Webern - Piano Variations Op

Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and steadfast embrace of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School.

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to taking the " path to the new music", as he styled it in a series of private lectures delivered in 1932–1933 (but unpublished until 1960).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

Following his death shortly after World War II, Webern became more widely celebrated and influential than ever before, albeit initially through pedagogy often lacking full context, and the thread of his work was taken by composers in directions far beyond any residual post-Romanticism and expressionism that had remained in his style. His gradual innovations in schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and melodic contour; his later adaptation and generalization of imitative contrapuntal techniques such as canon and fugue; and his inclination toward athematicism, abstraction, and lyricism variously informed and oriented European, typically serial or avant-garde composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Henri Pousseur, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and György Ligeti. Later, both Brian Ferneyhough and Helmut Lachenmann also found much in Webern on the way to complexity in the case of the former and ''musique concrète instrumentale'' in the case of the latter, engaging particularly with his atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism. Less so in the United States, his music attracted the interest of Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland, whose critical ambivalence was marked by a certain enthusiasm and fascination nonetheless; 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 the Symphony, Op. 21, and even singing the praises of Christian Wolff distinctly as "our Webern". A richer and more historically informed understanding of Webern and his music began to emerge during the latter half of the 20th century onward in the work of Kathryn Bailey Puffett, Julian Johnson, Felix Meyer, and Anne Shreffler as archivists, biographers, and musicologists, most importantly Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, gained access to sketches, letters, lectures, audio recordings, and other articles of or associated with Webern's estate.

Biography

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

Webern was born in Vienna, then in Austria-Hungary. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a descendent of , 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; and he clearly associated the area, which he took as his home, very closely with the memory of his mother Amelie, who had died in 1906 and whose loss also profoundly affected Webern for decades.

In 1902, Webern began attending classes at Vienna University. There he studied musicology with Guido Adler, writing his thesis on the ''Choralis Constantinus'' of Heinrich Isaac. This interest in early music would greatly influence his compositional technique in later years, especially in terms of his use of palindromic form on both the micro- and macro-scale and the economical use of musical materials.

Webern's cousin Ernst Dietz, an art historian studying in Graz, may have introduced Webern to the work of the painters Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, whom Webern came to admire. Segantini's work was a likely inspiration for Webern's 1905 single-movement string quartet.

Young Webern was enthusiastic about the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), Hugo Wolf, and Richard Wagner, visiting Bayreuth in 1902. He also enjoyed the music of Hector Berlioz and Georges Bizet. In 1903, besides describing some of Alexander Scriabin's music as "languishing junk," Webern wrote of Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 4 that it was "boring," that Carl Maria von Weber's ''Konzertstück'' in F minor was passé, and that he found Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 3 (which struck Eduard Hanslick as "artistically the most nearly perfect") "cold and without particular inspiration, ... badly orchestrated—grey on grey." Writing about an all-Russian concert program, Webern praised one of Alexander Glazunov's symphonies as "not particularly Russian" in contrast to some of Nikolai 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 at Guido Adler's advice that he paid Schoenberg for composition lessons. Webern progressed quickly under Schoenberg's tutelage, publishing his Passacaglia, Op. 1, as his graduation piece in 1908. He also met Berg, then another of Schoenberg's pupils. These two relationships would be the most important in his life in shaping his own musical direction.

With the help of friends and colleagues, Webern later began working peripatetically as a conductor and musical coach in various towns and cities, among them Ischl, Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic), Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), and Prague, before finally moving back to Vienna. He conducted some of Debussy's music in 1911, having written rapturously to Schoenberg about Claude Debussy's opera '' Pelléas et Mélisande'' in 1908.

1918–1934: Rise in Red Vienna

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

After the dissolution of the Society amid catastrophic hyperinflation in 1921, Webern obtained work as director not only of the , but also, from 1922 until the dissolution of these institutions after the failed February Uprising, of the mixed-voice amateur and the through his relationship with DJ Bach, Director of the . His performances in this capacity were aired on ''Österreichischer Rundfunk'' no fewer than twenty times starting in 1927. In 1933 he engaged Erich Leinsdorf as rehearsal and solo pianist for the , who later reflected on the experience as of "utmost value to my musical and critical development"; together they gave a performance of Stravinsky's dance cantata on folk idioms ''Les Noces'', of which the '' popevki''-like 3-7A cell and its 4–10 variant are not altogether unlike the rhythmized trichords of Webern's Op. 24 from the following year (1934) or the Op. 30 tetrachords (which Stravinsky later admired) apart from Stravinsky's tendency to anhemitony in marked contrast to Webern's hemitonicism. In 1926, Webern noted his voluntary resignation as chorusmaster of the Mödling , a paid position, in controversy over his hiring of a Jewish singer, Greta Wilheim, to replace a sick one. Letters document their correspondence in many subsequent years, and she (among others) would in turn provide him with facilities to teach private lessons as a convenience to Webern, his family, and his students.

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

1933–1938: Austrofascism and Anschluss

Webern's music, along with that of Berg, Křenek, Schoenberg, and others, was denounced as cultural Bolshevism and proscribed as ''Entartete Kunst'' by the Nazi Party in Germany, and its publication and performance were forbidden, although neither did it fare well under Austrofascism. An Austrian ''gauleiter'' on ''Bayerischer Rundfunk'' labeled both Berg and Webern as Jewish composers in 1933, and Berg wrote to Adorno of prior instances. Amid the rise of fascism in the 1930s, both found it harder to earn a living; Webern lost a promising conducting career which might have otherwise been more noted and recorded and had to take on work as an editor and proofreader for his publishers, UE. In 1933, Webern attacked Nazi cultural policies in private lectures; publication "would have exposed Webern to serious consequences."

Violinist Louis Krasner described Webern as naive and idealistic but not entirely without his wits, shame, or conscience, contextualizing Webern as a member of Austrian society at the time, one departed by Schoenberg and one in which the already pro-Nazi Vienna Philharmonic had even refused to play the late Berg's Violin Concerto. Krasner was particularly troubled by a 1936 conversation with Webern about the Jews, in which Webern expressed his vague but unambiguously anti-Semitic opinion that "Even Schoenberg, had he not been a Jew, would have been quite different!" Krasner remembered that "Jews ... were at the center of the difficulty. Those who wanted to, put the blame for all this calamity, for all this depraved condition, on the Jews who had brought it with them—along with a lot of radical ideas—from the East. People blamed the Jews for their financial worries. The Jews were, at the same time, the poverty-stricken people who came with nothing, and the capitalists who controlled everything."

When the Nazis invaded Austria, Krasner was visiting Webern in Maria Enzersdorf; Webern, uncannily seeming to anticipate the timing down to 4 o'clock in the afternoon, turned on the radio to hear this news and immediately warned Krasner, urging him to flee, whereupon he did (first to Vienna). Whether this was for Krasner's safety or to save Webern the embarrassment of Krasner's presence during a time of possible celebration in the pro-Nazi Webern family (or indeed in most of pro-Nazi Mödling, by Krasner's description as well as one even more vivid of Arnold Greissle-Schönberg), Krasner was ambivalent and uncertain, withholding judgment. Krasner revisited frequently, hoping to convince friends (e.g., Schoenberg's daughter Gertrude and her husband Felix Greissle) to emigrate before time ran out. Krasner eventually left more permanently, after a 1941 incident wherein he felt only his US passport saved him from both locals and police. Only later did Krasner himself realize how self-admittedly "foolhardy" he had been and in what danger he had placed himself, revealing an ignorance perhaps shared by Webern, who wrote to Humplik and Jone on the day of the Anschluss to be left alone: "I am totally immersed in my work omposingand cannot, cannot be disturbed." Krasner's presence could have been a disturbance to Webern for this reason, and Bailey Puffett speculates that this may indeed be why he was rushed off by Webern.

Webern's attitude towards Nazism has been variously described. This may reflect Webern's own vacillations, ambivalence, or cognitive dissonance no less than the different contexts in which, or the audiences to whom, his views were expressed: a very wide variety of differences were represented in his friends, family, and colleagues, from active members of the Nazi Party within his family to the Zionist Schoenberg, who emigrated; the left-leaning Berg, who died in 1935; and others of their Social Democratic milieu in previously "red" Vienna, most of whom fled. Nazism itself, "not a coherent doctrine or body of systemically interrelated ideas, but rather a vaguer worldview made up of a number of prejudices with varied appeals to different audiences which could scarcely be dignified with the term 'ideology,'" has been variously described.

There is, moreover, political complexity to complicate individual culpability. After World War I, the center-left Social Democrats had governed with the right-wing Social Christians in increasingly tenuous coalition, with the emergence of paramilitaries and disorder culminating in civil war. As a matter of ''Realpolitik'' and self-determination, prominent Austromarxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, among other Social Democrats, endured in their support of a German-Austrian Anschluss, unanimously passed by the Provisional National Assembly in 1918 as an answer to the '' Grossdeutsche Lösung'' before the peace treaty-imposed post-Habsburg rump state (''" ce qui reste, c'est l'Autriche"''). With their party outlawed and some members interned under Austrofascism, some Social Democrats, at least initially, viewed National Socialists as no worse than what had become of Social Christians, merged by Engelbert Dollfuss into the clericofascist Vaterländische Front in concert with appeals to Austrians' Catholic identity and imperial history in order to maintain independence of Nazi Germany through alliance with Fascist Italy and Hungary; thus Bauer, Renner, and others supported the Anschluss referendum even under Nazi occupation following years of deteriorating German-Austrian relations and Austrian weakening, including the failed Austrian Nazi coup d'état and continuing economic warfare and destruction of infrastructure. Likewise, as an expression more of pan-nationalism and populism than frank Nazism, many Austrians hoped for post-Anschluss political stability and prosperity. Bailey Puffett 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.

1938–1945: German Reich, ''Kristallnacht'', and World War II

In broad terms, Webern's attitude seems to have first warmed to a degree of characteristic fervor and later, in conjunction with widespread German disillusionment, cooled to Hitler and the Nazis to such an extent that by 1945 he had resolved to emigrate to England. Webern's patriotism led him to endorse the Nazi regime in a series of letters to Joseph Hueber, who was serving in the army and himself held such views. On 2 May 1940, Webern described Hitler as "this unique man" who created "the new state" of Germany; thus Alex Ross characterizes him as "an unashamed Hitler enthusiast".

Following , Webern checked on and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach, Otto Jokl, Josef Polnauer, and Hugo Winter. Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian for whom Schoenberg was unable to secure passage to the US, managed to survive the Holocaust as an albino and later edited a 1959 publication by UE of Webern's correspondence from this time with , Webern's then lyricist and collaborator, and her husband, sculptor Josef Humplik.

Webern's financial situation deteriorated until, by August 1940, his personal records reflected no monthly income. He attended the 1943 Winterthur première of his Op. 30 only with the diplomatic intervention and financial support of Werner Reinhart, its dedicatee.

Webern's 1944–1945 correspondence is strewn with references to bombings, deaths, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order; but also noted are the births of several grandchildren. At the age of sixty (i.e., in Dec. 1943), Webern 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. On 3 March 1945, news was relayed to Webern that his only son, Peter, died on 14 February of wounds suffered in a strafing attack on a military train two days earlier.

Toward the end of the war, the Weberns provided Schoenberg's first son Görgi and his family, for whom Schoenberg was unable to secure their passage to the US despite many attempts, food and shelter in a Mödling apartment belonging to their son-in-law. With the Red Army approaching, the Weberns fled on foot to Mittersill, about 75 km. away; there, Amalie, one of Webern's daughters, wrote of "17 persons pressed together in the smallest possible space." Görgi and his family stayed behind for their safety, but due to the Nazi munitions and propaganda in the apartment's storeroom, Görgi was held and nearly executed as a Nazi spy when he was discovered. He was able to convince a Jewish, German-speaking officer that he was not, drawing attention to his clothes, sewn with the yellow Star of David. Görgi and his family continued to live in this apartment with this family until 1969.

1945: Allied-administered Austria

On 15 September 1945, following the arrest of his son-in-law 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 and consequent embarrassment. She worked to get his 1907 Piano Quintet finally published by Bomart via Kurt List and Opp. 17, 24–25, and 29–31 published by UE at the behest of , 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 ebernbecame convinced that he could not live here n Austriaany 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. ewas 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

Webern's works are concise, distilled, and select; when Boulez, for a second time, recorded all of his then published compositions, including some of those without opus numbers, the results fit on just six CDs. Not all of his works were or could be published in his lifetime, especially after 1934. His music is often considered inaccessible by listeners and difficult by performers alike; Babbitt observed 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." Though his ''œuvre'' comprises stylistic shifts, it is typified by spartan textures, in which every note can be heard; carefully chosen timbres, often resulting in very detailed instructions to the performers and use of extended instrumental techniques ( flutter tonguing, col legno, and so on); wide-ranging melodic lines, often with leaps greater than an octave or more; and brevity: the Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Op. 9, (1913), for instance, last about three minutes in total. The concerns and techniques of his music 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).

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. Webern often musically expresses ic1 as a major seventh, minor ninth, or even wider interval. Webern's intervallic practices may be more globally understood as the outcome of a inversionally symmetrical treatment of pitch in a manner comparable to other modernists, including Berg, Bartók, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, or more nascently even Liszt and Wagner, 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).

1899–1908: Formative juvenilia and emergence from study

Webern published little of his early work in particular; like Brahms, Webern was meticulous and revised extensively. Many juvenilia remained unknown until the work and findings of the Moldenhauers in the 1960s, effectively obscuring and undermining formative facets of Webern's musical identity. 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.

Webern's earliest works consist primarily of ''lieder'', the genre that most testifies to his roots in Romanticism, specifically German Romanticism; one in which the music yields brief but explicit, potent, and spoken meaning manifested only latently or programmatically in purely instrumental genres; one marked by significant intimacy and lyricism; and one which often associates nature, especially landscapes, with themes of homesickness, solace, wistful yearning, distance, utopia, and belonging. Robert Schumann's "Mondnacht" is an iconic example; Joseph Freiherr von 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 Berg, Reger, Schoenberg, Strauss, Wolf, and Alexander Zemlinsky. 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 was the Passacaglia for orchestra (1908), Op. 1. Harmonically, it is a step forward into a more advanced language, and the orchestration is somewhat more distinctive than his earlier orchestral work. However, it bears little relation to the fully mature works he is best known for today. One element that is typical is the form itself: the passacaglia is a form which dates back to the 17th century, and a distinguishing feature of Webern's later work was to be the use of traditional compositional techniques (especially canons) and forms (the Symphony, the Concerto, the String Trio, and String Quartet, and the piano and orchestral Variations) in a modern harmonic and melodic language.

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 had sometimes no longer 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 , 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 esate 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 argues that the whole of Webern's music takes on the nature of such dramatic and visual tableaux, if in a more abstract and formal manner in some of the late works. Melodies frequently begin and end on weak beats, settle into or arise out of ostinati, or otherwise dynamically and texturally emerge or fade away. 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 , especially from the poetry of Stefan 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 , 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 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 Schoenberg did later, ultimately considering ''Jakobsleiter'' a "real twelve-tone composition" for its opening hexachordal ostinato and referring to a "Scherzo heme... which accidentally consisted of all the twelve tones," aware that " historian will probably one day find ... how enthusiastic ebern and Iwere about this." On the journey to composition with twelve tones, Webern revised many of his middle-period 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

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, which Webern himself 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" culminating in a twelve-tone simultaneity.

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 of Franz Schubert's various ''lieder'', giving the piano accompaniment to an appropriately Schubertian orchestra of strings and pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns: "Der Vollmond Strahlt auf Bergeshöhn" (the Romanze from ''Rosamunde''), "Tränenregen" (from ''Die schöne Müllerin''), "Der Wegweiser" (from ''Winterreise''), "Du bist die Ruh", and "Ihr Bild"; 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 Franz 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 ''Amtliche Wiener Zeitung'' (28 March 1925) read "''neu in jedem Sinne, frisch, unverbraucht, durch ihn zieht die Jugend, die Freude''" ("new in every respect, fresh, vital, pervaded by youth and joy"). 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 's discretion.

Performance style

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, Hermann Scherchen) in a contemporaneous tradition of conscientiously and non-literally handling notated musical figures, phrases, and even entire scores so as to maximize expressivity in performance and to cultivate audience engagement and understanding. 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."

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

Reception, influence, and legacy

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."

In part because he had largely remained 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 acquiring "a saintly, visionary aura". This was made possible in large part by René Leibowitz as he championed, performed, promulgated, and published ''Schoenberg et son école'', but Theodor W. Adorno 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.

It has been suggested that post-war composers' fascination with Webern's music was enabled by its apparent simplicity and concision facilitating musical analysis. Gottfried Michael Koenig speculates on the basis of his personal experience that since Webern's scores represented such a highly concentrated source, they may have been considered the better for didactic purposes than those of other composers. 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 fvisually amusing"; several days later, one of his articles in the ''Der Kurier'' was similarly headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at."

Meanwhile, Webern's characteristically passionate pan-German nationalism and politics were not widely known or mooted, likely due to his personal associations in and Red Vienna, his marginalization under fascism and ''Gleichschaltung'', his loyalty and assistance to his Jewish friends and colleagues (especially after ''Kristallnacht''), and his mysterious fate in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Significantly as relates to his reception, Stravinsky noted that Webern never compromised his artistic identity and values.

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

Well into and beyond the 1960s, Webern's work continued to influence 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 xpressionistmusic 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 (traces perhaps of Berg, whose example Pousseur cites, from whose music he quotes 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. Both Ferneyhough and Lachenmann sympathetically 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 örenis Defenseless—without Listening ören" 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."

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 Formalism (music)#Soviet Union, anti-formalist Cultural policy, 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 Hungarian Revolution of 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 and wrote music with serial techniques in the late 1960s, returned to tonality in Brno and was rewarded. Later still and farther east, Sofia Gubaidulina, for whom music was an Inner emigration, escape from the sociopolitical atmosphere of Stalinism, post-Stalinist Soviet Russia, cited the influence of both Johann Sebastian Bach, JS Bach and Webern in particular; she emigrated to Germany in 1992.

Webern's music remains polarizing and provocative within various community of practice, communities of musicians and scholars. Its legacy (or Western canon, canonic status) has been celebrated, confirmed, and challenged with recourse or reference to Cultural studies, culture, history, ideology, philosophy, politics, Social environment, social context, and public opinion or audience reception as a Critical theory, 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 Formalism (music), formal musical analysis, which itself was enriched by David Lewin's work toward a more integrative and Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenological approach, Julian Johnson worked toward a hermeneutics of Webern's music, building on the middle-period ''lieder'' Sketch (music), sketch studies of Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler as well as the work of the Moldenhauers. Since the "Restoration of the 1980s," as Martin Kaltenecker termed a paradigm shift from structure more toward perception within the discourse of Neue Musik, New Music, challenges have been raised within Musicology#Historical musicology, historical musicology, prompting 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." Though noted for his polemicism, Taruskin's work on Neue Musik, New Music since and including the Second Viennese School; ; ; in particular was criticized not only by Holzer and Rosen, but also by Max Erwin, Larson Powell, , , and particularly 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 himself admitted to having acquired a "dubious reputation" on the Second Viennese School and noted that he was described as "coming, like Shakespeare's Marc Anthony, 'to bury Webern, not to praise him'". In relation to post-Webernism more generally, Holzer warned of attempts "to place Darmstädter Ferienkurse, 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"
* Webern conducts his arrangement of Schubert's German Dances

Notes

References

Bibliography

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Further reading

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

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Webern, Anton Von
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