Anton Webern

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

Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (German: [ˈantoːn ˈveːbɐn] ^ⓘ), was an Austrian composer and conductor. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its stark concision and steadfast embrace and application of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques in an increasingly rigorous manner, somewhat after the Franco-Flemish School of his studies under Guido Adler. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School. He was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in a style lauded for its aphoristic, expressionist potency, a reflection of his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his process as a composer.

Webern was little known in his early career except as a peripatetic, demanding theater music director and a Schoenbergian. He came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher in Red Vienna. With a publication agreement through Emil Hertzka's Universal Edition and Schoenberg away at the Prussian Academy of Arts, Webern began writing music of increasing confidence, independence, and scale in the latter half of the 1920s, his mature chamber and orchestral works which—initially more than his earlier expressionist works—significantly influenced later composers. Ostracized from musical life at home as a "cultural Bolshevist", he remained committed to taking the "path to the new music".

Posthumously Webern's work was celebrated, yet intimate understanding was fledgling after years of severe disruption during which it was variously neglected, opposed, or suppressed, nor was its full context widely appreciated. Composers and performers first tended to take his 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 while extrapolating from elements of his late style in particular. A richer and more historically informed understanding of Webern and his music began to emerge in the latter half of the 20th century in the work of Kathryn Bailey Puffett, Nicholas Cook, Allen Forte, Julian Johnson, Felix Meyer, and Anne Shreffler as they and other scholars, most importantly Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, gained access to sketches, letters, lectures, recordings, and other articles of Webern's and others' estates.

Biography

1883–1918: Youth, education, and war in Austria-Hungary

• (left) Schloss Preglhof, Webern's childhood home, in Oberdorf
• (middle) A brick barn in a field of wildflowers on the Preglhof estate
• (right) Family grave at the cemetery in Schwabegg, on a meander spur of the Drava

Webern was born in Vienna, then in Austria-Hungary. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a descendent of minor nobility, high-ranking civil servant, mining engineer, and owner of the Lamprechtsberg copper mine in the Koralpe; and Amalie (née Geer), a competent pianist, accomplished singer, and possibly the only obvious source of the future composer's talent.

He lived in Graz and Klagenfurt for much of his youth. But his distinct and lasting sense of Heimat was shaped by readings of Peter Rosegger; and moreover by frequent and extended retreats with his parents, sisters, and cousins to his family's country estate, the Preglhof, which Webern's father had inherited upon the death of Webern's grandfather in 1889. Webern memorialized the Preglhof in a diary poem "An der Preglhof" and in the tone poem Im Sommerwind (1904), both after Bruno Wille's idyll. Once Webern's father sold the estate in 1912, Webern referred to it nostalgically as a "lost paradise". He continued to revisit the Preglhof, the family grave at the cemetery in Schwabegg, and the surrounding landscape for the rest of his life, taking it as his home and associating it with the memory of his mother, whose loss in 1906 profoundly affected him for decades.

After a summer trip to Bayreuth, Webern studied musicology at the University of Vienna (1902–1906) with Guido Adler, a composition student of Anton Bruckner and devoted Wagnerian who had been in contact with both Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. He learned the historical development of musical style and technique, writing his doctoral thesis on the Choralis Constantinus of Heinrich Isaac.

Webern also studied art history and philosophy under professors Max Dvořák, Laurenz Müllner, and Franz Wickhoff. His cousin Ernst Dietz, an art historian studying in Graz, may have introduced him to the work of the artists Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, whom he came to admire; he also enjoyed the work of Ferdinand Hodler and Moritz von Schwind. Segantini's 1898–1899 Trittico della natura, which Webern likely encountered in reproduction, partly inspired his 1905 single-movement string quartet, with its three sections corresponding to the three panels referenced in the preface as "Werden–Sein–Vergehen." In 1903, Webern joined the Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft.

Webern, 1912

Young Webern was enthusiastic about the music of Beethoven, Liszt, Mozart, Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), Hugo Wolf, and Wagner. He also enjoyed the music of Berlioz and Bizet. In 1903, besides describing some of Scriabin's music as "languishing junk," Webern wrote of Schumann's Symphony No. 4 that it was "boring," that Weber's Konzertstück in F minor was passé, and that he found Brahms's Symphony No. 3 (which struck Eduard Hanslick as "artistically the most nearly perfect") "cold and without particular inspiration, ... badly orchestrated—grey on grey." Writing about an all-Russian concert program, Webern praised one of Alexander Glazunov's symphonies as "not particularly Russian" in contrast to some of Rimsky-Korsakov's music, of which he thought less.

In 1904, he approached Hans Pfitzner for composition lessons but left angrily after hearing criticism of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. It may have been on Guido Adler's advice that he paid Schoenberg for composition lessons, as Adler was friends with Mahler and admired the work of Schoenberg. Webern progressed quickly under Schoenberg's tutelage, publishing his Passacaglia, Op. 1, as his graduation piece in 1908, and met Berg, then another of Schoenberg's pupils. The three became devoted, lifelong friends and shared similar musical trajectories.

With Alexander Zemlinsky's help especially, Webern later began working as a conductor and musical coach in various towns and cities, among them Ischl, Teplitz, Danzig, Stettin, and Prague. Having written rapturously to Schoenberg about Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande in 1908, he conducted Debussy's music in 1911. But he was unhappy and returned to Mödling to be near Schoenberg, despite Schoenberg's and his own father's advice that he not leave his theater post in Prague. In 1912, he suffered a breakdown and undertook a course of psychoanalysis with Alfred Adler into 1913, who noted his idealism and perfectionism in evaluating his symptoms as psychogenic responses to failure, resistance, or unfulfilled expectations, a diagnosis that Webern accepted, found insightful, and shared with Schoenberg.

1918–1933: Rise in Rotes Wien (Interwar Vienna)

Webern, 1927, portrait by Georg Fayer

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

After the Society's dissolution amid catastrophic hyperinflation in 1921, Webern obtained work as director of the Wiener Schubertbund and in 1922 of the mixed-voice amateur Singverein der Sozialdemokratischen Kunstelle and the Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte through DJ Bach, Director of the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle, with Österreichischer Rundfunk airing his performances at least twenty times starting in 1927. In 1926, Webern resigned as chorusmaster of the Mödling Männergesang-Verein, a paid position, in controversy over his hiring of a Jewish singer, Greta Wilheim, as a substitute for one who was sick.

Relations between Austria's Social Democrats and Social Christians grew less stable, and the Schattendorfer Urteil marked a radical turn. Webern and others signed an "Announcement of Intellectual Vienna" published on the front page of the Social Democrats' daily Arbeiter-Zeitung days before the 1927 Austrian legislative election. On Election Day in Die Reichspost, Ignaz Seipel of the Einheitsliste first applied in a major publication the term "Red Vienna" pejoratively, attacking Vienna's educational and cultural institutions. Social unrest escalated to the July Revolt of 1927.

Webern's music was performed more widely beginning in the latter half of 1920s, yet he found no great success such as Berg enjoyed with Wozzeck nor even as Schoenberg did, to a lesser extent, with Pierrot lunaire or in time with Verklärte Nacht. His Symphony, Op. 21, was performed in New York through the League of Composers in 1929 and again in Oxford at the ninth festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). In 1931 he was awarded the Preis der Stadt Wien für Musik.

In 1933 he engaged Erich Leinsdorf as rehearsal and solo pianist for the Singverein, who later reflected on the experience as of "utmost value to my musical and critical development". Together they performed Stravinsky's Les Noces, of which the popevki-like 3-7A cell and its 4–10 variant are not altogether unlike the rhythmized trichords of Op. 24 or the tetrachords of Op. 30 (which Stravinsky later admired), apart from Stravinsky's tendency to anhemitony in marked contrast to Webern's hemitonicism.

Though 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" (1928), an observation aligning with that of critics and historians of modernism more generally, they became increasingly marginalized and ostracized in Central Europe with few exceptions. Writing before his suicide in 1942, Stefan Zweig reflected, "the short decade between 1924 and 1933, from the end of German inflation to Hitler's seizure of power, represents—in spite of all—an intermission in the catastrophic sequence of events whose witnesses and victims our generation has been since 1914."

1933–1938: Perseverance in Schwarzes Wien (Austrofascist Vienna)

From 1928 onward, Webern grew closer to Ernst Krenek, alongside whom he lectured, whose music (taking a twelve-tone turn) he conducted, and with whom he, Berg, and Adorno shared concerns about the future. In Der Weg zur Neuen Musik (1932–1933) Webern attacked fascist cultural policy, asking "What will come of our struggle?", observing that "'cultural Bolshevism' is the name given to everything that is going on around Schoenberg, Berg, and myself (Krenek too)", and warning "Imagine what will be destroyed, wiped out, by this hate of culture!" He served as President (1933–1938, 1945) of the IGNM-Sektion Österreich. Inspired by Krenek's essay "Freiheit und Verantwortung", Webern wrote him affirming that "art has its own laws and that, if one wants to achieve something in it, only these laws and nothing else can have validity."

As a conductor ... he allied himself to the Social-Democrats. But, being utterly ignorant of politics, he was a ready prey to the personal influence of family and friends. He lived in a state of perpetual confusion ... . Soon he abandoned his first allegiance in favor of more nationalist ideas [which] may have saved him from the concentration camp but ... his musical principles are attacked as ‘Jewish’ and Bolshevist.”

Kurt List, conductor and student of Berg and Webern, in Modern Music (Nov.–Dec. 1943)

Financial crises, complex social and political movements, rife anti-Semitism, culture wars, and military conflicts continued to shape Webern's life, profoundly circumscribing his final years. With their party outlawed in the Austrian Civil War and some members held or executed by the Austrofascists, some Social Democrats supported a German-Austrian Anschluss premised on nationalism, Realpolitik, and self-determination continuous with the Grossdeutsche Lösung, the Provisional National Assembly's unanimous support (1918) and the Linzer Programm (1926-1933). Webern lost a promising conducting career, which might have been better recorded, in the abolition of Social Democratic cultural institutions; his music, along with that of Berg, Krenek, Schoenberg, and others, was deemed "Jewish" in Austria and was proscribed as Entartete Kunst by the Nazi Party in Germany. He worked as an editor and proofreader for his publishers, UE. Peter Stadlen's 1937 premières of Op. 27 were the last Vienna performances of Webern's music until after World War II.

Webern's attitude towards National Socialism has been variously described. Published accounts and letters are perspectival and varied, reflecting Webern's own vacillations or ambivalence given the different contexts in which or the audiences to whom his thoughts were expressed. Literature has often reflected limited evidence, musicological polemics, or broader ideological orientations and has commonly admitted at least some uncertainty. Musicologist Julie Brown, noting a general hesitancy to approach the topic, echoed the Moldenhauers in considering the issue "vexed" and Webern a "political enigma". Bailey Puffett described his politics as "somewhat vague", considering that his situation was "complex" and that he more or less practically avoided definitive political association. Johnson described him as "personally shy, a man of private feeling and essentially apolitical", "as much prone to identify with Nazi politics as so many other middle-class Austrians of his generation". Many differences were represented in his friends, family, and colleagues, among whom Webern found himself mediating, from Austrian National Socialists within his family and supporters among friends to the Zionist Schoenberg, the left-leaning Berg, and others of their Social Democratic milieu in previously "red" Vienna. Increasingly, he was surrounded by the former: Schoenberg emigrated to the US in 1933; Berg died in 1935; and DJ Bach, among others, were to flee persecution.

Violinist Louis Krasner described Webern as naive and idealistic but not without his wits or conscience in an account of Webern in Austrian society at the time, one in which the Vienna Philharmonic refused to play Berg's Violin Concerto. Webern insisted they stop at a Munich train station café in 1936 to show Krasner that anti-Semitism posed no real danger, and he presumed power would moderate Hitler, an optimistic complacency that had exasperated his threatened (Jewish) friends. He once told Krasner, "Schoenberg, had he not been a Jew, would have been quite different!" Krasner reflected in 1987 that "Jews ... were at the center of the difficulty" but that he was once "foolhardy" as to the full potential of anti-Semitism: while revisiting Vienna once in 1941 to help friends with emigration, only his US passport saved him from locals and police.

1938–1939: Inner emigration in the German Reich

Krasner's last visit to Webern was interrupted by the Anschluss: Webern turned on the radio just in time to hear the news and to urge Krasner to flee to Vienna. In retrospect, Krasner wondered whether Webern knew the Anschluss was planned that day, as the Webern family included Nazis; he also wondered whether this was for his safety or to save Webern the embarrassment of Krasner's presence during a time of possible celebration in the Webern family or indeed in most of Mödling. Bailey Puffett suggested that Webern was unlikely to be so conscious or involved, in part because he wrote his lyricist and collaborator Hildegard Jone and her spouse, sculptor Josef Humplik that day: "I am totally immersed in my work [composing] and cannot, cannot be disturbed."

Under Nazi occupation after years of Nazi soft power, Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, and others supported the 1938 Austrian Anschluss referendum. As an expression of Pan-Germanism and populism, many German-speaking Volk hoped for stability and prosperity within a nation-state (the Reich). Bailey Puffett wrote that Webern may well have hoped to be able again to conduct and to be better able to secure a future for his family under a new regime that proclaimed itself "socialist" no less than nationalist.

Webern was prevented from attending Hermann Scherchen's première of Op. 26 at the 1938 ISCM festival in London. Its critical success encouraged him to write more cantatas and reassured him after a cellist quit during a performance of Op. 20, declaring it unplayable.

Following Kristallnacht, Webern visited and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach, Otto Jokl, Josef Polnauer, and Hugo Winter. 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. Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian whose emigration Schoenberg and Webern were unable to secure, managed to survive the Holocaust as an albino and later edited a 1959 publication by UE of Webern's correspondence from this time with Humplik and Jone. Webern moved Humplik's 1929 gift of a Mahler bust to his bedroom.

Webern found himself increasingly isolated, with "almost all his friends and old pupils ... gone". Although he sought companionship among his family and any friends or acquaintances who remained, in 1939 he wrote to artist Franz Rederer, "We live completely withdrawn. I work a lot." He corresponded to maintain relationships, but the coming war limited postal service. With a large family and deep attachments, he was reluctant to emigrate. The Moldenhauers described his experience during and after this time as one of "inward emigration".

1939–1945: Disillusionment during World War II

In broad terms, Webern's attitude seems to have first warmed impressionably and later, with widespread German disillusionment, cooled to Hitler and the Nazis. While Alex Ross characterizes Webern as "an unashamed Hitler enthusiast" on the basis of Webern's 2 May 1940 description of Hitler as "this unique man" who created "the new state" of Germany, Bailey Puffett and the Moldenhauers contextualize this passage not only with reference to Webern's nationalism, but also as patriotic wartime correspondence with Joseph Hueber, an active soldier, baritone, mountaineering companion, and close friend who held such views and sent Webern gifts; indeed, Hueber had just sent Webern Mein Kampf. Unaware of Stefan George's aversion to the Nazis, Webern marveled suggestively at the wartime leader envisioned in rereading Das neue Reich, but "I am not taking a position!" he wrote to active soldier, singer, and onetime Social Democrat, Hans Humpelstetter. For Johnson, "Webern's own image of a neue Reich was never of this world; if his politics were ultimately complicitous it was largely because his utopian apoliticism played so easily into the hands of the status quo."

Webern's financial situation deteriorated from 1939 until, by August 1940, his personal records reflected no monthly income, and his children supported him. In February 1940, he attended performances of his Op. 1 and Op. 4 in Winterthur and Basel with the support of the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur. He intimated to Willi Reich that he might use this opportunity to emigrate, and he unsuccessfully sought Swiss conducting opportunities. He attended Scherchen's 1943 Winterthur première of Op. 30 with the diplomatic intervention and financial support of its dedicatee Werner Reinhart, his last trip outside the Reich, within which he hoped for opportunities.

His 1943–1945 correspondence is strewn with references to bombings, deaths, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order, but also noted are the births of several grandchildren. In Dec. 1943 he wrote that he was living in a barrack away from home and working from 6 am to 5 pm, compelled by the state in a time of war to serve as an air-raid protection police officer, aged 60. On 3 March 1945, news was sent to Webern that his only son, Peter, who had been intermittently conscripted since 1940, had died on 14 February of wounds suffered in a strafing attack on a military train two days earlier. With the Red Army's April arrival imminent, the Weberns provided Schoenberg's first son Görgi and his family, whose emigration Schoenberg was also unable to secure despite many attempts, a Mödling apartment, the property and childhood home of Benno Mattl; then they fled west, even resorting to traveling partly on foot to Mittersill, where Webern's daughter Amalie wrote of "17 persons pressed together in the smallest possible space".

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

1945: Death in Allied-occupied Austria

On 15 September 1945, following Mattl's arrest for black-market activities, Webern was smoking a cigar outside his home so as not to disturb his sleeping grandchildren about one hour before curfew when he was shot and killed by US Army cook PFC Raymond Norwood Bell of North Carolina, who, overcome by remorse, died of alcoholism in 1955.

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

Music

Further information: List of compositions by Anton Webern

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, June 23, 1910, writing to Schoenberg (and to be much later echoed by Theodor W. Adorno, who described Webern as "the only one to propound musical expressionism in its strictest sense, carrying it to such a point that it reverts of its own weight to a new objectivity)

Webern's œuvre is distilled and select, in part reflecting a certain perfectionism and painstaking rigor which presented also in his work as a conductor. Comprising several stylistic shifts, it is typified by spartan textures, carefully chosen timbres via detailed dynamics and extended instrumental techniques (e.g., flutter tonguing, col legno), wide-ranging melodic lines with leaps exceeding an octave, and brevity (e.g., his Six Bagatelles are about three minutes long). His musical concerns and techniques were cohesive, interrelated, and only very gradually transformed with the overlap of old and new, particularly in the case of his middle-period lieder (for example, his first use of twelve-tone technique in Op. 17, Nos. 2 and 3, was not especially stylistically significant and only eventually became realized as otherwise so in later works). In his programmatic or topical preoccupations (e.g., landscapes, nature, death, often Catholic mysticism) as well as in his orchestration, he has been compared to Mahler, with the opening of Webern's Op. 21 echoing that of Mahler's Ninth. There is also a debt to Brahms: Webern's Passacaglia, Op. 1 was openly modeled on that of Brahms's Fourth; Webern's Op. 27, No. 1 likewise resembles Brahms's Op. 116, No. 5.

A very general feature of Webern's music, as much of Schoenberg's, is a predilection toward the use of minor seconds, major sevenths, and minor ninths, as noted with some insight in 1934 by microtonalist Alois Hába, writing of his and his students' affinities with Schoenberg in particular, and later by both Valentina Kholopova and Yuri Kholopov in formulations more specific to Webern and with a more unifying emphasis on the semitone in the context of axial inversional symmetry and octave equivalence (i.e., interval class 1, or ic1), approaching Allen Forte's more generalizing pitch-class set analysis. Webern's consistent and distinctive use of ic1 in particular within small subsets of other intervals, sometimes derived from a given twelve-tone row in his later practice, was well noted. He often musically expressed ic1 as a major seventh, minor ninth, or even wider interval. His intervallic practices may be more globally understood as the outcome of an inversionally symmetrical treatment of pitch in a manner comparable to other modernists, including Berg, Bartók, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, or more nascently even Mahler, Bruckner, Liszt, and Wagner, but often far more strictly and increasingly in schemes with other parameters (e.g., fixed or "frozen" register, the association of articulations and dynamics with specific pitches).

His music has been considered inaccessible by listeners and difficult by performers alike. Babbitt wrote that during Webern's life it "was regarded (to the very limited extent that it was regarded at all) as the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition." Adriaan Peperzak, writing about the taste of "most intellectuals" in 1994 as "a plurality of cultural homes" and stressing a general connection between new and old represented also in music (i.e., both "after" and before tonality or common practice), observed that "whereas certain works of Bartók and Stravinsky already are experienced as difficult," "Josquin des Prez, Gesualdo, Webern and Boulez seem to be reserved to a small elite, and we continue to refer to traditional art in learning how to compose new works and how to listen to the extraordinary works made according to non-traditional codes." Not only was Webern's rediscovery roughly coterminous with the early music revival (i.e., with the rediscovery of other "music that is at the same time old and new," as Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople glossed it and as addressed by Richard Taruskin), but also Webern's own scholarly interest in early music (in addition to music of the standard repertoire) informed his compositional technique in terms of his generally organic and parsimonious approach, with use of very small motifs, palindromes, and parameterization on both the micro- and macro-scale, an approach that solidified in time with frequent references (variously in personal accounts and in his compositions, diaries, lectures, letters, programs, and teaching) not only to Beethoven and Goethe, but also to "the Netherlanders". Thus J. Peter Burkholder generalized his claim that "the use of existing music as a basis for new music is pervasive in all periods," having first referred to "the historicist mainstream" in reference to the proximal connection between music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

1899–1908: Formative juvenilia and emergence from study

Webern published little of his early work in particular and was meticulous, revising extensively, not unlike Brahms. And not all of Webern's works were or could be published in his lifetime, especially with the passing of Emil Hertzka and amid the rise of fascism. Webern's rediscovery prompted the publication of his complete œuvre, including juvenilia, many of which were unknown until the work and findings of the Moldenhauers in the 1960s, effectively obscuring and undermining formative facets of Webern's musical identity. Thus when Boulez first oversaw a project to record "all" of Webern's music, not including the juvenilia, the results fit on three rather than six CDs.

[H]ow do you approach composing? [... A]n experience goes around in me, until it becomes music ... . [Most] of my compositions ... relate to the death of my mother ... . The Passacaglia, the Quartet, most of the songs, the second Quartet [Op. 5], the first orchestral pieces [Op. 6], the second [Op. 10] (with some exceptions) ... .

Webern, 12 July 1912 letter to Alban Berg about his 1906–1912 music

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

Webern's first piece after completing his studies with Schoenberg in 1908 was his Passacaglia, with its more chromatic harmonic language and somewhat more distinctive orchestration relative to Webern's earlier works. Although it may appear to bear little relation to later works, it nonetheless foreshadows them. For example, a distinguishing feature of Webern's later work was to be the use of traditional compositional techniques (especially canons) and forms (as in the Symphony, the Concerto, the String Trio, and String Quartet, and the Piano and Orchestral Variations) like the passacaglia, though in a far more idiosyncratic and personal musical language.

1908–1924: Atonality, aphorism, and lieder

Webern wrote freely atonal music somewhat in the style of Schoenberg starting with Op. 3. The two were so close in their artistic development that in 1951 Schoenberg reflected that he sometimes no longer had known who he was. But Webern did not merely follow Schoenberg. Ethan Haimo noted the swift, radical influence in summer 1909 of Webern's novel and arresting Fünf Sätze for string quartet, Op. 5, on Schoenberg's subsequent Klavierstück Op. 11, No. 3 (which differs markedly from Op. 11, Nos. 1 and 2 of February 1909); Fünf Orchesterstücke for orchestra, Op. 16; and monodrama Erwartung, Op. 17. In 1949 Schoenberg still remembered being "intoxicated by the enthusiasm of having freed music from the shackles of tonality" and believing with his pupils "that now music could renounce motivic features and remain coherent and comprehensible nonetheless".

With Opp. 18–20, Schoenberg began to retreat somewhat. In Pierrot lunaire (1912), Op. 21, there are elements of Kabarett, neoclassicism, and neo-Romanticism (e.g., canon and passacaglia in "Nacht," canon and fugue in "Der Mondfleck," waltz in "Serenade," triadic harmony in "O alter Duft," grotesque satire throughout), as befits the text's protagonist. With its contrapuntal procedures and nonstandard ensemble, Pierrot was received by Webern as a direction for the composition of his own Opp. 14–16.

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

Johnson argued that the whole of Webern's music takes on the nature of such dramatic and visual tableaux, if in a more abstract and formal manner in some of the late works. Melodies frequently begin and end on weak beats, settle into or arise out of ostinati, or otherwise dynamically and texturally emerge or fade away. Tonality, useful for communicating direction and narrative in programmatic pieces, becomes more tenuous, fragmented, static, symbolic, and visual or spatial in function, thus mirroring the concerns and topics, explicit or implicit, of Webern's music and his textual selections for lieder, especially from the poetry of George and Trakl. Expanding on the orchestration of Mahler, Webern characteristically sought a colorful and novel but idiosyncratically fragile and intimate sound, not infrequently bordering on silence at a typical ppp, often in consistent association with certain lyrical topics, whether the female or an angelic voice as evoked by solo violin or the use of harmonics; luminosity or darkness as sought by different voicings or the use of sul ponticello; absence, emptiness, or loneliness metaphorically through compressed range by contrast to fulfillment or (often spiritual) presence or transcendence through registral expansion; the celestial and ethereal in the use of celesta, harp, glockenspiel; or angels and heaven, for example, in the use of harp and trumpet in the circling ostinati of Op. 6, No. 5, and winding to conclusion at the very end of Op. 15, No. 5).

For Webern especially, text-setting became a means of composing more than atonal aphorisms, but Schoenberg sought other means, "long ... yearning for a style for large forms ... to give personal things an objective, general form." From as early as 1906 Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern indulged a shared interest in esotericism, Swedenborgian mysticism, and Theosophy, reading Honoré de Balzac (Louis Lambert and Séraphîta) and August Strindberg (Till Damaskus and Jacob lutte) as they explored ways forward in their own work. Gabriel, the protagonist of Schoenberg's semi-autobiographical Die Jakobsleiter (1914–1922, rev. 1944) begins by describing a journey: "whether right, whether left, forwards or backwards, uphill or down – one must keep on going without asking what lies ahead or behind." Webern interpreted this line as a metaphor for pitch space, as did Schoenberg, who later considered Jakobsleiter a "real twelve-tone composition" for its opening hexachordal ostinato and a "Scherzo [theme] ... which accidentally consisted of all the twelve tones," well aware that "[a]n historian will probably one day find ... how enthusiastic [Webern and I] were about this." On the journey to composition with twelve tones, Webern revised many of his middle-period lieder in the years after their apparent composition but before publication, increasingly prioritizing clarity of pitch relations, even against timbral effects, as Anne Shreffler and Felix Meyer have described.

1924–1945: Formal coherence and expansion

The symmetry of Webern's tone row from Variations, Op. 30, is apparent from the equivalent, P1=IR1 and R12=I12, and thus reduced number of row forms, two, P and R, plus transpositions. Consisting of three related tetrachords: a and c consisting of two minor seconds and one minor third and b consisting of two minor thirds and one minor second. Notes 4–7 and 6–9 also consist of two minor seconds and one minor third. "The entire series thus consists of two intervals and has the greatest possible unity of series form, interval, motif, and chords.

Paradoxically, this product of hermetic constructivism seems infused with intense emotion, that emotion evenly diffused across the whole 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, describing Webern's Symphony, Op. 21.

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

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

Webern's late cantatas seem to indicate new developments in style as he noted ecstatically in letters to the Humpliks, or at least a thoroughgoing synthesis of the formal rigors of his mature instrumental works with the word painting of his lieder on a larger, orchestral scale. They are texturally somewhat denser and more homophonic at the surface through nonetheless contrapuntal polyphonic means, with "Schweigt auch die Welt" increasingly abandoning lines for points and culminating twice (at the center and end) in twelve-note simultaneities.

An apparent third cantata (1944–1945), setting "Das Sonnenlicht spricht" from Jone's Lumen cycle, was left in his sketchbook, having been planned initially as a concerto.

Arrangements and orchestrations

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

For Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1921, Webern arranged, among other things, 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) for bass solo, mixed chorus, and large orchestra; it was premièred for the first time in any form on 13 and 14 March 1925, with Webern conducting the first full-length concert of the Austrian Association of Workers Choir. A review in the 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"). The text, in English translation, reads in part: "Let us have the adorned spades and scoops,/ Come along all, who wield a sword or pen,/ Come here ye, industrious, brave and strong/ All who create things great or small." Liszt, initially inspired by his revolutionary countrymen, had left it in manuscript at publisher Carl Haslinger's discretion.

Performance practice

Eric Simon, who then played clarinet in the orchestra, related this episode: 'Webern was obviously upset by Klemperer's sober time-beating. He thought that if you did not go through physical and mental stresses and strains a performance was bound to be poor. During intermission he turned to the concert master and said: "You know, Herr Gutmann, the phrase there in measure so-and-so must be played Tiiiiiiiiiii-aaaaaaaaa." Klemperer, overhearing the conversation, turned around and said sarcastically: "Herr Gutmann, now you probably know exactly how you have to play the passage!"' Peter Stadlen, who sat with Webern at the concert, later provided a first-hand account of the composer's reaction after the performance: '... Webern turned to me and said with some bitterness: "A high note, a low note, a note in the middle—like the music of a madman!"'

The Moldenhauers detail Webern's reaction to Otto Klemperer's unsympathetic 1936 ISCM performance of his Symphony (1928), Op. 21, which Webern had played on piano for Klemperer "with enormous intensity and fanaticism ... passionately".

Webern insisted on lyricism, nuance, rubato, sensitivity, and both emotional and intellectual understanding in performance of music; this is evidenced by anecdotes, correspondence, extant recordings of Schubert's Deutsche Tänze (arr. Webern) and Berg's Violin Concerto under his direction, many such detailed markings in his scores (including a specially marked score of the Piano Variations), and finally by his compositional process as both publicly stated and later revealed in the musical and extramusical metaphors and associations everywhere throughout his sketches. As both a composer and conductor, he was one of many (e.g., Wilhelm Furtwängler, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Scherchen) in a contemporaneous tradition of conscientiously and non-literally handling notated musical figures, phrases, and even entire scores so as to maximize expressivity in performance and to cultivate audience engagement and understanding.

This aspect of Webern's work had been typically missed in his immediate post-war reception, however, even as it may radically affect the music's reception. Felix Galimir of the Galimir Quartet told The New York Times in 1981: "Berg asked for enormous correctness in the performance of his music. But the moment this was achieved, he asked for a very Romanticized treatment. Webern, you know, was also terribly Romantic—as a person, and when he conducted. Everything was almost over-sentimentalized. It was entirely different from what we have been led to believe today. His music should be played very freely, very emotionally."

Reception, influence, and legacy

Much of Webern's canonic status rests distinctly upon his vast posthumous influence despite his music's slowly obtained, relatively limited place within the standard repertoire as such. Although Schoenberg admired the music's concision, even Berg joked about its brevity. Significantly as relates to his reception, Stravinsky noted that Webern never compromised his artistic identity and values. Webern's characteristically passionate pan-German nationalism and politics were often not widely known or mooted, variously due to his personal and professional associations in fin-de-siècle and Red Vienna, his marginalization under fascism and Gleichschaltung, his loyalty and assistance to his Jewish friends and colleagues (especially after Kristallnacht), and the mystery surrounding him in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The 15th of September 1945, the day of Anton Webern's death, should be a day of mourning for any receptive musician. We must hail not only this great composer but also a real hero. Doomed to a total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had such a perfect knowledge.

Igor Stravinsky lauded Webern in a special edition of Die Reihe

1935–1947: Contemporaries' perspectives

Somewhat independently and singularly, identifying with Webern as a "solitary soul" amid 1940s wartime fascism, Luigi Dallapiccola found inspiration especially in Webern's lesser-known middle-period lieder, blending elements of bel canto, Viennese expressionism, and the ethereal qualities of Webern's music. Stunned by Webern's Op. 24 at its 1935 ISCM festival world première under Heinrich Jalowetz in Prague, Dallapiccola left the concert early with "food for thought" and an impression of the work's "aesthetic and stylistic unity on which one could not wish to improve." His 1943 Sex carmina alcaei are dedicated "with humility and devotion" to "the Master," with whom he met in 1942 through Schlee, coming away initially open-mouthed at Webern's emphasis then on tradition, specifically "our great Central European tradition." Dallapiccola's 1953 Goethe-Lieder especially recall Webern's Op. 16 in style.

In 1947, Schoenberg remembered and expressed solidarity with Berg and Webern despite rumors of the latter's having "fallen into the Nazi trap": "Let us—for the moment at least—forget all that might have at one time divided us. For there remains for our future what could only have begun to be realized posthumously: One will have to consider us three—Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern—as a unity, a oneness, because we believed in ideals, once perceived, with intensity and selfless devotion; nor would we ever have been deterred from them, even if those who tried might have succeeded in confounding us." Krasner notes that this "puts 'Vienna's Three Modern Classicists' into historical perspective," summarizing it as "what bound us together was our idealism."

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

In part because he had largely remained somewhat obscure and arcane during his own lifetime, interest in Webern's music increased in the aftermath of World War II as it came to represent a universally or generally valid, systematic, and compellingly logical model of new composition, with his œuvre acquiring "a saintly, visionary aura". His gradual innovations in schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and melodic contour; his later adaptation and generalization of imitative contrapuntal techniques such as canon and fugue; and his inclination toward athematicism, abstraction, and lyricism variously informed and oriented European, typically serial or avant-garde composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Sylvano Bussotti, Bruno Maderna, Henri Pousseur, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and György Ligeti. This was made possible in large part by René Leibowitz as he championed, performed, promulgated, and published Schoenberg et son école, but Adorno, Herbert Eimert, and others also contributed. When Webern's Piano Variations were performed at Darmstadt in 1948, young composers listened in a quasi-religious trance. In 1955, the second issue of Eimert and Stockhausen's journal Die Reihe was devoted to Webern's œuvre, and in 1960 his lectures were published by UE.

Less so in the United States, his music attracted the interest of Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland, whose critical ambivalence was marked by a certain enthusiasm and fascination nonetheless; Milton Babbitt, who ultimately derived more inspiration from Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice than that of Webern; and particularly Igor Stravinsky, to whom it was very fruitfully reintroduced by Robert Craft, and without which Stravinsky's late works might have taken different shape. Indeed, Stravinsky staked his contract with Columbia Records to see that Webern's "complete" music was first both recorded and widely distributed. Among the more interdisciplinary New York School, John Cage and Morton Feldman both cited the staggering effect of its sound on their own music, first meeting at a performance of Webern's Symphony and even singing the praises of Christian Wolff distinctly as "our Webern".

Some composers' fascination with Webern's music post-WWII may have been partly due to its concision and apparent simplicity, thereby facilitating musical analysis. Gottfried Michael Koenig speculated on the basis of his personal experience that since Webern's scores represented such a highly concentrated source, they may have been considered the better for didactic purposes than those of other composers. Robert Beyer criticized the approach of early serialists to Webern's music as reductive and narrowly focused on some of Webern's apparent methods rather than on his music more generally, especially neglecting timbre in their typical selection of Opp. 27–28. Karel Goeyvaerts recalled that at least on first impression, the sound of Webern's music reminded him of "a Mondrian canvas," explaining that "things of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality." Expressing a related opinion, contemporaneous German music critic and contributor to Die Reihe Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski wrote in the Darmstädter Tagblatt (3 September 1959) that some of the later and more radical music at Darmstadt was "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing"; several days later, one of his articles in the Der Kurier was similarly headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at."

1950s onward: Beyond (late) Webern

Continuing through the late 1950s onward, Webern's work reached musicians even as far removed as Joel Thome and Frank Zappa, yet many post-war European musicians and scholars had already begun to look beyond as much as back at Webern: there was some rapprochement with Berg and advocacy for more engagement with the expressionism of Webern's atonal works in contrast to some earlier post-Webernism. In Adorno's 1954 lecture "The Aging of the New Music," he claimed that in the prevailing climate "artists like Berg or Webern would hardly be able to make it"; 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."

Even as the first scene of Pousseur's Votre Faust (1960–1968) quotes the opening of "Schweigt auch die Welt," dramatizing the composer Henri's analysis of Webern's Op. 31, it already has several elements of late or postmodernism, with its extreme plurality of historically developed styles, mobile form, and polyvalent roles in the service of a self-reflexive theme of relative, unstable identity coinciding with a wider rapprochement with Berg (whose example Pousseur cited, from whose music he quoted in the second scene, and whose writings he translated into French in the 1950s). 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 and echoing Adorno's praise for Lulu, the première of which Boulez conducted in 1979 after its finished orchestration by Friedrich Cerha.

Engaging particularly with Webern's atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism, both Brian Ferneyhough and Helmut Lachenmann found much in Webern on the way to complexity in the case of the former and musique concrète instrumentale in the case of the latter. Ferneyhough and Lachenmann respectively expanded upon and poetically went further than Webern in attention to the smallest of details and the use of ever more radically extended techniques: for example, Ferneyhough's 1967 Sonatas for string quartet comprise not only serial, but also atonal sections much in the style of Webern's Op. 9 yet more intensely sustained; and Lachenmann wrote in the 1985 essay, "Hearing [Hören] is Defenseless—without Listening [Hören]," of "a melody made of a single note [...] in the viola part" in mm. 2–4 of Webern's Op. 10, No. 4, amid "the mere ruins of the traditional linguistic context," in a comparison to his own 1969 Air, in which even "the pure tone, now living in tonal exile, has in this new context no aesthetic advantage over pure noise."

Eastern Europe as exception

In the Communist Bloc, the music of the Second Viennese School proved an often bewildering or professionally dangerous but sometimes exciting or inspiring alternative to socialist realist art music, given access. Whereas Berg's Lyric Suite, performed by the Kolisch Quartet at the 1927 Baden-Baden ISCM festival where Bartók performed his own Piano Sonata, could inspire Bartók in his subsequent third and fourth string quartets and later Concerto for Orchestra, Second Viennese influence on composers behind the Iron Curtain was mediated by anti-fascist and anti-German sentiment and obstructed by anti-formalist cultural policies and Cold War separation more generally. In 1970 Ligeti explained, "In countries where there exists a certain isolation, in Eastern Europe, one cannot obtain correct information. One is cut off from the circulation of blood." Following the 1956 uprising in Hungary, the influence of Webern initially predominated, bearing on Pál Kadosa, Endre Szervánszky, and György Kurtág. Among Czechs, Marek Kopelent, who discovered the Second Viennese School as an editor and was particularly taken by Webern, was ostracized and blacklisted for his avant-garde music at home and despaired, unable to attend performances of his own works abroad; while Pavel Blatný, who attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and wrote music with serial techniques in the late 1960s, returned to tonality in Brno and was rewarded.

In Soviet Russia specifically, as official condemnation and restricted access eased somewhat with the repeal of anti-formalist resolutions amid the post-Stalinist Khrushchev Thaw in the late 1950s and early 1960s, modernist and avant-garde scores and recordings entered through family (e.g., the relationship between Sergei Slonimsky and Nicolas Slonimsky), friends, journalists, composers, and especially musicians (e.g., Igor Blazhkov, Gérard Frémy, Alexei Lubimov, Maria Yudina) as they traveled more. Kholopov risked arrest for obtaining scores from West Berlin and the Leipzig office of Schott Music while stationed nearby in Zossen as a military band arranger (1955–1958). Philip Herschkowitz, poverty-stricken, had been teaching privately with cautious emphasis on Beethoven and the tradition from which Webern emerged, while in Soviet Music Marcel Rubin criticized "Webern and His Followers" (1959), by contrast to Berg and Schoenberg, precisely for going too far; and Alfred Schnittke complained in an open letter (1961) of composers' restricted education. 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, Vladimir Martynov, Boris Tischenko, Viktor Yekimovsky) ironically learned more about what had been and even was still forbidden.

Via Andrei Volkonsky, Lydia Davydova recalled, "Russia heard the music of the Renaissance and the early Baroque for the first time. He also had scores that his relatives sent him from abroad and also records sent by his relatives. You could say the same about modern music, because at his apartment I heard for the first time Schoenberg—Pierrot Lunaire—and the Webern cantatas." Tischenko similarly remembered: "Precisely he [Volkonsky], precisely in the 1960s, discovered the regularity of the music that he composed. He was the first swallow of the avant-garde. And those who came after him ... they already followed in his tracks. I consider A. Volkonsky the discoverer." Edison Denisov described the 1960s as his "second conservatory" and also credited Volkonsky not only for introducing the likes of Webern and his followers, but also of Carlo Gesualdo.

This tolerance did not survive Brezhnev and the Stagnation: 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.

Since the 1980s: Reappraisals and polemics

Webern's music remains polarizing and provocative within various communities of musicians and scholars. Its legacy (or canonic status) has been celebrated, confirmed, and challenged with recourse or reference to culture, history, ideology, philosophy, politics, social context, and public opinion or audience reception as a critical basis, ranging from the earlier interdisciplinary aesthetics and sociomusicology of Adorno and Ernst Bloch to the New Musicology of Susan McClary and more adjacently Richard Taruskin in the US. Complementing formal musical analysis, which itself was enriched by David Lewin's work toward a more integrative (or "phenomenological") approach, Julian Johnson worked toward a hermeneutics of Webern's music, building on the middle-period lieder sketch studies of Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler as well as the work of the Moldenhauers.

Since postmodernism and the "Restoration of the 1980s," as Martin Kaltenecker termed a paradigm shift from structure more toward perception within the discourse of New Music, challenges were raised within historical musicology and more broadly intellectual and cultural history, including those of a historiographical nature. This prompted controversy and admonishments: Charles Rosen scorned a "kind of historical criticism ... avoiding any serious engagement with a work or style that one happens not to like"; Andreas Holzer warned of "the spread of post-factual tendencies in musicology"; and Pamela M. Potter cautioned that "[i]t is important to consider all the scholarship on musical life in the Third Reich that, taken together, reveals the complexity of the day-to-day existence of musicians and composers", as "[i]t seems inevitable that debates about the political culpability of individuals will persist, especially if the stakes remain so high for composers, for whom an up or down vote can determine inclusion in the canon." Taruskin's work, noted for its polemicism, was criticized as to New Music since and including the Second Viennese School by many, including Franklin Cox, who faulted him as an unreliable historian and "ideologist of tonal restoration," arguing that his "reactionary historicist" project opposed the Second Viennese School's "progressivist historicist" emancipation of the dissonance. Taruskin acknowledged his "dubious reputation" on the Second Viennese School but stood by his criticisms of their "idiosyncratic view of the past," drawing a line from Webern and Adler to Hanslick and "neo-Hegelian historians", especially Franz Brendel. In relation to post-Webernism more generally, Holzer warned of attempts "to place Darmstadt in a fascistoid corner or even identifying it as a US propaganda institution amid the Cold War" through "unbelievable distortions, exaggerations, reductions and propagation of clichés".

Recordings by Webern

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

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• Vandagriff, Rachel S. 2017. "Perspectives and the Patron: Paul Fromm, Benjamin Boretz and Perspectives of New Music". Journal of the Royal Musical Association 142(2):327–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1080/02690403.2017.1361175.
• Webern, Anton. 1963. The Path to the New Music. Ed. Willi Reich. [Trans. Leo Black.] Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania: Theodore Presser Co., in Association with Universal Edition. Reprinted London: Universal Edition, 1975. (Translation of Wege zur neuen Musik. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1960.)
• Webern, Anton. 1967. "Letters to Hildegard Jone and Josef Humplik", ed. Josef Polnauer, trans. Cornelius Cardew and Élisabeth Bouillon. Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser; London, Vienna, and Zürich: Universal Edition.
• Webern, Anton. 2000. Sämtliche Werke/Complete Works/L'Œuvre complète/L'opera completa. Oelze · Pollet · Schneider · McCormick · Finley · Aimard · Cascioli · Maisenberg · Zimerman · Kremer · Hagen · BBC Singers · Emerson String Quartet · Ensemble Intercontemporain · Berliner Philharmoniker · Pierre Boulez. 6-CD set. Deutsche Grammophon 0289 457 6372 9 GX 6. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon.
• White, Harry. 2008. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-156316-4.
• Wistrich, Robert S. 2012. From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel. Studies in Antisemitism Series. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. ISBN 978-0-803240-83-4 (ebk).
• Wodak, Ruth. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
• Yang, Tsung-Hsien. "Webern Symphony: Beyond Palindromes and Canons". PhD diss. Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University, 1987.

Further reading

• Ahrend, Thomas, and Matthias Schmidt (eds.). 2015. Der junge Webern. Texte und Kontexte. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 2b. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-083-6.
• Ahrend, Thomas, and Matthias Schmidt (eds.). 2016. Webern-Philologien. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 3. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-084-3.
• Cavallotti, Pietro, and Simon Obert, and Rainer Schmusch (eds.). 2019. Neue Perspektiven. Anton Webern und das Komponieren im 20. Jahrhundert. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 4. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-098-0.
• Ewen, David. 1971. "Anton Webern (1883–1945)". In Composers of Tomorrow's Music, by David Ewen, 66–77. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. ISBN 978-0-396-06286-8.
• Galliari, Alain. 2007. "Anton von Webern". Paris: Fayard. ISBN 978-2-213-63457-9.
• Kröpfl, Monika, and Simon Obert (eds.). 2015. Der junge Webern. Künstlerische Orientierungen in Wien nach 1900. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 2a. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-082-9.
• Mead, Andrew. 1993. "Webern, Tradition, and 'Composing with Twelve Tones'". Music Theory Spectrum 15(2):173–204. doi:10.2307/745813
• Moldenhauer, Hans. 1966. Anton von Webern Perspectives. Ed. Demar Irvine, with an introductory interview with 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. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 1. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-080-5.
• Perle, George. 1991. Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Sixth ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Rockwell, John. 1983. All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Alfred Knopf. Reprinted New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-306-80750-3, ISBN 978-0-306-80750-3.
• Tsang, Lee. 2002. "The Atonal Music of Anton Webern (1998) by Allen Forte". Music Analysis 21(3): 417–427.
• Wildgans, Friedrich. 1966. Anton Webern. Trans. Edith Temple Roberts and Humphrey Searle. Intro. and notes by Humphrey Searle. New York: October House.

External links

• 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 Gesamtausgabe (Complete Edition)