| Anton Webern | |
| Birth Date: | 3 December 1883 |
| Birth Place: | Vienna, Austria-Hungary |
| Death Place: | Mittersill, Allied-occupied Austria |
| List Of Works: | List of compositions |
| Signature: | Anton Webern transparent signature bw.png |
Anton Webern (pronounced as /de/; 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its concision and use 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. Their atonal music brought them fame and stirred debate. Webern was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in an aphoristic, expressionist style, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process.
Peripatetic, unhappy, and often assigned light music and operetta in his early conducting career, he aspired to conduct more established repertoire with more autonomy at home in Vienna. During and after World War I, he set folk, lyric, and spiritual texts in texturally dense German: [[Lieder]]. He came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher in Red Vienna. With a publication contract through Emil Hertzka's Universal Edition and Schoenberg away at the Prussian Academy of Arts, Webern wrote music of increasing confidence, independence, and scale using twelve-tone technique. He maintained his "path to the new music" while marginalized as a "cultural Bolshevist" effectively until his death.
A variety of post-World War II musicians celebrated his music, much of which was first published only then or later still. Among these were many composers influenced especially by his twelve-tone music in a phenomenon known as post-Webernism, linking but not restricting Webern's legacy to serialism. Understanding of his musical semantics or semiotics, performance pratice, and sociocultural contexts was widely fledgling after years of severe disruption. This was gradually improved by musicians and scholars who helped publish and record his works as well as establish his music as modernist repertoire. A German: [[Historical editions (music)|Gesamtausgabe]] (complete edition) is pending.
Webern was born in Vienna, 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. Much of Webern's early youth was in Graz (1890–1894) and Klagenfurt (1894–1902), though his father's work briefly took the family to Olmütz and back to Vienna.
His mother Amalie (née Geer) was a pianist and accomplished singer. She taught Webern piano and sang opera with him. He received first drums, then a trumpet, and later a violin as Christmas gifts. With his sisters Rosa and Maria, Webern danced to music and ice-skated the to the Wörthersee. Edwin Komauer taught him cello, and the family played chamber music, including that of Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven. Webern learned to play Bach's cello suites and may have studied Bach's polyphony under Komauer.
The extended Webern family spent summers, holidays, and vacations at their country estate, the Preglhof. The children played outside in the forest and on a high meadow with pasture grazed by herded cattle and with a church-and-mountain view; they bathed in a pond (where Webern once saved Rosa from drowning). He drove horses to Bleiburg and fought a wildfire encroaching on the estate. These experiences and reading Peter Rosegger's shaped Webern's distinct and lasting sense of Heimat.
After a trip to Bayreuth, Webern studied musicology at the University of Vienna (1902–1906) with Guido Adler, a friend of Mahler, composition student of Bruckner, and devoted Wagnerian who had been in contact with both Wagner and Liszt. Egon Wellesz recalled he and Webern analyzed Beethoven's late quartets at the piano in Adler's seminars. Webern learned the historical development of musical styles and techniques, editing the second volume of Heinrich Isaac's Choralis Constantinus as his doctoral thesis. Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer noted Webern's scholarly engagement with Isaac's music as a formative experience for Webern the composer. Webern especially praised Isaac's voice leading or "subtle organization in the interplay of parts":
Webern also studied art history and philosophy under professors Max Dvořák,, and Franz Wickhoff, joining the Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft in 1903. His cousin, an art historian studying in Graz, may have led him to the work of Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, which he admired along with that of Ferdinand Hodler and Moritz von Schwind. Webern idolized Segantini's landscapes on a par with Beethoven's music, diarying in 1904:
In 1904, Webern approached Hans Pfitzner for composition lessons but left angrily when Pfitzner criticized Mahler and Richard Strauss. Adler admired Schoenberg's work and may have sent Webern to him for composition lessons. Thus Webern met Berg, another Schoenberg pupil, and Schoenberg's brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky, through whom Webern may have worked as an assistant coach at the German: [[Volksoper]]|italic=no in Vienna (1906–1909). Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern became devoted, lifelong friends with similar musical trajectories. Adler, Heinrich Jalowetz, and Webern played Schoenberg's quartets under the composer, accompanying Marie Gutheil-Schoder in rehearsals for Op. 10.
Also through Schoenberg, who painted and had a 1910 solo exhibition at 's bookstore, Webern met Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer (with whom he corresponded on German: [[T–V distinction#German|ich–Du]] terms), Egon Schiele, and Emil Stumpp. In 1920, Webern wrote Berg about the "indescribable impression" Klimt's work made on him, "that of a luminous, tender, heavenly realm". He also met Karl Kraus, whose lyrics he later set, but only to completion in Op. 13/i.
Webern married Wilhelmine "Minna" Mörtl in a 1911 civil ceremony in Danzig. She had become pregnant in 1910 and feared disapproval, as they were cousins. Thus the Catholic Church only solemnized their lasting union in 1915, after three children.
They met in 1902, later hiking along the Kamp from Rosenburg-Mold to Allentsteig in 1905. He wooed her with John Ruskin essays (in German translation), dedicating his Langsamer Satz to her. Webern diaried about their time together "with obvious literary aspirations":
Webern conducted and coached singers and choirs in opera, operetta, musical theater, and light music in his early career. Operetta was in its Viennese Silver Age. It was regarded as low- or middlebrow; Kraus, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Krenek found it "uppity" in its pretensions. "What benefit ... if all operettas ... were destroyed", Webern told Dietz in 1908. But in 1912, he told Berg that Zeller's Vogelhändler was "quite nice" and Schoenberg that J. Strauss II's Nacht in Venedig was "such fine, delicate music. I now believe ... Strauss is a master."
A summer 1908 engagement with Bad Ischl's was "hell". Webern walked out on an engagement in Innsbruck (1909), writing in distress to Schoenberg: Webern wrote Zemlinsky seeking work at the Berlin or Vienna Volksoper instead. He started at Bad Teplitz's Civic Theater in early 1910, where the local news reported his "sensitive, devoted guidance" as conductor of Fall's Geschiedene Frau, but he quit within months due to disagreements. His repertoire likely included Fall's Dollarprinzessin, Lehár's Graf von Luxemburg, O. Straus's Walzertraum, J. Strauss II's Fledermaus, and Schumann's Manfred. There were only 22 musicians in the orchestra, too few to perform Puccini's operas, he noted.
Webern then summered at the Preglhof, composing his Op. 7 and planning an opera. In September, he attended the Munich premiere of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand and visited with his idol, who gave Webern a sketch of "German: Lob der Kritik|italic=no". Webern then worked with Jalowetz as assistant conductor in Danzig (1910–1911), where he first saw the "almost frightening" ocean. He conducted von Flotow's Wintermärchen, George's Försterchristl, Jones' Geisha, Lehár's Lustige Witwe, Lortzing's Waffenschmied, Offenbach's Belle Hélène, and J. Strauss II's Zigeunerbaron. He particularly enjoyed Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann and Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia, but only Jalowetz was allowed to conduct this more established repertoire.
Webern soon expressed homesickness to Berg; he could not bear the separation from Schoenberg and their world in Vienna. He returned after resigning in spring 1911, and the three were pallbearers at Mahler's funeral in May 1911. Then in summer 1911, an neighbor's antisemitic abuse and aggression caused Schoenberg to quit work, abandon Vienna, and go with his family to stay with Zemlinsky on the German: [[Starnbergersee]]|italics=no. Webern and others fundraised for Schoenberg's return, circulating more than one hundred leaflets with forty-eight signatories, including G. Adler, Klimt, Kraus, and R. Strauss, among others. But Schoenberg was resolved to move to Berlin, and not for the first or last time, convinced of Vienna's fundamental hostility.
Webern soon joined him (1910–1912), finishing no new music in his devoted work on Schoenberg's behalf, which entailed many editing and writing projects. He gradually became tired, unhappy, and homesick. He tried to persuade Schoenberg to return home to Vienna, continuing the fundraising campaign and lobbying for a position there for Schoenberg, only for Schoenberg to decline a return to the Vienna Academy. At the same time, Webern began a cycle of repeatedly quitting and being taken back by Zemlinsky at the German: [[State Opera (Prague)|Deutsches Landestheater Prague]]|italics=no (1911–1918). He also had a short-lived conducting post in Stettin (1912–1913).
Webern had little time (mostly summers) to compose. There were conflicts at work (e.g., he emphasized a director called him a "little man"). His ambivalence toward sales-oriented popular music theater contributed ("I ... stir the sauce", he wrote). "It appears ... improbable that I should remain with the theatre. It is ... terrible. ... I can hardly ... adjust to being away from home", he wrote Schoenberg in 1910. Miserably ill, he sought medical advice and took rest at a sanatorium in . In 1912–1913 he had a breakdown and saw Alfred Adler, who noted his idealism and perfectionism. Adler evaluated his symptoms as psychogenic responses to unmet expectations. Webern wrote Schoenberg that Adler's psychoanalysis was helpful and insightful.
Webern's father sold the Preglhof in 1912, and Webern mourned it as a "lost paradise". He revisited it and the family grave in nearby Schwabegg his entire life, associating these places with the memory of his mother, whose 1906 loss profoundly affected him. In 1912, he confided in Berg and Schoenberg respectively: "my compositions ... relate to the death of my mother"; and
For Christmas in 1912, he gave Schoenberg Rosegger's , from which Julian Johnson highlighted:
Webern frequented the surrounding Carinthian-Styrian Alps, treasuring it as time "up there, in the heights", where "one should stay". He backpacked or summited the Gaisstein, Grossglockner, Hochschober, Hochschwab, and Schneealpe (among others) throughout his life, fascinated by the alpine climate, föhn, glaciers, pines, and springs "crystal clear down to the bottom". He collected and organized "mysterious" herbs and flowers in pressed albums, later keeping cherished gardens where he made his home in the Mödling District (first in Mödling, then in Maria Enzersdorf). Webern associated nature with his personal (youthful and spiritual) experiences, forming a topical nexus that recurred in his diaries, letters, and music (explicitly in sketches and set texts).
Such habits endured in Webern's life and French: œuvre. In 1933, Joseph Hueber recalled Webern stopped in a fragrant meadow, dug his hands into the soil, and breathed in the flowers and grass before rising to ask: "Do you sense 'Him' ... as strongly as I, 'Him, Pan'?" In 1934, Webern's lyricist and collaborator Hildegard Jone described his work as "filled ... with the endless love and delicacy of the memory of ... childhood". Webern told her, "through my work, all that is past becomes like a childhood".
Webern served intermittently and patriotically in World War I, moving frequently and tiring. Eventually he hoped for its end. Despite Schoenberg's and his father's advice that he not quit conducting, in 1918 Webern returned to Schoenberg in Mödling, hoping to compose more. His finances were so poor that he soon explored a return to Prague, but other opportunities arose.
Webern worked with friends at the Society for Private Musical Performances (1918–1921), promoting new music through performances and contests. Music included that of Bartók, Berg, Busoni, Debussy, Korngold, Mahler, Novák, Ravel, Reger, Satie, Strauss, Stravinsky, and Webern himself. Webern wrote Berg about Stravinsky's "indescribably touching" Berceuses du chat and "glorious" Pribaoutki, which Schoenberg conducted at a sold-out 1919 Society concert. There was perhaps some shared influence among Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern at this time. The Society dissolved amid catastrophic hyperinflation in 1921.
Webern worked as director of the German: [[Wiener Schubertbund]]|italic=no and in 1922 of the mixed-voice amateur German: Singverein der Sozialdemokratischen Kunstelle|italic=no and the German: Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte|italic=no through David Josef Bach, Director of the German: Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle|italic=no. In 1926, Webern resigned as chorusmaster of the Mödling German: Männergesangverein|italic=no for hiring Jewish soprano Greta Wilheim as a stand-in soloist for Schubert's cantata Mirjams Siegesgesang. Webern hired Erich Leinsdorf as German: Singverein|italic=no pianist in 1933; they performed Stravinsky's ballet-cantata Les Noces.[1]
"Webern is the greatest conductor since Mahler himself", wrote Berg to Erwin Stein after Webern led Mahler's Third in 1922. RAVAG aired his performances at least twenty times starting in 1927. He was applauded as much as Willem Mengelberg in Holland. In Le Ménestrel (1930), Armand Machabey noted Webern's regional reputation as a conductor of French: "haute valeur" for his meticulous approach to then contemporary music.
Perhaps on religious grounds, Krenek speculated, Webern seemed uneasy in his dependence on the Social Democrats for conducting work. Citing Roberto Gerhard and Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Walter Kolneder judged, "Artistic work for and with workers was [from] a ... Christian standpoint which Webern took very seriously". Some on the left, notably in Der Kampf (1929), criticized Webern's programming as more ambitious and bourgeois than popular and proletarian.
Webern's finances were often precarious, even in his years of relative success. Relief came from family, friends, patrons, and prizes. He twice received the . To compose more, he sought income while trying not to overcommit himself as a conductor. He contracted with Universal Edition only after 1919, reaching better terms in 1927, but he was not very ambitious or astute in business. Even with a doctorate and Guido Adler's respect, he never secured a remunerative university position, whereas in 1925 Schoenberg was invited to the Prussian Academy of Arts, ending their seven years together in Mödling.
Social Democrat–Christian Social relations polarized and radicalized amid the . 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 , Ignaz Seipel of the officially applied the term "Red Vienna" pejoratively, attacking Vienna's educational and cultural institutions. Social unrest escalated to the July Revolt of 1927 and beyond. Webern's nostalgia for social order intensified with increasing civil disorder. In 1928 friends fundraised for him, partly to fund a rest cure at the German: Kurhaus Semmering|italic=no for his exhaustion and gastrointestinal complaints.
In 1928, Berg celebrated the "lasting works" and successes of composers "whose point of departure was ... late Mahler, Reger, and Debussy and whose temporary end point is in ... Schoenberg" in their rise from "pitiful 'cliques'" to a large, diverse, international, and "irresistible movement". But they were soon marginalized and ostracized in Central Europe with few exceptions.
Webern's music was performed more widely starting in the latter half of 1920s. Yet he found no great success as Berg enjoyed with Wozzeck nor 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 by the League of Composers (1929) and in London at the 1931 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival. Louis Krasner sensed some resentment, noting that Webern had "very little". Krenek's impression was that Webern resented his financial hardships and lack of wider recognition.
Financial crises, complex social and political movements, pervasive antisemitism, culture wars, and renewed military conflicts continued to shape Webern's world, profoundly circumscribing his life. In the Austrian Civil War, Austrofascists executed, exiled, and imprisoned Social Democrats, outlawed their party, and abolished cultural institutions. Stigmatized by his decade-long association with Social Democrats, Webern lost a promising domestic conducting career, which might have been better recorded. He worked as a UE editor and board member and president (1933–1938, 1945).
Webern delivered an eight-lecture series German: Der Weg zur Neuen Musik at 's and her physician husband Rudolf Kurzman's home (Feb.–Apr. 1933). He attacked fascist cultural policy, asking "What will come of our struggle?" He observed that "'cultural Bolshevism' is the name given to everything that is going on around Schoenberg, Berg, and myself (Krenek too)" and warned, "Imagine what will be destroyed, wiped out, by this hate of culture!" He lectured more at the Kurzmann-Leuchter home, privately in 1934–1935 on Beethoven's piano sonatas to about 40 attendees and later in 1937–1938.
His music and that of Berg, Krenek, Schoenberg, et al. was declared "Jewish" in Austria and German: "[[Entartete Musik]]"|italic=no by Nazis. Persevering, Webern wrote Krenek that "art has its own laws ... if one wants to achieve something in it, only these laws and nothing else can have validity"; upon completing Op. 26 (1935), he wrote DJ Bach, "I hope it is so good that (if people ever get to know it) they will declare me ready for a concentration camp or an insane asylum!" The Vienna Philharmonic nearly refused to play Berg's Violin Concerto (1936). Peter Stadlen's 1937 Op. 27 premieres were the last Viennese Webern performances until after World War II. The critical success of Hermann Scherchen's 1938 ISCM London Op. 26 premiere encouraged Webern to write more cantatas and reassured him after a cellist quit Op. 20 mid-performance, declaring it unplayable.
Webern's milieu comprised increasingly vast differences. Like most Austrians, he and his family were Catholic, though not church regulars; Webern was perhaps devout if unorthodox. They became politically divided. His friends (e.g., then Zionist Schoenberg, left-leaning Berg) were of a mostly Jewish milieu in late Imperial and then "red" (Social Democratic) Vienna. Alma Mahler, Krenek,, and Stein preferred or supported the "lesser evil" of the Austrofascists (or aligned Italian fascists) French: vis-à-vis the Nazis. Presuming power would moderate Hitler, Webern mediated among friends with an optimistic, perhaps self-soothing, complacency, exasperating those who were at risk. He found himself surrounded mostly by one side as Schoenberg emigrated to the US (1933), Rudolf Ploderer died by suicide (1933), Berg died (1935), and DJ Bach, among others, fled or worse.
Webern's views of National Socialism were variously described. His published items reflected his audience or context. Secondary literature reflected limited evidence or ideological orientations and admitted uncertainty. Julie Brown noted hesitancy to approach the topic and echoed the Moldenhauers, considering the issue "vexed" and Webern a "political enigma". Bailey Puffett considered his politics "somewhat vague" and his situation "complex", noting that he practically avoided definitive political association. Johnson described him as "personally shy, a man of private feeling and essentially apolitical", "prone to identify with Nazi politics as ... other ... Austrians". Krasner surmised Webern's cognitive dissonance, finding him "idealistic and rather naive". In 1943 Kurt List described Webern as "utterly ignorant" and "perpetual[ly] confus[ed]" about politics, "a ready prey to the personal influence of family and friends".
Webern conducted nine concerts as a BBC Symphony visiting conductor (1929–1936). He selected then little-known Mahler (including both nocturnes from the Symphony No. 7 in 1934), insisted on rehearsing at the piano with vocalists, and was criticized for coaching musical phrasing. Grief-stricken after Berg's death and overwhelmed by difficulties, he withdrew from the 1936 world premiere of Berg's Violin Concerto in Barcelona. There Krasner recalled, The two then played the concerto in London with BBC musicians, who rehearsed before Webern conducted. There Kenneth Anthony Wright observed Webern's "funny little explanations of the varying dynamics and flexibility of tempo"; "every syllable and every gesture of Webern was understood and lovingly heeded", said Krasner. The musicians "all admired and respected Webern", according to Sidonie Goossens. But Felix Aprahamian, Benjamin Britten, and Berthold Goldschmidt criticized Webern's conducting, and BBC management did not invite him back after 1936.
Krasner's last visit with Webern was interrupted by Kurt Schuschnigg's broadcast speech that the Anschluss was imminent. Krasner had been playing some of Schoenberg's Violin Concerto for Webern and trying to convince him to write a sonata for solo violin. When Webern turned on the radio and heard this speech, he urged Krasner to flee. Because Webern's family included Nazis, Krasner wondered whether Webern had already known that the Anschluss was planned for that day. He also wondered whether Webern's warning had been solely for his safety or whether it had also been to save Webern the embarrassment of the violinist's presence in the event of celebration at the Webern home.
Much of Austria did celebrate. But Webern made only a terse note of the Anschluss in his notebook without registering any clear emotion. In fact, he wrote Jone and her husband Josef Humplik asking not to be disturbed as he was "totally immersed" in work on Op. 28. Bailey Puffett suggested that Krasner's visit may have been a distraction and that he may have resented Webern, in hindsight, for "refusing to see the reality of Hitler's antisemitism" until perhaps after 1936.
Support for the Anschluss rested on antisemitism, economic prospects, and the idea of a Greater Germany. Under some duress, Theodor Innitzer ushered in Catholic support. Karl Renner supported unification as a matter of self-determination before the years (1933–1938) of German: [[Gleichschaltung]] and Nazi soft power, and he and others now supported (or accepted as inevitable) the 1938 Anschluss. Webern had long shared in common pan-German sentiments, especially during wartime. He also likely hoped to conduct again, securing a firmer future for his family under a new regime proclaiming itself "socialist" no less than nationalist. According to Josef Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian, Webern's optimism was not dispelled until 1941.
German: [[Kristallnacht]]|italic=no shocked Webern. He visited and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach,, 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, whose emigration Schoenberg and Webern were unable to secure, managed to survive the Holocaust as an albino; he later edited a 1959 UE publication of Webern's correspondence from this time with Humplik and Jone. Webern moved Humplik's 1929 gift of a Mahler bust to his bedroom.
Webern found himself increasingly alone, with "almost all his friends and old pupils ... gone", and his financial situation was poor. He had considered joining Schoenberg in the US since 1933 but was reluctant to leave home and family. He entered a period of "inward emigration", writing to artist Franz Rederer in 1939, "We live completely withdrawn. I work a lot." He corresponded extensively to maintain relationships, imploring his student George Robert to play Schoenberg in New York and expressing his loneliness and isolation to Schoenberg. Then war limited postal service, disrupting their direct correspondence completely by 1941.
Webern's music was performed mostly outside the German: Reich, where only his tonal music and arrangements were allowed as works not in the style of a German: "[[Glossary of Nazi Germany#J|Judenknecht]]". Supported by IGNM-Sektion Basel, the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur, and Werner Reinhart, he attended three Swiss concerts, his last trips outside the German: Reich. In 1940, Erich Schmid conducted Op. 1 in Winterthur; soprano Marguerite Gradmann-Lüscher sang Op. 4 and most of Op. 12 (not No. 3) at the Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel, Schmid accompanying. In Feb. 1943, Scherchen gave the world premiere of Op. 30 at the .
Webern intimated to Willi Reich that he might emigrate there, joking (Oct. 1939) "Anything of the sort did seem quite out of the question for me!" But Webern failed to find employment, even as a formality, likely due to anti-German sentiment in the context of Swiss neutrality and refugee laws.
In the Reich, he met with former Society violist Othmar Steinbauer about a formal teaching role in Vienna in early 1940, but nothing materialized. He lectured at the homes of Erwin Ratz and 's widow Margaret (1940–1942). Many private pupils came to him between 1940 and 1943, even from afar, among them briefly Karl Amadeus Hartmann.
Sharing in wartime public sentiment at the height of Hitler's popularity (spring 1940), Webern expressed high hopes, crediting him as "unique" and "singular" for "the new state for which the seed was laid twenty years ago". These were patriotic letters to Joseph Hueber, an active soldier, baritone, close friend, and mountaineering companion who often sent Webern gifts. Indeed, Hueber had just sent Webern Mein Kampf. Unaware of Stefan George's aversion to the Nazis, Webern reread and marveled suggestively at the wartime leader envisioned therein, but "I am not taking a position!" he wrote active soldier, singer, and onetime Social Democrat, Hans Humpelstetter. For Johnson, "Webern's own image of a German: 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 status quo."
By Aug. 1940, Webern depended financially on his children. He sought wartime emergency relief funds from German: Künstlerhilfe Wien|italic=no and the German: [[Reichsmusikkammer]]|italic=no (1940–1944), which he received despite indicating non-membership in the Nazi Party on an application. Whether Webern ever joined the party was unknown. This represented his only income after mid-1942. He nearly exhausted his savings by 1944.
His 1943–1945 letters were strewn with references to bombings, death, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order, but several grandchildren were born. In Dec. 1943, aged 60, he wrote from a barrack that he was working 6 am–5 pm as an air-raid protection police officer, conscripted into the war effort. He corresponded with Willi Reich about IGNM-Sektion Basel's concert marking his sixtieth, in which Paul Baumgartner played Op. 27, Walter Kägi Op. 7, and August Wenzinger Op. 11. Gradmann-Lüscher sang both Opp. 3 and the world premiere of 23. For Schoenberg's 70th birthday (1944), Webern asked Reich to convey "my most heartfelt remembrances, ... longing! ... hopes for a happy future!" Webern's only son Peter, intermittently conscripted since 1940, was killed (14 Feb. 1945) in an air attack. Airstrike sirens interrupted the family's mourning.
The Weberns assisted Schoenberg's first son Görgi during the war; with the Red Army's April 1945 arrival imminent, they gave him their Mödling apartment, the property and childhood home of Webern's son-in-law Benno Mattl. Görgi later told Krasner that Webern "felt he'd betrayed his best friends." The Weberns fled west, resorting to traveling partly on foot to Mittersill to rejoin their family of "17 persons pressed together in the smallest possible space".
On the night of 15 Sept. 1945, Webern was outside smoking when he was shot and killed by a US soldier in an apparent accident. He had been following Thomas Mann's work, which the Nazis had burned, noting in 1944 that Mann had finished Joseph and His Brothers. In his last notebook entry, Webern quoted Rainer Maria Rilke: "Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything."
Webern's wife Minna suffered final years of grief, poverty, and loneliness as friends and family continued emigrating. She wished Webern lived to see more success. With the abolition of German: Entartete Kunst|italic=no policies, solicited her for hidden manuscripts; thus Opp. 17, 24–25, and 29–31 were published. She worked to get Webern's 1907 Piano Quintet published via Kurt List.
In 1947 she wrote Dietz, now in the US, that by 1945 Webern was "firmly resolved to go to England". Likewise, in 1946 she wrote DJ Bach in London: "How difficult the last eight years had been for him. ... [H]e had only the one wish: to flee from this country. But one was caught, without a will of one's own. ... It was close to the limit of endurance what we had to suffer." Minna died in 1949.
Webern's music was generally concise, organic, and parsimonious, with very small motifs, palindromes, and parameterization on both the micro- and macro-scale. His idiosyncratic approach reflected affinities with Schoenberg, Mahler, Guido Adler and early music; interest in esotericism and German: [[Naturphilosophie]]; and thorough perfectionism. He engaged with the work of Goethe, Bach, and the Franco-Flemish School in addition to that of Wolf, Brahms, Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Beethoven, Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), and Mozart. Stylistic shifts were not neatly coterminous with gradually developed technical devices, particularly in the case of his mid-period German: Lieder.
His music was also characteristically linear and song-like. Much of it (and Berg's and Schoenberg's) was for singing. Johnson described the song-like gestures of Op. 11/i. In Webern's mid-period German: Lieder, some heard instrumentalizing of the voice (often in relation to the clarinet) representing yet some continuity with Italian: [[bel canto]]. Lukas Näf described one of Webern's signature hairpins (on the Op. 21/i mm. 8–9 bass clarinet Italian: [[tenuto]] note) as a messa di voce requiring some rubato to execute faithfully. Adventurous textures and timbres, and melodies of wide leaps and sometimes extreme ranges and registers were typical.
For Johnson, Webern's rubato compressed Mahler's "'surging and ebbing'" tempi; this and Webern's dynamics indicated a "vestigial lyrical subjectivity." Webern often set carefully chosen lyric poetry. He related his music not only to nostalgia for the lost family and home of his youth, but also to his Alpinism and fascination with botanical aromatics and morphology. He was compared to Mahler in his orchestration and semantic preoccupations (e.g., memory, landscapes, nature, loss, often Catholic mysticism). In Jone, who he met with her husband Humplik via the German: [[Hagenbund]]|italic=no, Webern found a lyricist who shared his esoteric, natural, and spiritual interests. She provided texts for his late vocal works.
Webern's and Schoenberg's music distinctively prioritized minor seconds, major sevenths, and minor ninths as noted in 1934 by microtonalist Alois Hába. The Kholopov siblings noted the semitone's unifying role by axial inversional symmetry and octave equivalence as interval class 1 (ic1), approaching Allen Forte's generalized pitch-class set analysis. Webern's consistent use of ic1 in cells and sets, often expressed as a wide interval musically, was well noted. Symmetric pitch-interval practices varied in rigor and use by others (e.g., Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók, Debussy, Stravinsky; more nascently Mahler, Brahms, Bruckner, Liszt, Wagner). Berg and Webern took symmetric approaches to elements of music beyond pitch. Webern later linked pitches and other parameters in schemes (e.g., fixed or "frozen" register).
Relatively few of Webern's works were published in his lifetime. Amid fascism and Emil Hertzka's passing, this included late as well as early works (in addition to others without opus numbers). His rediscovery prompted many publications, but some early works were unknown until after the work of the Moldenhauers well into the 1980s, obscuring formative facets of his musical identity. Thus when Boulez first oversaw a project to record Webern's music, the results fit on three CDs and the second time, six. A German: Gesamtausgabe has remained in progress.
Webern published little juvenilia; like Brahms, he was meticulous and self-conscious, revising extensively. His earliest works were mostly Lieder on works of Richard Dehmel, Gustav Falke, and Theodor Storm. He set seven Ferdinand Avenarius poems on the "changing moods" of life and nature (1899–1904). Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf were important models. With its brief, potent expressivity and utopianization of the natural world, the (German) Romantic Lied had a lasting influence on Webern's musical aesthetic. He never abandoned its lyricism, intimacy, and wistful or nostalgic topics, though his music became more abstract, idealized, and introverted.
Webern memorialized the Preglhof in a diary poem "An der Preglhof" and in the tone poem Im Sommerwind (1904), both after Bruno Wille's idyll. In Webern's Sommerwind, Derrick Puffett found affinities with Strauss's Alpensinfonie, Charpentier's Louise, and Delius's Paris.
At the Pregholf in summer 1905, Webern wrote his tripartite, single-movement string quartet in a highly modified sonata form, likely responding to Schoenberg's Op. 7. He quoted Jakob Böhme in the preface and mentioned the panels of Segantini's Italian: Trittico della natura as "German: Werden–Sein–Vergehen" in sketches. Sebastian Wedler argued that this quartet bore the influence of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra in its germinal three-note motive, opening fugato of its third (development) section, and Nietzschean reading (via eternal recurrence) of Segantini's triptych. In its opening harmonies, Allen Forte and Heinz-Klaus Metzger noted Webern's anticipation of Schoenberg's atonality in Op. 10.
In 1906, Schoenberg assigned Webern Bach chorales to harmonize and figure; Webern completed eighteen in a highly chromatic idiom. Then the Passacaglia, Op. 1 (1908) was his graduation piece, and the Op. 2 choral canons soon followed. The passacaglia's chromatic harmonic language and less conventional orchestration distinguished it from prior works; its form foreshadowed those of his later works. Conducting the 1911 Danzig premiere of Op. 1 at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-, he paired it with Debussy's 1894 Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Ludwig Thuille's 1896 Romantische Ouvertüre, and Mahler's 1901–1904 Kindertotenlieder in a poorly attended German: Moderner Abend concert. The critic derided Op. 1 as an "insane experiment".
In 1908 Webern also began an opera on Maeterlinck's , of which only unfinished sketches remained. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande enraptured him twice in Dec. 1908 Berlin and again in 1911 Vienna. As a vocal coach and opera conductor, he knew the repertoire "perfectly ... every cut, ... unmarked cadenza, and in the comic operas every theatrical joke". He "adored" Mozart's Il Seraglio and revered Strauss, predicting Salome would last. When in high spirits, Webern would sing bits of Lortzing's Zar und Zimmermann, a personal favorite. He expressed interest (to Max Deutsch) in writing an opera pending a good text and adequate time; in 1930, he asked Jone for "opera texts, or rather dramatic texts", planning cantatas instead.
Webern's music, like Schoenberg's, was freely atonal after Op. 2. Some of their and Berg's music from this time was published in Der Blaue Reiter. Schoenberg and Webern were so mutually influential, the former later joked, "I haven't the slightest idea who I am". In Op. 5/iii, Webern borrowed from Schoenberg's Op. 10/ii. In Op. 5/iv, he borrowed from Schoenberg's Op. 10/iv setting of "Ich fühle luft von anderen planeten".
The first of Webern's innovative and increasingly extremely aphoristic Opp. 5–11 (1909–1914) radically influenced Schoenberg's Opp. 11/iii and 16–17 (and Berg's Opp. 4–5). Here, considered, Webern did not seek "the new ... in [music of] the past but in the future". In writing the Op. 9 bagatelles, Webern reflected in 1932, "I had the feeling that when the twelve notes had all been played the piece was over." "[H]aving freed music from the shackles of tonality," Schoenberg wrote, he and his pupils believed "music could renounce motivic features". This "intuitive aesthetic" arguably proved to be aspirational insofar as motives persisted in their music.
Two enduring topics emerged in Webern's work: familial (especially maternal) loss and memory, often involving some religious experience, and abstracted landscapes idealized as spiritual (even pantheistic) Heimat (e.g., the Preglhof, the Eastern Alps). Webern explored these ideas via Swedenborg's correspondences in Tot (Oct. 1913), a stage play in six reflective, self-consoling Alpine tableaux vivants.
Webern's music took on the character of such static dramaticovisual scenes, with pieces frequently culminating in the accumulation and amalgamation (often the developing variation) of compositional material. Fragmented melodies frequently began and ended on weak beats, settled into or emerged from ostinati, and were dynamically and texturally faded, mixed, or contrasted. Tonality became less directional, functional, or narrative than tenuous, spatial, or symbolic as fit Webern's topics and literary settings. Stein thought that "his compositions should be understood as musical visions". Oliver Korte traced Webern's German: Klangfelder to Mahler's "suspensions".
Expanding on Mahler's orchestration, Webern linked colorful, novel, fragile, and intimate sounds, often nearly silent at, to lyrical topics: solo violin to female voice; closed or open voicings, sometimes Italian: [[sul ponticello]], to dark or light respectively; compressed range to absence, emptiness, or loneliness; registral expansion to fulfillment, (spiritual) presence, or transcendence; celesta, harp, and glockenspiel to the celestial or ethereal; and trumpet, harp, and string harmonics to angels or heaven.
With elements of German: [[Kabarett]]|italic=no, neoclassicism, and ironic Romanticism in Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21 (1912), Schoenberg began to distance himself from Webern's and latterly Berg's aphoristic expressionism, which provoked the 1913 German: [[Skandalkonzert]]|italic=no.
During and after World War I (1914–1926) Webern worked on some fifty-six songs. He finished thirty-two, ordered into sets (in ways that do not always align with their chronology) as Opp. 12–19. The first of these mid-period German: Lieder was an unfinished setting of a passage ("In einer lichten Rose ...") from Dante's Paradiso, Canto XXXI. Webern had learned from the example of Schoenberg's vocal music "that one cannot persist with ... absolute purity".
Taking Schoenberg's advice to write songs as a means of composing something more substantial than aphorisms, he often made earnest settings of folk, lyric, or spiritual texts. By comparison to melodic "atomization" in Op. 11, Walter Kolneder noted relatively "long arcs" melodic writing in Op. 12 and polyphonic part writing to "control the ... expression" in Opp. 12–16 more generally. "How much I owe to your Pierrot", Webern told Schoenberg after setting Georg Trakl's "Abendland III" (Op. 14/iv), in which, distinctly, there was no silence until a pause at the concluding gesture. The contrapuntal procedures and nonstandard ensemble of Pierrot are both evident in Webern's Opp. 14–16.
Schoenberg "yearn[ed] for a style for large forms ... to give personal things an objective, general form." Berg, Webern, and he had indulged their shared interest in Swedenborgian mysticism and Theosophy since 1906, reading Balzac's Louis Lambert and Séraphîta and Strindberg's Till Damaskus and Jacob lutte. Gabriel, protagonist of Schoenberg's semi-autobiographical Die Jakobsleiter (1914–1922, rev. 1944) described a journey: "whether right, whether left, forwards or backwards, uphill or down – one must keep on going without asking what lies ahead or behind", which Webern interpreted as a pitch-space metaphor. Schoenberg later reflected on "how enthusiastic we were about this."
On the journey to composition with twelve tones, Webern revised many of his mid-period German: 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 described. His and Schoenberg's music had long been marked by its contrapuntal rigor, formal schemes, systematic pitch organization, and rich motivic design, all of which they found in the music of Brahms before them. Webern had written music preoccupied with the idea of dodecaphony since at least the total chromaticism of his Op. 9 bagatelles (1911) and Op. 11 cello pieces (1914).
There are twelve-tone sets with repeated notes at the start of Op. 12/i and in some bars of Op. 12/iv, in addition to many ten- and eleven-tone sets throughout Op. 12. Webern wrote to Jalowetz in 1922 about Schoenberg's lectures on "a new type of motivic work", one that "unfolds the entire development of, if I may say so, our technique (harmony, etc)". It was "almost everything that has occupied me for about ten years", Webern continued. He regarded Schoenberg's transformation of twelve-tone rows as the "solution" to their compositional concerns. In Op. 15/iv (1922), Webern first used a tone row (in the voice's opening twelve notes), charted the four basic row forms, and integrated tri- and tetrachords into the harmonic and melodic texture. He systematically used twelve-tone technique for the first time in Op. 16/iv–v (1924).
With Schoenberg leaving Mödling in 1925 and this compositional approach at his disposal, Webern obtained more artistic autonomy and aspired to write in larger forms, expanding on the extreme concentration of expression and material in his earlier music. Until the Kinderstück for piano (1924, intended as one of a set), Klavierstück (1925), and Satz for string trio (1925), Webern had finished nothing but German: Lieder since a 1914 cello sonata. The 1926–1927 String Trio, Op. 20, was his first large-scale non-vocal work in more than a decade. For its 1927 publication, Webern helped Stein write an introduction emphasizing continuity with tradition:
Schoenberg exploited combinatorial properties of particular tone rows, but Webern focused on prior aspects of a row's internal organization. He exploited small, invariant pitch subsets (or partitions) symmetrically derived via inversion, retrograde, or both (retrograde inversion). He understood his compositional (and precompositional) work with reference to ideas about growth, morphology, and unity that he found represented in Goethe's and in Goethean science more generally.
Webern's large-scale, non-vocal music in more traditional genres, written from 1926 to 1940, has been celebrated as his most rigorous and abstract music. Yet he always wrote his music and tried his new compositional procedures with concern for (or at least some latent reference to) expressivity and representation. In sketches for his Op. 22 quartet, Webern conceived of his themes in programmatic association with his experiences—as an "outlook into the highest region" or a "coolness of early spring (Anninger, first flora, primroses, anemones, pasqueflowers)", for example. Studying his compositional materials and sketches, Bailey Puffett wrote, While writing the Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, Webern was inspired by the Sator square, which is like a twelve-tone matrix. He concluded his German: Weg zur Neuen Musik with this magic square.
In Webern's late cantatas and songs, George Rochberg observed, "the principles of 'the structural spatial dimension' ... join[ed] forces with lyrico-dramatic demands". Specifically in his cantatas, Bailey Puffett wrote, Webern synthesized the rigorous style of his mature instrumental works with the word painting of his Lieder on an orchestral scale. Webern qualified the apparent connection between his cantatas and Bach's as general and referred to connections between the second cantata and the music of the Franco-Flemish School. His textures became somewhat denser yet more homophonic at the surface through nonetheless contrapuntal polyphonic means. In Op. 31/i he alternated lines and points, culminating twice in twelve-note simultaneities.
At his death he left sketches for the movement of an apparent third cantata (1944–1945), first planned as a concerto, setting "Das Sonnenlicht spricht" from Jone's Lumen cycle.
In his youth (1903), Webern orchestrated five or more Schubert German: Lieder for an appropriately Schubertian orchestra (strings and pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns). Among these were "Der Vollmond Strahlt auf Bergeshöhn" (the Romanze from Rosamunde), "Tränenregen" (from Die schöne Müllerin), "Der Wegweiser" (from Winterreise), "Du bist die Ruh", and "Ihr Bild".
After attending Hugo Wolf's funeral and memorial concert (1903), he arranged three German: Lieder for a larger orchestra, adding brass, harp, and percussion to the Schubertian orchestra. He chose "Lebe wohl", "Der Knabe und das Immlein", and "Denk es, o Seele", of which only the latter was finished or wholly survived.
For Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1921, Webern arranged, among other music, 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; thus Liszt's work was finally premièred when Webern conducted the first full-length concert of the Austrian Association of Workers Choir (13 and 14 March 1925). A review in the Wiener Zeitung (28 March 1925) read "neu in jedem Sinne, frisch, unverbraucht, durch ihn zieht die Jugend, die Freude" ("new in every respect, fresh, vital, pervaded by youth and joy"). The text (in English translation) read in part: "Let us have the adorned spades and scoops,/Come along all, who wield a sword or pen,/Come here ye, industrious, brave and strong/All who create things great or small."
In orchestrating the six-voice ricercar from Bach's Musikalisches Opfer, Webern timbrally defined the internal organization (or latent subsets) of the Bach's subject. Joseph N. Straus argued that Webern (and other modernists) effectively recomposed earlier music, "projecting motivic density" onto tradition. After more conservatively orchestrating two of Schubert's 1824 Six German Dances on UE commission in 1931, he wrote Schoenberg:
Webern's music was generally considered difficult by performers and inaccessible by listeners alike. "To the limited extent that it was regarded", Milton Babbitt observed, it represented "the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition".
Composers and performers first tended to take Webern's work, with its residual post-Romanticism and initial expressionism, in mostly formalist directions with a certain literalism, departing from Webern's own practices and preferences in extrapolating from elements of his late style. This became known as post-Webernism. A richer, more historically informed understanding of Webern's music and his performance practice began to emerge in the latter half of the 20th century as scholars, especially the Moldenhauers, sought and archived sketches, letters, lectures, recordings, and other articles of Webern's (and others') estates.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Webern's marginalization under Gleichschaltung was appreciated, but his pan-Germanism, politics, and social attitudes (especially regarding antisemitism) were not as known or often mooted. For many, like Stravinsky, Webern never compromised his artistic identity and values, but for others the matter was less simple.
Webern notated articulations, dynamics, Italian: [[tempo rubato]], and other musical expressions, coaching performers to adhere to these instructions but urging them to maximize expressivity through musical phrasing. This was supported by personal accounts, correspondence, and extant recordings of Schubert's Deutsche Tänze (arr. Webern) and Berg's Violin Concerto under Webern's direction. Ian Pace considered Peter Stadlen's account of Webern's coaching for Op. 27 as indicating Webern's "desire for an extremely flexible, highly diaphanous, and almost expressively overloaded approach".
This aspect of Webern's work was often overlooked in his immediate post-war reception, which was roughly coterminous with the early music revival. Stravinsky engaged with Webern and Renaissance music in his later music; his amanuensis Robert Craft performed Webern as well as Monteverdi, Schütz, Gabrieli, and Tallis. Many musicians performed "music that is at the same time old and new", as Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople glossed it and as Richard Taruskin addressed. J. Peter Burkholder noted early and new music audience overlap.
Felix Galimir of the Galimir Quartet told The New York Times (1981): "Berg asked for enormous correctness in the performance of his music. But the moment this was achieved, he asked for a very Romanticized treatment. Webern, you know, was also terribly Romantic—as a person, and when he conducted. Everything was almost over-sentimentalized. It was entirely different from what we have been led to believe today. His music should be played very freely, very emotionally."[2]
Many artists portrayed Webern (often from life) in their work. Kokoschka (1912), Schiele (1917 and 1918), (1920 and 1924), and Rederer (1934) made drawings of him. Oppenheimer (1908), Kokoschka (1914), and (1934) painted him. Stumpp made two lithographs of him (1927). Humplik twice sculpted him (1927 and 1928). Jone variously portrayed him (1943 lithograph, several posthumous drawings, 1945 oil painting). Rederer made a large woodcut of him (1964).
Schoenberg admired Webern's concision, writing in the foreword to Op. 9 upon its 1924 publication: "to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath—such concentration can only be present in proportion to the absence of self-indulgence". But Berg joked about Webern's brevity. Hendrik Andriessen found Webern's music "pitiful" in this regard. In their second (1925) Abbruch self-parody, editors jested that "Webern's" (Mahler's) "extensive" Symphony of a Thousand had to be abbreviated.
Felix Khuner remembered Webern was "just as revolutionary" as Schoenberg. In 1927, Hans Mersmann wrote that "Webern's music shows the frontiers and ... limits of a development which tried to outgrow Schoenberg's work."
Identifying with Webern as a "solitary soul" amid 1940s wartime fascism, Luigi Dallapiccola independently and somewhat singularly found inspiration especially in Webern's lesser-known mid-period Lieder, blending its ethereal qualities and Viennese expressionism with Italian: [[bel canto]]. Stunned by Webern's Op. 24 at its 1935 ISCM festival world première under Jalowetz in Prague, Dallapiccola's impression was of unsurpassable "aesthetic and stylistic unity". He dedicated Sex carmina alcaei "with humility and devotion" to Webern, who he met in 1942 through Schlee, coming away surprised at Webern's emphasis on "our great Central European tradition." Dallapiccola's 1953 Goethe-lieder especially recall Webern's Op. 16 in style.
In 1947, Schoenberg remembered and stood firm with Berg and Webern despite rumors of the latter's having "fallen into the Nazi trap": "... [F]orget all that might have ... divided us. For there remains for our future what could only have begun to be realized posthumously: One will have to consider us three—Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern—as a unity, a oneness, because we believed in ideals ... with intensity and selfless devotion; nor would we ever have been deterred from them, even if those who tried might have succeeded in confounding us." For Krasner this put "'Vienna's Three Modern Classicists' into historical perspective". He summarized it as "what bound us together was our idealism."
After World War II, there was unprecedented engagement with Webern's music. It came to represent a universally or generally valid, systematic, and compellingly logical model of new composition, especially at the German: [[Darmstädter Ferienkurse]]|italic=no. René Leibowitz performed, promulgated, and published Schoenberg et son école; Adorno, Herbert Eimert, Scherchen, and others contributed. Composers and students listened in a quasi-religious trance to Peter Stadlen's 1948 Op. 27 performance.
Webern's gradual innovations in schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and melodic contour; his generalization of imitative techniques such as canon and fugue; and his inclination toward athematicism, abstraction, and lyricism variously informed and oriented European and Canadian, typically serial or avant-garde composers (e.g., Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Pousseur, Ligeti, Sylvano Bussotti, Bruno Maderna, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Barbara Pentland). Eimert and Stockhausen devoted a special issue of die Reihe to Webern's French: œuvre in 1955. UE published his lectures in 1960.
In the US, Babbitt and initially Rochberg found more in Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice. Elliott Carter's and Aaron Copland's critical ambivalence was marked by a certain enthusiasm and fascination nonetheless. Robert Craft fruitfully reintroduced Stravinsky to Webern's music, without which Stravinsky's late works would have taken different shape. Stravinsky staked his contract with Columbia Records to see Webern's then known music first both recorded and widely distributed. Stravinsky lauded Webern's "not yet canonized art" in 1959.
Among the New York School, John Cage and Morton Feldman first met in Carnegie Hall's lobby, ecstatic after a performance of Op. 21 by Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic. They cited the effect of its sound on their music. They later sung the praises of Christian Wolff as "our Webern".
Gottfried Michael Koenig suggested some early interest in Webern's music may have been that its concision and apparent simplicity facilitated didactic musical analysis. criticized serial approaches to Webern's music as reductive, narrowly focused more on Webern's procedures than his music while neglecting timbre in their typical selection of Opp. 27–28. Webern's music sounded like "a Mondrian canvas", "crude and unfinished", to Karel Goeyvaerts. Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski criticized some Darmstadt music as "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing" (, 1959); a Der Kurier article of his was headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at".
Through late 1950s onward, Webern's work reached musicians as far removed as Frank Zappa, yet many post-war European musicians and scholars had already begun to look beyond as much as back at Webern in his context. Nono advocated for a more humanistic understanding of Webern's music.
Adorno lectured that in the prevailing climate "artists like Berg or Webern would hardly be able to make it" ("The Aging of the New Music", 1954). Against the "static idea of music" and "total rationalization" of the "pointillist constructivists," he advocated for more subjectivity, citing Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1911), in which Wassily Kandinsky wrote: "Schoenberg's [expressionist] music leads us to where musical experience is a matter not of the ear, but of the soul—and from this point begins the music of the future."
In the 1960s, many began to describe Webern and his like as a "dead end". Rochberg felt "Webern's music leaves his followers no new, unexplored territory." Stravinsky judged Webern "too original ... too purely himself. ... [T]he entire world had to imitate him [and] fail; of course it will blame Webern"; he blamed post-Webernism: "[T]he music now being charged to his name can neither diminish his strength nor stale his perfection."
In Votre Faust (1960–1968), Pousseur quoted and his protagonist Henri analyzed Webern's Op. 31. Yet there were already several elements of late or postmodernism (e.g., eclecticism of historical styles, mobile form, polyvalent roles). This coincided with a wider rapprochement with Berg, whose example Pousseur cited, from whose music he also quoted, 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.
Engaging with Webern's atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism, both Ferneyhough and Lachenmann expanded upon and went further than Webern in attention to the smallest of details and the use of ever more radically extended techniques. Ferneyhough's 1967 Sonatas for string quartet included atonal sections much in the style of Webern's Op. 9, yet more intensely sustained. In a comparison to his own 1969 Air, Lachenmann wrote of "a melody made of a single note [...] in the viola part" of Webern's Op. 10/iv (mm. 2–4) amid "the mere ruins of the traditional linguistic context," observing that "the pure tone, now living in tonal exile, has in this new context no aesthetic advantage over pure noise" ("Hearing [Hören] is Defenseless—without Listening [Hören]", 1985).
In Eastern Europe, the Second Viennese School's music represented a professionally dangerous but sometimes exciting or inspiring alternative to socialist realism. Their influence on composers behind the Iron Curtain was mediated by anti-fascist and -German sentiment as well as anti-formalist cultural policies and Cold War separation. Ligeti lamented the separation and left in 1956, noting that "after Bartók hardly any grass could grow".
Webern's influence predominated after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, bearing on Pál Kadosa, Endre Szervánszky, and György Kurtág. Among Czechs, attended the German: Darmstädter Ferienkurse|italic=no and wrote music with serial techniques in the late 1960s. He returned to tonality in Brno and was rewarded. Marek Kopelent discovered the Second Viennese as an editor and was particularly taken by Webern. Kopelent was blacklisted for his music and despaired, unable to attend international performances of his work.
Official Soviet Russian condemnation eased in the post-Stalinist Khrushchev Thaw with the rehabilitation of some affected by the Zhdanov Doctrine. Sheet music and recordings entered via journalists, friends, family (e.g., from Nicolas to Sergei Slonimsky), and especially composers and musicians (e.g.,, Gérard Frémy, Alexei Lubimov, Maria Yudina), who traveled more. Stationed in Zossen as a military band arranger (1955–1958), Yuri Kholopov risked arrest for obtaining scores in West Berlin and from the Leipzig office of Schott Music.
Philip Herschkowitz, poverty-stricken, taught privately in Moscow with cautious emphasis on Beethoven and the tradition from which Webern emerged. His pupil Nikolai Karetnikov taped Glenn Gould's 1957 Moscow Conservatory performance of Webern's Op. 27. In practice like that of Webern, Karetnikov derived the tone row of his Symphony No. 4 from motives as small as two notes related by semitone.
In Soviet Music, Marcel Rubin criticized "Webern and His Followers" (1959), by contrast to Berg and Schoenberg, for going too far. 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, Victor Ekimovsky, Vladimir Martynov, Boris Tischenko) ironically learned more about what had been and even was still forbidden. Kruschchev warned, "dodecaphonic music, music of noises ... this cacophonic music we totally reject. Our people cannot include such trash".
Through Andrei Volkonsky, Lydia Davydova recalled, Schoenberg's and Webern's music came to Russia alongside Renaissance and early Baroque music. Tischenko remembered that in the 1960s, Volkonsky "was the first swallow of the avant-garde. [T]hose who came after him ... already followed in his tracks. I consider [him] the discoverer." Edison Denisov described the 1960s as his "second conservatory", crediting Volkonsky not only for introducing Webern, but also Gesualdo.
This tolerance did not survive the Brezhnev 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.
Many choreographers set Webern's music to dance. Martha Graham and George Balanchine choreographed several works in Episodes I and II respectively (1959) as a New York City Ballet "novelty". John Cranko set Opus 1 (1965) to Webern's Passacaglia, Op. 1. Rudi van Dantzig choreographed Webern's music in Ogenblikken (1968) and Antwoord gevend (1980); Glen Tetley in Praeludium (1978) and Contredanses (1979); Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker alongside that of Beethoven and Schnittke in Erts (1992); and Trisha Brown in Twelve Ton Rose (1996). Jiří Kylián set only Webern's music in No More Play (1988) and Sweet Dreams (1990), more often pairing it with that of other composers in several ballets (1984–1995).
Webern's legacy, bitterly contested in the "serial wars", remained subject to polemic vicissitudes. Musicologists quarreled amid the "Restoration of the 1980s", as Martin Kaltenecker termed a paradigm shift from structure to perception within musicological discourse. Charles Rosen scorned "historical criticism ... avoiding any serious engagement with a work or style ... one happens not to like". Andreas Holzer warned of "post-factual tendencies". Pamela M. Potter advised considering "the complexity of ... day-to-day existence" under Nazism, partly in considering the relevance of composers' politics to their canonic status. Meanwhile Allen Forte and Bailey Puffett formally analyzed Webern's atonal and twelve-tone French: œuvres respectively.
Tim Page noted less formalist readings of Webern's work at his 1983 birth centenary.[3] The occasion "went almost unmarked", Glenn Watkins observed, "a fate hardly imaginable for Berg [on his] 1985 [centenary]". After Webern's mid-century "meteoric ascension and ultimate canonization", Watkins described "quick shifts of interest" tapering to neglect. Webern's music was established but infrequent in standard (repeating) orchestral repertoire. His French: œuvre was played at the Venice Festival of Contemporary Music (1983), Juilliard (1995), and the Vienna Festival (2004), echoing six international festivals in his name (1962–1978). In some obscurity (1941 or 1942), Webern had been quietly sure that "in the future even the postman will whistle my melodies!" But many did not acquire such a taste. He remained polarizing and provocative.
Noting this aspect of his reception, Johnson described Webern's "almost unique position in the canon of Western composers". Christian Thorau argued Webern's innovations impeded his "German: exoterischen Kanonisierung|italics=no". By contrast to the "concert canon", Anne C. Shreffler considered Webern's better standing in a "separate canon" of technical and formal innovation. Burkholder argued that music of the "historicist tradition", including Webern's, was secure in "a musical museum", "for that is what the concert hall has become". Mark Berry described Webern, already among Boulez's "big five", as one of five "canonical pillars of classic historical early twentieth-century modernism". David H. Miller suggested Webern "achieved a certain kind of acceptance and canonization".
Taruskin prioritized audience reception, not "musical utopianism". He excoriated the Second Viennese School's "idiosyncratic view of the past", linking Webern and Adler to Eduard Hanslick and "neo-Hegelian" Franz Brendel; he criticized historical determinism, "the natural ally of totalitarian politics." Martin Scherzinger noted that Taruskin's criticisms sought "active complicity with undesirable politics". Noted for his polemicism and revisionism,[4] Taruskin described his "dubious reputation" on Webern and New Music and was praised and criticized by many. For Franklin Cox, Taruskin was an unreliable historian who opposed the Second Viennese School's "progressivist historicist" emancipation of the dissonance with a "reactionary historicist" "ideolog[y] of tonal restoration".
Pascal Decroupet observed an unquestioned "canon of polarizations" in prior histories. Johnson noted the "co-existence and interaction of diverse stylistic practices" with "remarkable similarities", challenging "conservative and progressive" campism and decentering musicology's technical periodizations via the French: [[longue durée]] of global modernity. Thus he ventured continuity between the "broken homeland" of Webern's Opp. 12–18 and the "broken pastoral" of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony; between Webern's "evanescent images of musical fullness" and the brief, fragmentary nature of Chopin's Op. 28, which Schumann likened to "ruins". Building on Shreffler's and Felix Meyer's sketch studies as institutions acquired and made the Moldenhauers' estate accessible, Johnson worked toward a hermeneutics of Webern's (and Mahler's) music.