Anton Webern: Difference between revisions

Austrian composer and conductor (1883–1945)

Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern^[a] (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.^[1]

Little known in the earlier part of his life, not only as a student and follower of Schoenberg, but also as a peripatetic and often unhappy theater music director with a mixed reputation for being a demanding conductor, Webern came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher^[b] in Red Vienna. With Schoenberg away at the Prussian Academy of Arts (and with the benefit of a publication agreement secured through Emil Hertzka‘s 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, initially more than his earlier expressionist works, would significantly influence a later 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to taking the “path to the new music” as he styled it in a series of private lectures (delivered 1932–1933 but unpublished until 1960).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.

Posthumously Webern’s work became celebrated and influential, 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.^[3] 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 archivists, biographers, and musicologists, most importantly Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, gained access to sketches, letters, lectures, audio recordings, and other articles of Webern’s and others’ estates.^[5]

Biography[edit]

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

Webern was born in Vienna, then in Austria-Hungary. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a descendent of minor nobility [de], high-ranking civil servant, mining engineer,^[7] 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.^[10] Webern memorialized the Preglhof in a diary poem “An der Preglhof” and in the tone poem Im Sommerwind (1904), both after Bruno Wille‘s idyll. Once Webern’s father sold the estate in 1912, 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^[c] and devoted Wagnerian who had been in contact with both Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.^[d] He learned the…