1883–1908: Upbringing between late Imperial Vienna and countryside edit

Bucolic Heimat edit

Webern was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a descendent of minor nobility [de], high-ranking civil servant, mining engineer,^[6] and owner of the Lamprechtsberg copper mine in the Koralpe. Much of Webern's early youth was in Graz (1890–1984) and Klagenfurt (1894–1902), though his father's work briefly took the family to Olmütz and back to Vienna.^[7]

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 Lendkanal [de] to the Wörthersee. Edwin Komauer taught him cello, and the family played chamber music, including that of Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven.^[8]

The extended Webern family spent summers, holidays, and vacations at their country estate, the Preglhof. The children played outside in the forest and a high meadow with a church-and-mountain view and pasture grazed by herded cattle. The children bathed in a pond, where Webern once saved Rosa from drowning. He drove horses to Bleiburg and fought a wildfire encroaching on the estate.^[9] These experiences and reading Peter Rosegger's Heimatkunst [de] shaped Webern's distinct and lasting sense of Heimat.^[10]

University edit

After a trip to Bayreuth,^[11] Webern studied musicology at the University of Vienna (1902–1906) with Guido Adler, a friend of Mahler, composition student of Bruckner,^[c] and devoted Wagnerian who had been in contact with both Wagner and Liszt.^[12][d] He learned the historical development of musical styles and techniques, writing his doctoral thesis on Heinrich Isaac's Choralis Constantinus.^[12]

Webern also studied art history and philosophy under professors Max Dvořák, Laurenz Müllner [de], and Franz Wickhoff,^[13] joining the Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft^[e] in 1903.^[11] His cousin Ernst Dietz, an art historian studying in Graz, may have led him to the work of Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, which he admired along with that of Ferdinand Hodler and Moritz von Schwind.^[14]

Schoenberg and his circle edit

In 1904, Webern approached Hans Pfitzner for composition lessons but left angrily when Pfitzner criticized Mahler and Richard Strauss.^[15] Adler admired Schoenberg's work and may have^[f] sent Webern to him for composition lessons.^[17] 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 Volksoper (1906–1908).^[18] Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern became devoted, lifelong friends with similar musical trajectories.^[19]

Also through Schoenberg, who painted and had a 1910 solo exhibition at Hugo Heller [de]'s bookstore, Webern met Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer (with whom he corresponded on ich–Du terms), Egon Schiele, and Emil Stumpp.^[20] In 1920, Webern wrote Berg about the "indescribable impression" Klimt's work made on him, "that of a luminous, tender, heavenly realm".^[21][g] He also met Karl Kraus, whose lyrics he later set, but only to completion in Op. 13/i.^[23]

1908–1918: Early adulthood in Austria-Hungary and German Empire edit

Early conducting career edit

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-^[24] or middlebrow; Kraus, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Krenek found it "uppity" in its pretensions.^[25] In 1924, Ernst Décsey recalled: "I refused to go .... I found it beneath my dignity. ... I saw only old laziness and unbearable musical blandness."^[26][h]

A summer 1908 engagement with Bad Ischl's Kurorchester [de] was "hell".^[18] Webern walked out on engagements in Innsbruck (1909) and at Bad Teplitz's Civic Theater (1910).^[28] He worked with Heinrich Jalowetz in Danzig (1910–1911) and Stettin (1912–1913), briefly following Schoenberg to Berlin (1911–1912) in-between.^[29] He repeatedly quit and was taken back by Zemlinsky at the Deutsches Landestheater Prague (1911–1918).^[30]

"What benefit ... if all operettas ... were destroyed", Webern told Dietz in 1908.^[18] But in 1912, he told Berg that Carl Zeller's Vogelhändler was "quite nice" and Schoenberg that Johann Strauss II's Nacht in Venedig was "such fine, delicate music. I now believe ... Strauss is a master."^[31]

His repertoire included Leo Fall's Dollarprinzessin, Friedrich von Flotow's Wintermärchen, Sidney Jones' Geisha, Franz Lehár's Graf von Luxemburg and Lustige Witwe, Albert Lortzing's Waffenschmied, Jacques Offenbach's Belle Hélène, Oscar Straus's Walzertraum, and Johann Strauss II's Fledermaus and Zigeunerbaron in addition to Gounod, Mozart, Schumann, and Wagner, among others. News reports praised Webern's "sensitive, devoted guidance" as conductor of Fall's Geschiedene Frau in 1910. He particularly enjoyed Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann and Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia.^[32]

Psychotherapy edit

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).^[33] "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.^[34] Miserably ill, he sought medical advice and took rest at a sanatorium in Semmering [de].^[35] 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.^[36]

"Old song" of "lost paradise" edit

Webern's father sold the Preglhof in 1912, and Webern mourned it as a "lost paradise".^[i] 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.^[38] In 1912, he confided in Berg and Schoenberg respectively: "my compositions ... relate to the death of my mother";^[j] and

I am overwhelmed with emotion when I imagine everything .... My daily way to the grave of my mother. The infinite mildness of the entire countryside, all the thousand things there. Now everything is over. ... If only you could ... have seen .... The seclusion, the quiet, the house, the forests, the garden, and the cemetery. About this time, I had always composed diligently.^[40]

For Christmas in 1912, he gave Schoenberg Rosegger's Waldheimat [de], from which Julian Johnson highlighted:

Childhood days and childhood home!
It is that old song of Paradise. There are people for whom ... Paradise is never lost ... in them God's kingdom ... rises ... more ... in ... memory than ... ever ... in reality; ... children are poets and retrace their steps.^[41]

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 and spiritual experiences, forming a topical nexus that recurred in his diary, letters, and music (explicitly in sketches and set texts).^[42]

Such habits endured in Webern's life and 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'?"^[43] In 1934, Webern's lyricist and collaborator Hildegard Jone [de] 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".^[39]

World War I edit

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.^[44] His finances were so poor that he soon explored a return to Prague,^[45] but other opportunities arose.

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

Society for Private Musical Performances edit

Webern worked with friends^[k] at the Society for Private Musical Performances (1918–1921), promoting new music through performances and contests. Music included that of Bartók, Berg, Busoni, Debussy,^[l] 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.^[47] There was perhaps some shared influence among Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern at this time.^[48] The Society dissolved amid catastrophic hyperinflation in 1921.

Mature conducting career edit

Webern worked as director of the Wiener Schubertbund and in 1922 of the mixed-voice amateur Singverein der Sozialdemokratischen Kunstelle^[m] and the Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte^[n] through David Josef Bach, Director of the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle.^[49][o] In 1926, Webern resigned as chorusmaster of the Mödling Männergesangverein^[p] for hiring Jewish soprano Greta Wilheim as a stand-in soloist for Schubert's cantata Mirjams Siegesgesang.^[50] Webern hired Erich Leinsdorf as Singverein pianist in 1933;^[q] they performed Stravinsky's ballet-cantata Les Noces.^[52][r]

"Webern is the greatest conductor since Mahler himself", wrote Berg to Erwin Stein after Webern led Mahler's Third in 1922.^[59] RAVAG aired his performances at least twenty times starting in 1927. He was applauded as much as Willem Mengelberg in Holland.^[60] In Le Ménestrel (1930), Armand Machabey noted Webern's regional reputation as a conductor of "haute valeur"^[s] for his meticulous approach to then contemporary music.^[60]

Perhaps on religious grounds, Krenek speculated, Webern seemed uneasy in his dependence on the Social Democrats for conducting work.^[61] 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".^[62] Some on the left, notably Oscar Pollak [de] in Der Kampf (1929), criticized Webern's programming as more ambitious and bourgeois than popular and proletarian.^[63]

Relative success in destabilizing society edit

Webern's finances were often precarious, even in his years of relative success. Relief came from family, friends, patrons, and prizes.^[64] He twice received the Preis der Stadt Wien für Musik [de].^[t] To compose more, he sought income while trying not to overcommit himself as a conductor.^[68] He contracted with Universal Edition only after 1919, reaching better terms in 1927,^[69] but he was not astute or very ambitious in business.^[70] 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.^[71]

His music was performed more widely starting in the latter half of 1920s.^[72] Yet he found no great success as Berg enjoyed with Wozzeck^[73] 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. Krenek's impression was that Webern resented his financial hardships and lack of wider recognition.^[61]

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".^[74] But they were soon marginalized and ostracized in Central Europe with few exceptions.^[75][u]

Social Democrat–Christian Social relations polarized and radicalized amid the Schattendorfer Urteil [de].^[77] Webern and others^[v] signed an "Announcement of Intellectual Vienna"^[w] published on the front page of the Social Democrats' daily Arbeiter-Zeitung^[x] days before the 1927 Austrian legislative election.^[78] On Election Day in Die Reichspost [de], Ignaz Seipel of the Einheitsliste [de] officially applied the term "Red Vienna" pejoratively, attacking Vienna's educational and cultural institutions.^[79] Social unrest escalated to the July Revolt of 1927 and beyond.^[79] Webern's nostalgia for social order intensified with increasing civil disorder.^[80] In 1928 friends fundraised for him, partly for another stay at the Kurhaus Semmering.^[y]

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

Marginalization at home edit

Financial crises, complex social and political movements, pervasive antisemitism,^[z] culture wars, and renewed military conflicts^[aa] continued to shape Webern's world, profoundly circumscribing his life.^[84] In the Austrian Civil War, Austrofascists^[ab] executed, exiled, and imprisoned Social Democrats, outlawed their party,^[86] and abolished cultural institutions. Stigmatized by his decade-long association with Social Democrats, Webern lost a promising conducting career, which might have been better recorded.^[87] He worked as a UE editor and IGNM-Sektion Österreich [de] board member and president (1933–1938, 1945).^[88]

Webern delivered an eight-lecture series Der Weg zur Neuen Musik^[ac] at Rita Kurzmann-Leuchter [de]'s and her physician husband Rudolf Kurzman's home (Feb.–Apr. 1933).^[90] 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)"^[ad] and warned, "Imagine what will be destroyed, wiped out, by this hate of culture!"^[92] 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.^[93]

His music and that of Berg, Krenek, Schoenberg, et al. was declared "Jewish" in Austria^[ae] and "Entartete Musik" by Nazis.^[99] 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";^[af] 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!"^[101] The Vienna Philharmonic nearly refused to play Berg's Violin Concerto (1936).^[ag] Peter Stadlen's 1937 Op. 27 premières were the last Viennese Webern performances until after World War II.^[103] The critical success of Hermann Scherchen's 1938 ISCM London Op. 26 première encouraged Webern to write more cantatas and reassured him after a cellist quit Op. 20 mid-performance, declaring it unplayable.^[104]

Besieged milieu and political confusion edit

Webern's milieu comprised increasingly vast differences.^[105] Like most Austrians, he and his family were Catholic, though not church regulars; Webern was devout if unorthodox.^[106] They became politically divided.^[ah] His friends (e.g., then Zionist Schoenberg,^[ai] left-leaning Berg^[aj]) were of a mostly Jewish milieu in late Imperial and then "red" (Social Democratic) Vienna.^[118] Alma Mahler, Krenek, Willi Reich [de], and Erwin Stein preferred or supported the "lesser evil"^[ak] of the Austrofascists (or aligned Italian fascists) vis-à-vis the Nazis.^[120] Presuming power would moderate Hitler, Webern mediated among friends with an optimistic, perhaps self-soothing, complacency, exasperating those who were at risk.^[121] He found himself surrounded mostly by one side as Schoenberg emigrated to the US (1933), Rudolf Ploderer died by suicide (1933),^[al] Berg died (1935), and DJ Bach, among others, fled or worse.^[123]

Webern's views of National Socialism were variously described.^[am] His published items^[an] reflected his audience or context.^[125] Secondary literature reflected limited evidence or ideological orientations^[ao] and admitted uncertainty.^[127] Julie Brown noted hesitancy to approach the topic and echoed the Moldenhauers, considering the issue "vexed" and Webern a "political enigma".^[128] Bailey Puffett considered his politics "somewhat vague" and his situation "complex", noting that he practically avoided definitive political association.^[129] Johnson described him as "personally shy, a man of private feeling and essentially apolitical",^[130] "prone to identify with Nazi politics as ... other ... Austrians".^[131] Violinist Louis Krasner surmised Webern's cognitive dissonance,^[ap] finding him "idealistic and rather naive".^[aq] 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".^[ar]

1938–1939: Inner emigration in Nazi Germany edit

Anschluss edit

Krasner's last Webern visit was interrupted by the Anschluss. Webern turned on the radio to hear the news, urging Krasner to flee.^[137] Webern's family included Nazis; did Webern know the Anschluss was planned that day, Krasner wondered. Was this for his safety, Krasner wondered, or to save Webern the embarrassment of Krasner's presence (during a time of possible celebration in Webern's home).^[138] Much of Austria did celebrate.^[139] Bailey Puffett noted Webern wrote Jone and her husband Josef Humplik that day, "I am totally immersed in my work [composing] and cannot, cannot be disturbed", which she suggested Krasner's visit simply may have done.^[140]

Bailey Puffett wrote that Webern likely hoped to conduct again, securing a firmer future for his family under a new regime proclaiming itself "socialist" no less than nationalist.^[141] As an expression of pan-Germanism and populism, many German-speaking Volk,^[as] especially Austrian Deutschnationalisten, hoped for stability and prosperity within a new nation-state (the Reich).^[107] In opposition to the Austrofascists^[at] and after years of Nazi soft power proceeding to occupation,^[au] some on the Austrian left^[av] promoted unification and now supported the post hoc 1938 Austrian Anschluss referendum^[142] on premises of Realpolitik and self-determination in line with the Grossdeutsche Lösung (1848), the Provisional National Assembly's unanimous support (1918),^[aw] and the Linz Program [de] (1926-1933).^[ax] According to Josef Polnauer, Webern's optimism was not dispelled until 1941.^[143]

Kristallnacht and recoil edit

Kristallnacht shocked Webern. He visited and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach, Otto Jokl [de], Polnauer, and Hugo Winter.^[144] 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.^[145] Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian whose emigration Schoenberg and Webern were unable to secure,^[146] 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.^[147] Webern moved Humplik's 1929 gift of a Mahler bust to his bedroom.^[148]

Webern found himself increasingly alone,^[149] with "almost all his friends and old pupils ... gone",^[150] and his financial situation was poor. He had considered joining Schoenberg in the US since 1933 but was reluctant to leave home and family.^[151] He entered a period of "inward emigration",^[152] writing to artist Franz Rederer in 1939, "We live completely withdrawn. I work a lot."^[145] He corresponded extensively to maintain relationships, imploring his student George Robert to play Schoenberg in New York^[153] and expressing his loneliness and isolation to Schoenberg.^[154] Then war limited postal service,^[155] disrupting their correspondence completely by 1941. For Schoenberg's 70th birthday (1944), Webern asked Willi Reich to convey "my most heartfelt remembrances, ... longing! ... hopes for a happy future!"^[156]

1939–1945: Hope and disillusionment during World War II edit

Swiss and Reich prospects edit

Webern's music was performed mostly outside the Reich, where only his tonal music and arrangements were allowed as works not in the style of a "Judenknecht".^[ay] Supported by IGNM-Sektion Basel, the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur, and Werner Reinhart, he attended three Swiss concerts, his last trips outside the Reich.^[158] 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 Winterthur Stadthaus [de].

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!"^[159] 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.^[160]

In the Reich, he met with former Society violist Othmar Steinbauer about a formal teaching role in Vienna in early 1940, but nothing materialized.^[161] He lectured at the homes of Erwin Ratz and Carl Prohaska [de]'s widow Margaret (1940–1942).^[162] Many private pupils came to him between 1940 and 1943, even from afar, among them briefly Karl Amadeus Hartmann.^[163]

Wartime hopes and reality edit

Sharing in wartime public sentiment at the height of Hitler's popularity (spring 1940), Webern expressed high hopes, crediting him as "unique" and "singular"^[az] 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.^[164] Indeed, Hueber had just sent Webern Mein Kampf.^[ba] Unaware of Stefan George's aversion to the Nazis, Webern reread Das neue Reich [de] 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.^[166] For Johnson, "Webern's own image of a neue Reich was never of this world; if his politics were ultimately complicitous it was largely because his utopian apoliticism played so easily into ... the status quo."^[167]

By Aug. 1940, Webern depended financially on his children.^[168] He sought wartime emergency relief funds from Künstlerhilfe Wien and the Reichsmusikkammer Künstlerdank [de] (1940–1944), which he received despite indicating non-membership in the Nazi Party on an application.^[169] Whether Webern ever joined the party was unknown.^[170][bb] This represented his only income after mid-1942. He nearly exhausted his savings by 1944.^[173]

His 1943–1945 letters were strewn with references to bombings, death, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order, but several grandchildren were born.^[174] 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.^[174] He corresponded with 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 23 (world premiere).^[175] His only son Peter, intermittently conscripted since 1940,^[176] was killed (14 Feb. 1945) in an air attack. Airstrike sirens interrupted the family's mourning.^[177]

Refuge and death in Mittersill edit

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.^[bc] 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".^[174]

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.^[179] Webern's wife Wilhelmine "Minna" Mörtl's last years were marred by grief, poverty, and loneliness as friends and family continued emigrating. She wished Webern lived to see more success. With the abolition of Entartete Kunst policies, Alfred Schlee [de] 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."^[180] Minna died in 1949.

Webern's music was organic and parsimonious,^[bd] with very small motifs, palindromes, and parameterization on both the micro- and macro-scale.^[185] His idiosyncratic approach reflected affinities with Schoenberg, Mahler,^[be] Guido Adler and early music; interest in esotericism and Naturphilosophie; and thorough perfectionism.^[bf] He engaged with the work of Goethe, Bach,^[bg] and the Franco-Flemish School in addition to that of Hugo Wolf, Brahms,^[bh] Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Beethoven, Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), and Mozart.^[191][bi] Stylistic shifts were not neatly coterminous with gradually developed technical devices, particularly in the case of his mid-period Lieder.^[bj]

His music was also characteristically linear and song-like.^[199] Much of it (and Berg's^[200] and Schoenberg's)^[201] was for singing.^[19][bk] Johnson described the song-like gestures of Op. 11/i.^[204] In Webern's mid-period Lieder, some heard instrumentalizing of the voice^[205] (often in relation to the clarinet)^[206] representing yet some continuity with bel canto.^[207][bl] Lukas Näf described one of Webern's signature hairpins (on the Op. 21/i mm. 8–9 bass clarinet tenuto note) as a messa di voce requiring some rubato to execute faithfully.^[209][bm] Concision, adventurous textures and timbres, and melodies of wide leaps and sometimes extreme ranges and registers were typical.^[211]

For Johnson, Webern's rubato compressed Mahler's "'surging and ebbing'" tempi; this and Webern's dynamics indicated a "vestigial lyrical subjectivity."^[212] Webern often set carefully chosen lyric poetry.^[213] 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.^[214] He was compared to Mahler in his orchestration and semantic preoccupations (e.g., memory, landscapes, nature, loss, often Catholic mysticism).^[215] In Jone, who he met with her husband Humplik via the Hagenbund, Webern found a lyricist who shared his esoteric, natural, and spiritual interests. She provided texts for his late vocal works.^[216]

Webern's and Schoenberg's music distinctively prioritized minor seconds, major sevenths, and minor ninths^[bn] as noted in 1934 by microtonalist Alois Hába.^[217] 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.^[218] Webern's consistent use of ic1 in cells and sets, often expressed as a wide interval musically,^[219] was well noted.^[bo] Symmetric pitch-interval practices varied in rigor and use by others (e.g., Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók, Debussy, Stravinsky; more nascently Mahler, Brahms, Bruckner,^[bp] 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).^[223]

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 and those 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,^[224] obscuring formative facets of his musical identity.^[225] Thus when Boulez first oversaw a project to record Webern's music, the results fit on three CDs and the second time, six.^[226][bq] A Gesamtausgabe has remained in progress.

1899–1908: Formative juvenilia and emergence from study edit

Webern published little juvenilia; like Brahms, he was meticulous and self-conscious, revising extensively.^[227] His earliest works were mostly Lieder on works of Richard Dehmel, Gustav Falke, and Theodor Storm.^[228] He set seven Ferdinand Avenarius poems on the "changing moods" of life and nature (1899–1904).^[229] 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.^[230] He never abandoned its lyricism, intimacy, and wistful or nostalgic topics, though his music became more abstract, idealized, and introverted.^[228]

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.^[231] He quoted Jakob Böhme in the preface^[232] and mentioned the panels^[br] of Segantini's Trittico della natura^[bs] as "Werden–Sein–Vergehen" in sketches.^[233][bt] Sebastian Wedler argued that it 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 Thus Spoke Zarathustra's eternal recurrence) of Segantini's triptych.^[234] In its opening harmonies, Allen Forte and Heinz-Klaus Metzger noted Webern's anticipation of Schoenberg's atonality in Op. 10.^[235]

The Passacaglia, Op. 1 (1908) was Webern's graduation piece after study with Schoenberg. Its chromatic harmonic language and less conventional orchestration distinguished it from prior works; its form foreshadowed those of his later works.^[236] Conducting the 1911 Danzig premiere of Op. 1 at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Schützenhaus [de], 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 Moderner Abend^[bu] concert. The Danziger Zeitung [de] critic derided Op. 1 as an "insane experiment".^[237]

In 1908 Webern also began an opera on Maeterlinck's Alladine et Palomides [fr], of which only unfinished sketches remained.^[238] He knew the repertoire "perfectly ... every cut, ... unmarked cadenza, and in the comic operas every theatrical joke".^[239] He "adored" Mozart's Il Seraglio and revered Strauss, predicting Salome would last. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande enraptured him twice in Dec. 1908 Berlin and again in 1911 Vienna.^[240] When in high spirits, Webern would sing bits of Lortzing's Zar und Zimmermann, a personal favorite. To Max Deutsch he later expressed interest 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.^[241]

1908–1914: Atonality and aphorisms edit

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.^[243]

Schoenberg and Webern were so mutually influential, the former later joked, "I haven't the slightest idea who I am".^[244] 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".^[245][bv]

But Webern was no epigone.^[246] Already in Op. 9, he "had the feeling that when the twelve notes had all been played the piece was over."^[247] The first of his innovative and increasingly extremely aphoristic Opp. 5–11 (1909–1914) radically influenced Schoenberg's Opp. 11/iii^[bw] and 16–17 (and Berg's Opp. 4–5).^[249] "[H]aving freed music from the shackles of tonality," Schoenberg wrote, he and his pupils believed "music could renounce motivic features".^[250] This "intuitive aesthetic" arguably proved to be aspirational insofar as motives persisted in their music.^[251]

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).^[252] 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.^[253] Tonality became less directional, functional, or narrative than tenuous, spatial, or symbolic as fit Webern's topics and literary settings. Oliver Korte traced Webern's Klangfelder^[bx] to Mahler's "suspensions".^[by]

Expanding on Mahler's orchestration, Webern linked colorful, novel, fragile, and intimate sounds, often nearly silent at ppp, to lyrical topics: solo violin to female voice; closed or open voicings, sometimes sul ponticello, to dark or light; compressed range to absence, emptiness, or loneliness and registral expansion to fulfillment, (spiritual) presence, or transcendence;^[bz] celesta, harp, and glockenspiel to the celestial or ethereal; and trumpet, harp, and string harmonics to angels or heaven.^[254][ca]

With elements of Kabarett,^[cb] neoclassicism,^[cc] and ironic Romanticism^[cd] in Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21 (1912), Schoenberg began^[ce] to distance himself from Webern's and latterly Berg's aphoristic expressionism, which provoked the 1913 Skandalkonzert.

1914–1924: Mid-period Lieder edit

During and after World War I (1914–1926) Webern worked on some fifty-six songs, following Schoenberg's advice to set texts as a means of composing something more substantial than aphorisms. He finished thirty-two, ordered into sets as Opp. 12–19.^[257] The first of these mid-period Lieder was an unfinished setting of a passage ("In einer lichten Rose ...") from Dante's Paradiso, Canto XXXI.^[258]

Walter Kolneder noted "regression" to relatively "long arcs of melody" in Op. 12 by comparison to "'atomization' of the melodic line" in Op. 11. Adorno wrote that in Op. 12 "Webern's music secretly expands: he is mastering the solution which Schoenberg first displayed in Pierrot ... and ... Op. 22: that one cannot persist with the method of absolute purity".^[259] The contrapuntal procedures and nonstandard ensemble of Pierrot influenced Webern's Opp. 14–16:^[260] "How much I owe to your Pierrot", he told Schoenberg after setting Trakl's "Abendland III" (Op. 14/iv),^[261] in which, distinctly, there was no silence until a pause at the concluding gesture. Webern mingled his usual topics with recurrent wartime themes of wandering in search of home or solace.

Schoenberg "yearn[ed] for a style for large forms ... to give personal things an objective, general form."^[cf] Since 1906 Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern indulged shared interest in Swedenborgian mysticism and Theosophy, 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)^[cg] 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",^[ch] which Webern interpreted as a pitch-space metaphor. Schoenberg later reflected on "how enthusiastic [Webern and I] were about this."^[ci] On the journey to composition with twelve tones, Webern revised many of his mid-period Lieder in the years after their apparent composition but before publication, increasingly prioritizing clarity of pitch relations, even against timbral effects, as Anne Shreffler^[267] and Felix Meyer described.

After Op. 16, Webern used twelve-tone technique for the first time, though he^[cj] and Schoenberg had long experimented with the idea. Twelve-tone sets appear at the start of Op. 12/i (with repeated notes) and in some bars of Op. 12/iv, with many further examples of ten- and eleven-tone sets.^[269]

1924–1945: Formal coherence and expansion edit

At the same time as they began using twelve-tone technique, Schoenberg left Vienna to teach in Berlin, and thus Webern obtained more artistic autonomy.^[71] Whereas Schoenberg exploited combinatorial properties of particular tone rows,^[270] 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). Webern varied his music's structural unity and motivic saturation superficially as before (for example, through fragmentation, Klangfarbenmelodie, or octave displacement).^[271] He likened his approach to Goethe's Urpflanze [de] and elevated its underlying technical and theoretical basis by analogy to natural law in principle.^[ck]

Like Brahms's, Webern's (and Schoenberg's) music was marked by contrapuntal rigor, formal schemes, and systematic pitch organization long before this technique.^[273] And like Stravinsky, argued Joseph N. Straus, Webern (and Schoenberg) effectively recomposed earlier music, "projecting motivic density" onto tradition.^[274] 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.^[275] After orchestrating some Schubert more conservatively, he wrote Schoenberg (1931):

I took pains to remain on the solid ground of classical ideas of instrumentation, yet to place them into the service of our idea, i.e., as a means toward the greatest possible clarification of thought and context.^[cl]

Webern's 1926–1927 String Trio, Op. 20, was his first large-scale non-vocal work since the 1914 Cello Sonata. He produced many sketches and drafts toward this goal, including an abandoned 1917 string quartet; other efforts toward a string trio; a seventeen-measure 1920 movement scored for clarinet, trumpet, and violin; and piano works including Kinderstück (1924, intended as one of a set) and Klavierstück (1925).^[277] While writing the Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, he found inspiration in the Sator Square, which is like a twelve-tone matrix;^[278] with this square, he concluded his Weg zur Neuen Musik.

Webern made further strides in his cantatas (as he ecstatically wrote the Humpliks),^[279] synthesizing the rigorous style of his mature instrumental works with the word painting of his Lieder on a orchestral scale.^[280] His textures were somewhat denser yet more homophonic at the surface through nonetheless contrapuntal polyphonic means.^[279] In Op. 31/i he alternated lines and points, culminating twice^[cm] in twelve-note simultaneities.^[281] For George Rochberg, "the principles of 'the structural spatial dimension' ... "join[ed] forces with lyrico-dramatic demands" in Webern's late cantatas and songs (Opp. 23, 25–26, 29, and 31).^[282]

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.^[283]

Arrangements and orchestrations edit

In his youth (1903), Webern orchestrated five or more Schubert Lieder^[cn] for an appropriately Schubertian orchestra (strings and pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns). In 1934, he did the same for two of Schubert's 1824 Six German Dances.

For Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1921, Webern arranged, among other things,^[285] 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)^[286] for bass solo, mixed chorus, and large orchestra; thus Liszt's work was finally premièred^[co] 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").^[288] 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."

Webern's music was generally considered difficult by performers and inaccessible by listeners alike.^[289] "To the limited extent that it was regarded", Milton Babbitt observed, it represented "the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition".^[290]

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.^[291] A richer, more historically informed understanding of Webern's music and its performance practice began to emerge in the latter half of the 20th century. Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer sought and archived sketches, letters, lectures, recordings, and other articles of Webern's (and others') estates.^[cp]

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Webern's marginalization under Gleichschaltung was appreciated, but his pan-Germanism and assistance to Jewish friends were not as known or often mooted.^[292] For many, like Stravinsky, Webern never compromised his artistic identity and values, but for others the matter was less simple.^[cq]

Performance practice edit

Webern notated articulations, dynamics, tempo rubato, and other musical expressions, coaching performers to adhere to these instructions but urging them to maximize expressivity through musical phrasing.^[293][cr] 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".^[295][cs]

This aspect of Webern's work was often overlooked in his immediate post-war reception,^[297] 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.^[298] 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.^[299]

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."^[300]

Contemporaries edit

Artists edit

Many artists portrayed Webern (often from life) in their work. Kokoschka (1912), Schiele (1917 and 1918), B. F. Dolbin [de] (1920 and 1924), and Rederer (1934) made drawings of him. Oppenheimer (1908), Kokoschka (1914), and Tom von Dreger [de] (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).^[301]

Musicians edit

Schoenberg admired Webern's concision. Berg joked about his brevity. Hendrik Andriessen found Webern's music "pitiful" in this regard.^[302] In their second (1925) Abbruch^[ct] self-parody, Anbruch [de]^[cu] editors jested that "Webern's" (Mahler's) "extensive" Symphony of a Thousand had to be abbreviated.

For Felix Khuner, Webern was "just as revolutionary" as Schoenberg.^[303] In 1927, Hans Mersmann wrote that "Webern's music shows the frontiers and ... limits of a development which tried to outgrow Schoenberg's work."^[304]

Identifying with Webern as a "solitary soul" amid 1940s wartime fascism,^[305] Luigi Dallapiccola independently and somewhat singularly^[cv] found inspiration especially in Webern's lesser-known mid-period Lieder, blending its ethereal qualities and Viennese expressionism with bel canto.^[306] 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".^[307] He dedicated Sex carmina alcaei^[cw] "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."^[308] Dallapiccola's 1953 Goethe-lieder especially recall Webern's Op. 16 in style.^[309]

In 1947, Schoenberg remembered and stood firm with Berg and Webern despite rumors of the latter's having "fallen into the Nazi trap":^[cx] "... [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."^[cy] For Krasner this put "'Vienna's Three Modern Classicists' into historical perspective". He summarized it as "what bound us together was our idealism."^[310]

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

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 Darmstädter Ferienkurse.^[315] René Leibowitz performed, promulgated, and published Schoenberg et son école;^[316] Adorno,^[317] Herbert Eimert, Scherchen,^[318] and others contributed. Composers and students^[da] listened in a quasi-religious trance to Peter Stadlen's 1948 Op. 27 performance.^[319]

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).^[320] Eimert and Stockhausen devoted a special issue of die Reihe to Webern's œuvre in 1955. UE published his lectures in 1960.^[321]

In the US, Babbitt^[322] and initially Rochberg^[323] 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.^[324] 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.^[325] Stravinsky lauded Webern's "not yet canonized art" in 1959.^[326]

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.^[327] 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. Robert Beyer [de] 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.^[328] Webern's music sounded like "a Mondrian canvas", "crude and unfinished", to Karel Goeyvaerts.^[329] Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski criticized some Darmstadt music as "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing" (Darmstädter Tagblatt [de], 1959); a Der Kurier article of his was headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at".^[330]

1950s onward: Beyond (late) Webern edit

Through late 1950s onward, Webern's work reached musicians as far removed as Joel Thome and Frank Zappa,^[335] yet many post-war European musicians and scholars had already begun to look beyond^[336] as much as back at Webern in his context. Nono advocated for a more cultural and historical understanding of Webern's music.^[337]

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".^[338][dd] Rochberg felt "Webern's music leaves his followers no new, unexplored territory."^[341] 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."^[342]

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).^[343] This coincided with a wider rapprochement with Berg,^[344] whose example Pousseur cited,^[345] from whose music he also quoted, and whose writings he translated into French in the 1950s.^[346] 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.^[de]

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).

Eastern Europe edit

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^[347] as well as anti-formalist cultural policies^[348] and Cold War separation.^[df] Ligeti lamented the separation and left in 1956, noting that "after Bartók hardly any grass could grow".^[351]

Webern's influence predominated after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, bearing on Pál Kadosa, Endre Szervánszky, and György Kurtág.^[352] Among Czechs, Pavel Blatný attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and wrote music with serial techniques in the late 1960s. He returned to tonality in Brno and was rewarded.^[353] Marek Kopelent discovered the Second Viennese as an editor and was particularly taken by Webern.^[354] Kopelent was blacklisted for his music and despaired, unable to attend international performances of his work.^[355]

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., Igor Blazhkov [ru], Gérard Frémy, Alexei Lubimov, Maria Yudina), who traveled more.^[356] 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.^[357]

Philip Herschkowitz, poverty-stricken, taught privately in Moscow with cautious emphasis on Beethoven and the tradition from which Webern emerged.^[358] His pupil Nikolai Karetnikov taped Glenn Gould's 1957 Moscow Conservatory performance of Webern's Op. 27.^[359] 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.^[186]

In Soviet Music, Marcel Rubin criticized "Webern and His Followers" (1959), by contrast to Berg and Schoenberg, for going too far.^[360] Alfred Schnittke complained in an open letter (1961) of composers' restricted education.^[361] 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^[dg]) ironically learned more about what had been and even was still forbidden.^[363] Kruschchev warned, "dodecaphonic music, music of noises ... this cacophonic music we totally reject. Our people cannot include such trash".^[364]

Through Andrei Volkonsky, Lydia Davydova recalled, Schoenberg's and Webern's music came to Russia alongside Renaissance and early Baroque music.^[365] 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."^[365] Edison Denisov described the 1960s as his "second conservatory", crediting Volkonsky not only for introducing Webern, but also Gesualdo.^[366]

This tolerance did not survive the Brezhnev Stagnation.^[367] 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.^[368]

Dance edit

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".^[369] John Cranko set Opus 1 (1965) to Webern's Passacaglia, Op. 1. Rudi van Dantzig choreographed Webern's music in Ogenblikken^[dh] (1968) and Antwoord gevend^[di] (1980); Glen Tetley in Praeludium (1978) and Contredanses (1979);^[370] Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker alongside that of Beethoven and Schnittke in Erts (1992);^[371] and Trisha Brown in Twelve Ton Rose (1996).^[372] 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).^[373]

Since the 1980s: Reappraisals and historiography edit

Webern's legacy, bitterly contested in the "serial wars",^[dj] remained subject to polemic vicissitudes. Musicologists quarreled^[374][dk] amid the "Restoration of the 1980s", as Martin Kaltenecker termed a paradigm shift from structure to perception within musicological discourse.^[dl] Charles Rosen scorned "historical criticism ... avoiding any serious engagement with a work or style ... one happens not to like".^[375] Andreas Holzer warned of "post-factual tendencies".^[376][dm] 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.^[378] Meanwhile Allen Forte and Bailey Puffett formally analyzed Webern's atonal and twelve-tone œuvres respectively.

Taruskin prioritized audience reception, not "musical utopianism".^[dn] He excoriated the Second Viennese School's "idiosyncratic view of the past", linking Webern and Adler to Eduard Hanslick and "neo-Hegelian" Franz Brendel;^[380] he criticized historical determinism, "the natural ally of totalitarian politics."^[381][do] Martin Scherzinger noted that Taruskin's criticisms sought "active complicity with undesirable politics".^[383][dp] Noted for his polemicism and revisionism,^[387][dq] Taruskin described his "dubious reputation" on Webern and New Music^[389] and was praised and criticized^[dr] 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".^[397]

On Webern's 1983 birth centenary, Tim Page noted less formalist readings of his work.^[398] 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",^[399] Watkins described "quick shifts of interest" tapering to neglect.^[400] Webern's music was established but infrequent in standard (repeating) orchestral repertoire.^[401][ds] His œuvre was played at the Venice Festival of Contemporary Music (1983),^[405] Juilliard (1995), and the Vienna Festival (2004), echoing six international festivals in his name (1962–1978).^[dt] In some obscurity (1941 or 1942), Webern had been quietly sure that "in the future even the postman will whistle my melodies!"^[407] But many did not acquire such a taste.^[408][du] He remained polarizing and provocative.^[411]

Noting this aspect of his reception, Johnson described Webern's "almost unique position in the canon of Western composers".^[412] Michael Walter [de] argued Webern's innovations impeded his "exoteric canonization". By contrast to the "concert canon", Anne C. Shreffler considered Webern's better standing in a "separate canon" of technical and formal innovation.^[dv] 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".^[417][dw] Mark Berry described Webern, already among Boulez's "big five", as one of five "canonical pillars of classic historical early twentieth-century modernism".^[dx] David H. Miller suggested Webern "achieved a certain kind of acceptance and canonization".^[423]

Pascal Decroupet observed an unquestioned "canon of polarizations" in prior histories.^[424][dy] Johnson noted the "co-existence and interaction of diverse stylistic practices" with "remarkable similarities", challenging "conservative and progressive" campism^[427] and decentering musicology's technical periodizations^[428] via the longue durée of global modernity.^[429][dz] Thus he ventured continuity^[431] between the "broken homeland" of Webern's Opp. 12–18 and the "broken pastoral" of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony;^[432][ea] between Webern's "evanescent images of musical fullness"^[433] and the brief, fragmentary nature of Chopin's Op. 28, which Schumann likened to "ruins".^[435] Building on Shreffler's and Felix Meyer's sketch studies as institutions acquired and made the Moldenhauers' estate accessible,^[eb] Johnson worked toward a hermeneutics of Webern's (and Mahler's) music.

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

Bibliography edit