961) of composers' restricted education.Template:Sfn Through Grigory Shneyerson's anti-formalist On Music Living and Dead (1960) and Johannes Paul Thilman's anti-modernist "On the Dodecaphonic Method of Composition" (1958), many (e.g., Eduard Artemyev, Victor Ekimovsky, Vladimir Martynov, Boris TischenkoTemplate:Efn) ironically learned more about what had been and even was still forbidden.Template:Sfn Kruschchev warned, "dodecaphonic music, music of noises ... this cacophonic music we totally reject. Our people cannot include such trash".Template:Sfn

Through Andrei Volkonsky, Lydia Davydova recalled, Schoenberg's and Webern's music came to Russia alongside Renaissance and early Baroque music.Template:Sfn Tischenko remembered that in the 1960s, Volkonsky "was the first swallow of the avant-garde. [T]hose who came after him ... already followed in his tracks. I consider [him] the discoverer."Template:Sfn Edison Denisov described the 1960s as his "second conservatory", crediting Volkonsky not only for introducing Webern, but also Gesualdo.Template:Sfn

This tolerance did not survive the Brezhnev Stagnation.Template:Sfn Volkonsky emigrated in 1973, Herschkowitz in 1987, and of Khrennikov's Seven (1979), Denisov, Elena Firsova, Sofia Gubaidulina, Dmitri Smirnov, and Viktor Suslin eventually emigrated.Template:Sfn

Dance

Many choreographers set Webern's music to dance. Martha Graham and George Balanchine choreographed several works in Episodes I and II respectively (1959) as a New York City Ballet "novelty".Template:Sfn John Cranko set Opus 1 (1965) to Webern's Passacaglia, Op. 1. Rudi van Dantzig choreographed Webern's music in OgenblikkenTemplate:Efn (1968) and Antwoord gevendTemplate:Efn (1980); Glen Tetley in Praeludium (1978) and Contredanses (1979);Template:Sfn Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker alongside that of Beethoven and Schnittke in Erts (1992);Template:Sfn and Trisha Brown in Twelve Ton Rose (1996).Template:Sfn Jiří Kylián set only Webern's music in No More Play (1988) and Sweet Dreams (1990), more often pairing it with that of other composers in several ballets (1984–1995).Template:Sfn

Since the 1980s: Reappraisals and historiography

Contested canonization

Webern's legacy, contested in the "serial wars",Template:Efn remained subject to polemic vicissitudes. Musicologists quarreledTemplate:SfnTemplate:Efn amid the "Restoration of the 1980s", as Martin Kaltenecker termed a paradigm shift from structure to perception within musicological discourse.Template:Efn Charles Rosen scorned "historical criticism ... avoiding any serious engagement with a work or style ... one happens not to like".Template:Sfn Andreas Holzer warned of "post-factual tendencies".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Pamela M. Potter advised considering "the complexity of ... day-to-day existence" under Nazism, partly in considering the relevance of composers' politics to their canonic status.Template:Sfn Meanwhile Allen Forte and Bailey Puffett formally analyzed Webern's atonal and twelve-tone respectively.

Tim Page noted less formalist readings of Webern's work at his 1983 birth centenary. The occasion "went almost unmarked", Glenn Watkins observed in the United States, "a fate hardly imaginable for Berg [on his] 1985 [centenary]". After Webern's mid-century "meteoric ascension and ultimate canonization",Template:Sfn Watkins described "quick shifts of interest" tapering to neglect.Template:Sfn Webern's music was established but infrequent in standard (repeating) orchestral repertoire.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn His was played at the Venice Festival of Contemporary Music (1983),Template:Sfn Juilliard (1995), and the Vienna Festival (2004), echoing six international festivals in his name (1962–1978).Template:Efn In some obscurity (1941 or 1942), Webern had been quietly sure that "in the future even the postman will whistle my melodies!"Template:Sfn But many did not acquire such an aesthetic taste.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn He remained polarizing and provocative.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn

Noting this aspect of his reception, Johnson described Webern's "almost unique position in the canon of Western composers".Template:Sfn Christian Thorau argued Webern's innovations impeded his "".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn By contrast to the "concert canon", Shreffler considered Webern's better standing in a "separate canon" of technical and formal innovation.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Burkholder argued that music of the "historicist tradition",Template:Efn including Webern's, was secure in "a musical museum", "for that is what the concert hall has become".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Mark Berry described Webern, already among Boulez's "big five", as one of five "canonical pillars of classic historical early twentieth-century modernism".Template:Efn David H. Miller suggested Webern "achieved a certain kind of acceptance and canonization".Template:Sfn

Taruskin prioritized audience reception, not "musical utopianism".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn He excoriated the Second Viennese School's "idiosyncratic view of the past", linking Webern and Adler to Eduard Hanslick and "neo-Hegelian" Franz Brendel;Template:SfnTemplate:Efn he criticized historical determinism, "the natural ally of totalitarian politics."Template:Sfnm Martin Scherzinger noted that Taruskin's criticisms sought "active complicity with undesirable politics".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Noted for his polemicism and revisionism,Template:Efn Taruskin described his "dubious reputation" on Webern and New MusicTemplate:Sfnm and was praised and criticizedTemplate:Efn by many. For Franklin Cox, Taruskin was an unreliable historian who opposed the Second Viennese School's "progressivist historicist" emancipation of the dissonance with a "reactionary historicist" ideology of "tonal restoration".Template:Sfn

Historical–conceptual continuities

Pascal Decroupet observed an unquestioned "canon of polarizations" in prior histories.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Johnson noted the "co-existence and interaction of diverse stylistic practices" with "remarkable similarities", challenging "conservative and progressive" campismTemplate:Sfn and decentering musicology's technical periodizationsTemplate:Sfn via the of global modernity.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Thus he ventured continuityTemplate:Sfn between the "broken homeland" of Webern's Opp. 12–18 and the "broken pastoral" of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony;Template:SfnTemplate:Efn between Webern's "evanescent images of musical fullness"Template:Sfn and the brief, fragmentary nature of Chopin's Op. 28, which Schumann likened to "ruins".Template:Sfn

Building on Shreffler's and Felix Meyer's work, including sketch studies, as institutions like the Template:Ill acquired and made the Moldenhauers' estate accessible,Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Johnson noted Webern's concern for the relation between form and content,Template:SfnTemplate:Efn and pursued a hermeneutics of Webern's (and Mahler's) music.Template:Sfnm (He argued that Webern, following Mahler, fundamentally treated nature not merely as something to express or to represent musically, but as a deeper formal principle or structural model, yielding inseparably richer musical expression.)Template:Sfn

Wedler argued by antinomy and demythologization that the complex, seemingly contradictory reception of Webern and his music stemmed from this unity of opposites imaginatively mediated within Webern's underlying aesthetic of musical lyricism (or musical poetry, as Schoenberg called it). Adorno termed it "absolute lyricism", perhaps (Wedler suggested) after Hegel, who saw concentration as the lyric's essence, permitting "the greatest wealth of steps and nuances" to dialectically resolve the dilemma between "almost dumb conciseness" and "the eloquent clarity of a [fully developed] idea".Template:Sfn

Recordings by Webern

• • Webern conducts his arrangement of Schubert's German Dances

See also

• List of Austrians in music

References

Bibliography

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Further reading

• Ahrend, Thomas, and Matthias Schmidt (eds.). 2015. Der junge Webern. Texte und Kontexte Template:Webarchive. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 2b. Wien: Lafite. Template:ISBN.
• Ahrend, Thomas, and Matthias Schmidt (eds.). 2016. Webern-Philologien Template:Webarchive. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 3. Wien: Lafite. Template:ISBN.
• Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Modern European Philosophy Series, gen. ed. Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Template:ISBN (ebk). Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Cacciari, Massimo. 1996. Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, trans. Rodger Friedman. Crossing Aesthetics Series, eds. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk). Template:ISBN (pbk). (Translation of Dallo Steinhof, 1980, Milano: Adelphi.)
• Cavallotti, Pietro, and Simon Obert, and Rainer Schmusch (eds.). 2019. Neue Perspektiven. Anton Webern und das Komponieren im 20. Jahrhundert Template:Webarchive. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 4. Wien: Lafite. Template:ISBN.
• Cook, Nicholas. 2013. Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Template:ISBN (ebk).
• Distler, Jed. 2000. "Complete Webern". Classics Today, Music Reviews Digest (9 Sept. 2000, web site accessed 19 Jan. 2023).
• Ewen, David. 1971. "Anton Webern (1883–1945)". Composers of Tomorrow's Music, by David Ewen, 66–77. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. Template:ISBN.
• Forte, Allen. 1998. The Atonal Music of Anton Webern. New Haven: Yale University Press. Template:ISBN
• Galliari, Alain. 2007. "Anton von Webern". Paris: Fayard. Template:ISBN.
• Kennicott, Philip. 2000. "Webern's Atonal Recall: Boulez Sets Record Straight on Composer". 11 June 2000. The Washington Post (web site accessed 19 Jan. 2023).
• Krellman, Hanspeter. 1975. Anton Webern in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Rowohlts Monographien, gen. ed. Kurt Kusenberg. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag. Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Kröpfl, Monika, and Simon Obert (eds.). 2015. Der junge Webern. Künstlerische Orientierungen in Wien nach 1900 Template:Webarchive. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 2a. Wien: Lafite. Template:ISBN.
• McClary, Susan. Spring 1989. "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition". Cultural Critique ("Discursive Strategies and the Economy of Prestige"). 12:57–81.
• McFarland, Rob, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner (eds.). 2020. The Red Vienna Sourcebook. Vol. 204, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Template:ISBN (ebk). Template:ISBN (hbk). Template:ISBN (pbk). . (Translation of Das Rote Wien: Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne, 1919–1934, 2020, Berlin: De Gruyter. Template:ISBN (hbk).)
• Mead, Andrew. 1993. "Webern, Tradition, and 'Composing with Twelve Tones'". Music Theory Spectrum 15(2):173–204.
• Moldenhauer, Hans. 1966. Anton von Webern Perspectives. Ed. Demar Irvine, with an introductory interview of Igor Stravinsky. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
• Noller, Joachim. 1990. "Bedeutungsstrukturen: zu Anton Weberns 'alpinen' Programmen". Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 151(9):12–18.
• Obert, Simon (ed.). 2012. Wechselnde Erscheinung. Sechs Perspektiven auf Anton Weberns sechste Bagatelle Template:Webarchive. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 1. Wien: Lafite. Template:ISBN.
• 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.
• Pousseur, Henri. 1964. "Music, Form and Practice (an Attempt to Reconcile Some Contradictions)". Trans. Margaret Shenfield. Die Reihe 6 (English ed. 1964, German ed. 1960):77–93. Reprint from original in Revue belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 13 (1959).
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• Tsang, Lee. 2002. "The Atonal Music of Anton Webern (1998) by Allen Forte". Music Analysis 21(3): 417–427.
• Taruskin, Richard. 2009. Music in the Nineteenth Century. The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 3. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Template:ISBN.
• Wildgans, Friedrich. 1966. Anton Webern. Trans. Edith Temple Roberts and Humphrey Searle. Intro. and notes by Humphrey Searle. New York: October House.

External links

• Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe Template:Webarchive (Complete Edition)
• 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 & list of works (in English and French)