1883–1945 · Austria · 20th century
Anton Webern (1883–1945) was an Austrian composer, conductor and musicologist, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg and one of the founders of the Second Viennese School. He took twelve-tone technique to a point of extreme brevity and strictness of form. For a player, his path is worth knowing: from romantic songs of his youth to music where every note counts.
Anton Webern was born in Vienna to Carl von Webern, a mining engineer and civil servant in the ministry of agriculture, and Amalie von Webern, née Geer, the daughter of a butcher who took an interest in art and played the piano as an amateur. He spent his childhood in Graz, then in Klagenfurt, where he attended the gymnasium.
From 1895, Webern began studying music seriously: he was taught piano and cello by the local musician Edwin Komauer. Chamber music was played at home, and Webern took part in local orchestras — music entered his life long before he thought of it as a profession.
The family spent Easter and summer holidays at the Preglhof, a country estate near Schwabegg in Carinthia. There Webern walked through forests and meadows and kept a deep attachment to the place for life: even as an adult he returned there, and to the family grave in nearby Schwabegg, more than once.
Webern finished the gymnasium and entered the University of Vienna, where he studied musicology under Guido Adler from 1902 to 1906. The same years — 1904 to 1908 — overlapped with composition lessons from Arnold Schoenberg, which shaped his views and the course of his work.
In Schoenberg's class, Webern met Alban Berg, who became a close friend for life. Together with their teacher, they formed the circle that would later be called the Second Viennese School.
For his musicology dissertation under Adler, Webern prepared an edition of Heinrich Isaac's Choralis Constantinus II — a work in which each voice is built as a separate, self-contained and clearly audible line. He later looked for this same quality in his own music.
Even before starting his studies, Webern spent a great deal of time at concerts and the opera, and attended the Bayreuth Festival. As a student, he kept going to performances, listening to works by Brahms, Mahler, Wagner and Strauss.
Starting in 1908, Webern conducted operas and symphony concerts in cities across Germany and Austria, and in Prague too, often moving from place to place.
These engagements involved mostly operetta and light music, which Webern himself regarded as beneath serious repertoire. Several times he left a post over disagreements with a theatre's management, only to take up a new engagement soon after — moving and changing cities became part of these years.
In these years Webern worked in theatres in Bad Teplitz, Danzig, Stettin and Prague. In Danzig he saw the ocean for the first time, which struck him as almost frightening.
In 1912–1913, Webern had a breakdown and saw the physician Alfred Adler. There were several causes: too little time to compose, conflicts at his theatre job, and a hard-to-bear separation from home. Webern wrote to Schoenberg that Adler's psychoanalysis had been helpful to him.
After the First World War began, Webern spent nearly two years on and off in military service. Frequent moves and exhaustion left him little time to compose — in these years he finished only nine songs. In December 1916 the army let him go because of his myopia, a condition that had kept him off the front line from the start.
In early 1918, before the war had even ended, Webern followed Schoenberg to Mödling, hoping to compose again close to his teacher. Money troubles and disagreements broke their friendship for a while, but the two made peace in October 1918, shortly before Webern's father died in 1919.
In 1917, after the death of Emperor Franz Joseph I and amid a broader reckoning with the war, Webern wrote several songs that carried a sense of personal grief and the end of an era.
Webern made a name as a choirmaster and conductor who championed Gustav Mahler's music in Vienna and abroad. From 1918 to 1921, together with Berg, Schoenberg and Erwin Stein, he worked at the Society for Private Musical Performances, which presented new music — works by Bartók, Busoni, Mahler, Stravinsky and other composers.
Webern led the Vienna Workers' Choral Society and, from 1928 to 1938, was a conductor for Austrian Radio. He also headed the Vienna Schubertbund, conducting works by Brahms, Mahler, Reger and Schumann, and led workers' symphony concerts in Vienna, at one of which, in 1922, he performed Mahler's Third Symphony.
After the Nazis came to power in Austria in 1938, Webern was removed from his post at the radio. The music of his circle was branded cultural Bolshevism, foreign to German tradition, and after that he could no longer find official work in the country's musical life. At the same time, he helped Jewish friends leave the country or hide, even though he himself repeatedly thought about emigrating and never did.
In these same years, performances of his music reached beyond Austria too: the Symphony, Op. 21, was heard in New York in 1929, then in 1931 at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in London.
In the last years before and during the war, Webern rarely appeared in public: he prepared piano reductions for the Universal Edition publishing house and gave private lessons.
Webern's life ended tragically in Mittersill, occupied in 1945 by American troops. On the evening of 15 September, he stepped out of the house of his son-in-law Mattel to smoke a cigar his son-in-law had given him, and was shot at close range, three times, by an American army soldier who mistook the flash of a struck match for a threat. The soldier, who appeared to be drunk, explained his actions as self-defence.
Webern's widow, Wilhelmine, had to prove in writing to the American authorities that her husband, by his health and his principles, could not have attacked anyone, least of all a soldier.
Webern was a pupil and successor of Arnold Schoenberg: he himself said that Schoenberg was the head of their shared school, and that he and Alban Berg were its wings. Webern took twelve-tone and serial technique to a point of extreme brevity: his music is marked by an aphoristic concision and economy of means — not a single wasted note — combined with a strict constructive scheme and very refined work with sound. This refinement of sound goes together with an almost abstract, detached cast of thought.
Webern wrote symphonic, chamber, vocal and choral works, but only 31 of them carry opus numbers. The site features his early songs for voice and piano, written before his move to twelve-tone technique, at a time when he already had a style of his own. Their level on the site ranges from intermediate to advanced.
A good place to start is the intermediate-level song "Kahl reckt der Baum", moving on to "intermediate+" songs such as "Dies ist ein Lied für dich allein" and "So ich traurig bin", and then to the more demanding, advanced-level "Im Windesweben".
These songs date from 1908–1909 — the very years when Webern already had a personal style setting his music apart from Schoenberg's and Berg's, even though the thematic work in them was still traditional. He gave up tonality for good in those same years, and later moved on to twelve-tone technique.
These songs come from two early cycles set to poems by Stefan George. In them, unlike Webern's later works, a listener can still make out thematic development in the traditional, familiar sense.
Webern's twelve-tone technique was taken up by many composers of the post-war avant-garde: in the West by Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono and Maderna, as well as Ligeti; in Russia the same tradition was carried on by Volkonsky, Denisov, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Kneifel and Vustin.
Webern's numbered works span several decades — from the Passacaglia, Op. 1, to the Second Cantata, Op. 31 (1943) — yet amount to only thirty-one pieces in all. Webern himself learned to play the piano as a child, and the instrument accompanies many of his works, including the early songs featured on the site.