Anton Webern

Abstract

Anton Webern (b. 1883–d. 1945) is one of the most significant composers in the history of 20th-century music. Born in Vienna and raised in Graz and Klagenfurt, he studied musicology at the University of Vienna with Guido Adler from 1902 to 1906 and became a private pupil of Arnold Schoenberg in 1904. Together with his teacher, as well as his fellow student and friend Alban Berg, he was an exponent of avant-garde music in Austria ever since 1910 (the year of the first performance of some of Webern’s “atonal” works) and a representative of the so-called Second Viennese School. In the 1920s, Webern adopted Schoenberg’s “composition with twelve notes related only to one another” in a characteristically individual manner, emphasizing internal relationships of the rows. Although he was excluded from almost all of his former activities—especially from conducting—due to the cultural policy in prewar Austria from 1934 onward, Webern did not leave the country, although he communicated only within a small circle, including the painter and poet Hildegard Jone, whose verse he exclusively set to music in his late vocal compositions. Due to a misunderstanding he was shot and killed by an American Army soldier in September 1945. Throughout his lifetime, Webern was generally regarded as a radical follower, ardent disciple, and even as an epigone, of Schoenberg. After his death, young composers of the Darmstadt circle recognized Webern’s work as groundbreaking for their integral serialism. In the 1950s, this led to an extraordinary posthumous fame for Webern, connecting him to the controversies regarding New Music in the “Webern Style.” During the 1970s, commentators recognized Webern’s music more for its expressivity and its connections with the music of Mahler. From the very beginning, scholarly literature about Webern played its part in the construction of such specific images of the composer. In the 1980s, with the transfer of the greater part of Webern’s estate from Hans Moldenhauer’s private archive in Spokane, WA, to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, researchers gained more open access to the contents of the archive, so that they could address some previous polarizing views on Webern’s efforts through source studies. At the beginning of the 21st century, Webern and his music also became the subject of different approaches related to cultural studies in a broader sense (e.g., social studies or gender studies) and postmodern methodologies (e.g., deconstruction). At any rate, Webern’s frequently very concentrated, even condensed sound structures have been a favorite subject for analyses by a vast spectrum of music-theoretical approaches and schools, of which this article can provide only a representative selection.