Anton Webern

• (left) Schloss Preglhof, Webern's childhood home, in Oberdorf
• (middle) A brick barn in a field of wildflowers on the Preglhof estate[6]
• (right) Family grave at the cemetery in Schwabegg, on a meander spur of the Drava

Webern was born in Vienna, then in Austria-Hungary. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a descendent of minor nobility, high-ranking civil servant, mining engineer,[7] and owner of the Lamprechtsberg copper mine in the Koralpe; and Amalie (née Geer), a competent pianist, accomplished singer, and possibly the only obvious source of the future composer's talent.[8]

He lived in Graz and Klagenfurt for much of his youth. But his distinct and lasting sense of Heimat was shaped by readings of Peter Rosegger;[9] and moreover by frequent and extended retreats with his parents, sisters, and cousins to his family's country estate, the Preglhof, which Webern's father had inherited upon the death of Webern's grandfather in 1889.[10] Webern memorialized the Preglhof in a diary poem "An der Preglhof" and in the tone poem Im Sommerwind (1904), both after Bruno Wille's idyll. Once Webern's father sold the estate in 1912,[11] Webern referred to it nostalgically as a "lost paradise".[12] He continued to revisit the Preglhof,[13] the family grave at the cemetery in Schwabegg, and the surrounding landscape for the rest of his life,[14] taking it as his home and associating it with the memory of his mother, whose loss in 1906 profoundly affected him for decades.[15]

After a summer trip to Bayreuth,[16] Webern studied musicology at the University of Vienna (1902–1906) with Guido Adler, a composition student of Anton Bruckner[lower-alpha 3] and devoted Wagnerian who had been in contact with both Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.[17][lower-alpha 4] He learned the historical development of musical style and technique, writing his doctoral thesis on the Choralis Constantinus of Heinrich Isaac.[17]

Webern's secondary study was art history.[16] His cousin Ernst Dietz, an art historian studying in Graz, may have introduced him to the work of the painters Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, whom he came to admire; he also enjoyed the work of Ferdinand Hodler and Moritz von Schwind.[18] Segantini's 1898–1899 Trittico della natura,[lower-alpha 5] which Webern likely encountered in reproduction, partly inspired his 1905 single-movement string quartet, with its three sections corresponding to the three panels[lower-alpha 6] referenced in the preface as "Werden–Sein–Vergehen."[19][lower-alpha 7] In 1903, Webern joined the Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft.[lower-alpha 8]

Webern, 1912

Young Webern was enthusiastic about the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, Liszt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), Hugo Wolf, and Wagner. He also enjoyed the music of Hector Berlioz and Georges Bizet. In 1903, besides describing some of Alexander Scriabin's music as "languishing junk," Webern wrote of Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 4 that it was "boring," that Carl Maria von Weber's Konzertstück in F minor was passé, and that he found Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 3 (which struck Eduard Hanslick as "artistically the most nearly perfect") "cold and without particular inspiration, ... badly orchestrated—grey on grey."[21] Writing about an all-Russian concert program, Webern praised one of Alexander Glazunov's symphonies as "not particularly Russian" in contrast to some of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's music, of which he thought less.[21][lower-alpha 9]

In 1904, he approached Hans Pfitzner for composition lessons but left angrily after hearing criticism of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.[23] It may have been on Guido Adler's advice that he paid Schoenberg for composition lessons, as Adler was friends with Mahler and admired the work of Schoenberg. Webern progressed quickly under Schoenberg's tutelage, publishing his Passacaglia, Op. 1, as his graduation piece in 1908. He also met Berg, then another of Schoenberg's pupils. These two relationships would be the most important in his life in shaping his own musical direction.

With the help of friends and colleagues, especially Alexander Zemlinsky,[24] Webern later began working peripatetically as a conductor and musical coach in various towns and cities, among them Ischl, Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic), Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), and Prague. He conducted some of Debussy's music in 1911, having written rapturously to Schoenberg about Claude Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 1908. But Webern returned to Vienna, specifically Mödling, to be happier near Schoenberg, despite Schoenberg's and his own father's advice that he not leave his theater post in Prague.[25] In 1912, he suffered a breakdown and undertook a course of psychoanalysis with Alfred Adler into 1913, who noted his idealism and perfectionism in diagnosing his symptoms as psychogenic responses to failure, resistance, or unfulfilled expectations, a diagnosis that Webern accepted, found insightful, and shared with Schoenberg.[26]

Webern, 1927, portrait by Georg Fayer

From 1918 to 1921, Webern helped organize and operate the Society for Private Musical Performances, which gave concerts of new music by Béla Bartók, Berg, Ferruccio Busoni, Debussy, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Mahler, Maurice Ravel, Max Reger, Erik Satie, Strauss, Stravinsky, and Webern himself. After their Society performances in 1919 (and while working on his own Opp. 14–15), Webern wrote to Berg that Stravinsky's Berceuses du chat "[move] me completely beyond belief," describing them as "indescribably touching," and that Stravinsky's Pribaoutki were "something really glorious";[27] like the Berceuses du chat, Webern's subsequent Five Canons, Op. 16, were only several measures long each and scored for vocalist accompanied by clarinets (or in the case of Nos. 2 and 4, a clarinet).

After the dissolution of the Society amid catastrophic hyperinflation in 1921, Webern obtained work as director of the Wiener Schubertbund and then, from 1922 until the dissolution of these institutions after the failed February Uprising, of the mixed-voice amateur Singverein der Sozialdemokratischen Kunstelle[lower-alpha 10] and the Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte[lower-alpha 11] through his relationship with DJ Bach, Director of the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle.[lower-alpha 12][28] His performances in this capacity were aired on Österreichischer Rundfunk no fewer than twenty times starting in 1927. In 1933 he engaged Erich Leinsdorf as rehearsal and solo pianist for the Singverein,[29] who later reflected on the experience as of "utmost value to my musical and critical development";[30] together they gave a performance of Stravinsky's dance cantata on folk idioms Les Noces,[31] of which the popevki-like 3-7A cell and its 4–10 variant[32] are not altogether unlike the rhythmized trichords of Op. 24[33] or the tetrachords of Op. 30[34] (which Stravinsky later admired),[35] apart from Stravinsky's tendency to anhemitony[36] in marked contrast to Webern's hemitonicism.[37]

Webern's music began to be performed more widely during and after the 1920s, yet he found no great success such as Berg enjoyed with Wozzeck nor even 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 through the League of Composers in 1929 and again in Oxford at the ninth festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). He was awarded Music Prize of the City of Vienna and served as Vienna ISCM President (1933–1938, 1945).

In 1926, Webern noted his voluntary resignation as chorusmaster of the Mödling Männergesang-Verein,[lower-alpha 13] a paid position, in controversy over his hiring of a Jewish singer, Greta Wilheim, to replace a sick one. Letters document their correspondence in many subsequent years, and she (among others) would in turn provide him with facilities to teach private lessons as a convenience to Webern, his family, and his students.[38]

Amid the 1927 Austrian elections, Webern and others[lower-alpha 14] were sufficiently moved to sign an "Announcement of Intellectual Vienna"[lower-alpha 15] published on the front page of the Social Democrats' daily Arbeiter-Zeitung.[39][lower-alpha 16] Though 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"[40] in their rise from "pitiful 'cliques'" to a large, diverse, international, and "irresistible movement,"[40] they became increasingly marginalized and ostracized in Central Europe with few exceptions.[41] Writing before his suicide in 1942, Stefan Zweig reflected, "the short decade between 1924 and 1933, from the end of German inflation to Hitler's seizure of power, represents—in spite of all—an intermission in the catastrophic sequence of events whose witnesses and victims our generation has been since 1914."[42]

From 1928 onward, Webern had furthered a closer working friendship with Ernst Krenek, alongside whom he lectured, whose music (taking a twelve-tone turn) he conducted, whose essays he admired, and with whom he, Berg, and Adorno shared various affinities and concerns about the future.[44] Inspired by Krenek's essay "Freiheit und Verantwortung",[lower-alpha 17] Webern wrote to Krenek affirming that "art has its own laws and that, if one wants to achieve something in it, only these laws and nothing else can have validity."[45] In Der Weg zur Neuen Musik,[lower-alpha 18] a series of private lectures delivered 1932–1933,[lower-alpha 19] Webern attacked fascist cultural policy, asking "What will come of our struggle?", observing that "'cultural Bolshevism' is the name given to everything that is going on around Schoenberg, Berg, and myself (Krenek too)", and warning "Imagine what will be destroyed, wiped out, by this hate of culture!"[48]

Webern's music, along with that of Berg, Krenek, Schoenberg, and others, was proscribed as Entartete Kunst by the Nazi Party in Germany, and its publication and performance were forbidden, although neither did it fare well under Austrofascism.[49] An Austrian gauleiter on Bayerischer Rundfunk labeled both Berg and Webern as Jewish composers in 1933,[50][lower-alpha 20] although Berg wrote to Adorno of prior instances.[51] Amid the rise of fascism in the 1930s, both found it harder to earn a living; Webern lost a promising conducting career which might have otherwise been more noted and recorded and had to take on work as an editor and proofreader for his publishers, UE.[52] The last performances of Webern's music in Vienna were Peter Stadlen's 1937 premières of the Piano Variations.[53]

Violinist Louis Krasner described Webern as naive and idealistic but not entirely without his wits, shame, or conscience, contextualizing Webern as a member of Austrian society at the time, one departed by Schoenberg and one in which the already pro-Nazi Vienna Philharmonic had even refused to play the late Berg's Violin Concerto.[54][lower-alpha 21] Krasner was particularly troubled by a 1936 conversation with Webern about the Jews, in which Webern expressed his vague, possibly anti-Semitic opinion that "Even Schoenberg, had he not been a Jew, would have been quite different!"[56] Krasner remembered that "Jews ... were at the center of the difficulty. Those who wanted to, put the blame for all this calamity, for all this depraved condition, on the Jews who had brought it with them—along with a lot of radical ideas—from the East. People blamed the Jews for their financial worries. The Jews were, at the same time, the poverty-stricken people who came with nothing and the capitalists who controlled everything."[57]

On one visit to Webern, Krasner described his seeming to anticipate the Anschluss: Webern turned on the radio just in time to hear the news and to urge Krasner to flee Maria Enzersdorf abruptly, whereupon he did (first to Vienna).[58] Whether this was for Krasner's safety or to save Webern the embarrassment of Krasner's presence during a time of possible celebration in the Webern family (or indeed in most of Mödling),[59] Krasner was ambivalent and uncertain. Krasner revisited frequently, hoping to convince and to assist friends (e.g., Schoenberg's daughter Gertrude and her husband Felix Greissle) with emigration. Krasner eventually left more permanently after a 1941 incident wherein he felt only his US passport saved him from both locals and police, later reflecting on himself as "foolhardy"[60] as to the full potential of Nazi anti-Semitism then, a blindness shared even by Franz Neumann (in his 1942 Behemoth until revisions in 1944)[61] and perhaps, Bailey Puffett suggested,[62] by Webern, who wrote to Humplik and Jone on the day of the Anschluss to be left alone: "I am totally immersed in my work [composing] and cannot, cannot be disturbed."[63][lower-alpha 22]

"Personally shy, a man of private feeling and essentially apolitical,"[65] Webern's attitude towards Nazism has been described in various, sometimes conflicting, ways by scholars. Published accounts and letters[lower-alpha 23] are suggestive and indirect, reflecting Webern's own vacillations or ambivalence given the different contexts in which or the audiences to whom his views were expressed.[66] A very wide variety of differences were represented in his friends, family, and colleagues, among whom Webern found himself mediating,[67] from active members of the Nazi Party within his family[68] and supporters among friends[69] to the Zionist Schoenberg, who emigrated; the left-leaning Berg,[lower-alpha 24] who died in 1935; and others of their Social Democratic milieu in previously "red" Vienna,[78] most of whom were targeted and fled.[79]

Political complexity attends consideration of Webern's individual culpability,[52] and Nazism itself, "not a coherent doctrine or body of systemically interrelated ideas, but rather a vaguer worldview made up of a number of prejudices with varied appeals to different audiences which could scarcely be dignified with the term 'ideology,'"[80] has been variously described. After World War I, the center-left Social Democrats had governed with the right-wing Social Christians in increasingly tenuous coalition, with the emergence of paramilitaries and disorder culminating in civil war. As a matter of nationalism, Realpolitik, and self-determination, prominent Austromarxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, among other Social Democrats, endured in their support of a German-Austrian Anschluss, unanimously passed by the Provisional National Assembly in 1918 as an answer to the Grossdeutsche Lösung before the peace treaty-imposed post-Habsburg rump state ("ce qui reste, c'est l'Autriche").[lower-alpha 25] With their party outlawed and some members interned under Austrofascism, some Social Democrats, at least initially, viewed National Socialists as no worse than what had become of Social Christians, merged by Engelbert Dollfuss into the clericofascist Vaterländische Front in concert with appeals to Austrians' Catholic identity and imperial history in order to maintain independence of Nazi Germany[lower-alpha 26] through alliance with Fascist Italy and Hungary;[83] thus Bauer, Renner, and others supported the Anschluss referendum even under Nazi occupation[84] following years of deteriorating German-Austrian relations and Austrian weakening, including the failed Austrian Nazi coup d'état and continuing economic warfare and destruction of infrastructure. Likewise, as an expression more of Pan-Germanism and populism than frank Nazism, many German-speaking populations hoped for political stability and prosperity within a nation-state (the [[German Reich#Reich as "national people" versus Reich as "state territory"|Reich]]). Bailey Puffett wrote that Webern may well have hoped to be able again to conduct and to be better able to secure a future for his family under a new regime that proclaimed itself "socialist" no less than nationalist.[52]

Following Kristallnacht, Webern visited and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach, Otto Jokl, Josef Polnauer, and Hugo Winter.[85] For Jokl, a former Berg pupil, Webern wrote a letter of recommendation to facilitate emigration; when that failed, Webern served as his godfather in a 1939 baptism.[86] Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian whose emigration Schoenberg and Webern were unable to secure,[87] managed to survive the Holocaust as an albino and later edited a 1959 publication by UE of Webern's correspondence from this time with Hildegard Jone, Webern's then lyricist and collaborator, and her husband, sculptor Josef Humplik.[88] Webern hid Humplik's 1929 gift of a Mahler bust in his bedroom.[89]

In broad terms, Webern's attitude seems to have first warmed impressionably and later, with widespread German disillusionment, cooled to Hitler and the Nazis to such an extent that by 1945 he had resolved to emigrate to England.[90] While Alex Ross characterizes Webern as "an unashamed Hitler enthusiast"[91] on the basis of Webern's 2 May 1940 description of Hitler as "this unique man" who created "the new state" of Germany,[92] Bailey Puffett and the Moldenhauers contextualize this passage not only with reference to Webern's nationalism, but also as patriotic wartime correspondence with Joseph Hueber, an active soldier, baritone, mountaineering companion, and close friend who held such views and sent Webern gifts from service abroad.[93][lower-alpha 27] Unaware of Stefan George's aversion to the Nazis, Webern marveled suggestively at the wartime leader envisioned in Das neue Reich, but "I am not taking a position!" he wrote to another active soldier, singer, and onetime Social Democrat, Hans Humpelstetter.[66]

Webern was prevented from attending Hermann Scherchen's première of Op. 26 at the 1938 ISCM festival in London. But its critical success[94] encouraged him to write more cantatas and reassured him after a cellist quit during a performance of Op. 20, declaring it unplayable.[95] Meanwhile, his financial situation deteriorated until, by August 1940, his personal records reflected no monthly income.[96] He attended the 1943 Winterthur première of Op. 30 only with the diplomatic intervention and financial support of its dedicatee Werner Reinhart.

Webern's 1944–1945 correspondence is strewn with references to bombings, deaths, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order; but also noted are the births of several grandchildren.[97] At the age of sixty (i.e., in Dec. 1943), Webern wrote that he was living in a barrack away from home and working from 6 am to 5 pm, compelled by the state in a time of war to serve as an air-raid protection police officer.[97] On 3 March 1945, news was relayed to Webern that his only son, Peter, died on 14 February of wounds suffered in a strafing attack on a military train two days earlier.[98]

In March 1945, with the Red Army's April arrival imminent, the Weberns provided Schoenberg's first son Görgi and his family, whose emigration Schoenberg was also unable to secure despite many attempts,[99] a Mödling apartment, the property and childhood home of Benno Mattl, a Kreisleiter and member of the Schutzstaffel who had married one of Webern's daughters Christine in 1938.[100] The Weberns fled west, even resorting to traveling partly on foot to Mittersill; there Webern's daughter Amalie wrote of "17 persons pressed together in the smallest possible space".[97] Due to Nazi munitions and propaganda in the apartment's storeroom, Görgi was held and nearly executed as a Nazi spy, but he was able to convince a German-speaking Jewish officer that he was not by drawing attention to his clothes sewn with the yellow Star of David.[60] Görgi and his family remained there until 1969.[100]

Grave of Webern and his wife "Minna" at the cemetery in Mittersill

On 15 September 1945, following Mattl's arrest for black-market activities, Webern was smoking a cigar outside his home so as not to disturb his sleeping grandchildren about one hour before curfew when he was shot and killed by US Army cook PFC Raymond Norwood Bell of North Carolina, who, overcome by remorse, died of alcoholism in 1955.[101]

Webern's wife Wilhelmine "Minna" Mörtl was buried with him when she died in 1949. Her last years were marred by grief, illness, loneliness (as friends and family continued to emigrate), and continuing poverty and consequent embarrassment. She worked to get his 1907 Piano Quintet finally published by Bomart via Kurt List and Opp. 17, 24–25, and 29–31 published by UE at the behest of Alfred Schlee, who solicited her urgently, with the abolition of the Entartete Kunst ban, for Webern's manuscripts hidden in Vienna. News of performances abroad made her wish that Webern had lived to experience more successes, and her grief was compounded by the lack of commemoration in Vienna: she asked Jone in 1948, "Should Anton have already been forgotten? Or is it the fault of the dreadful time in which we live?" In 1947 she wrote to Dietz, who had emigrated to the US, that "during the summer of 1945 [Webern] became convinced that he could not live here [in Austria] any more. He was firmly resolved to go to England and he would have carried it out, too"; likewise, in 1946, she wrote to DJ Bach, who had emigrated to London: "How difficult the last eight years had been for him. [He] was so embittered that he 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."[102]

Webern published little of his early work in particular and was meticulous, revising extensively, not unlike Brahms.[128] And not all of Webern's works were or could be published in his lifetime, especially with the passing of Emil Hertzka and amid the rise of fascism. Webern's rediscovery prompted the publication of his complete œuvre, including juvenilia, many of which were unknown until the work and findings of the Moldenhauers in the 1960s, effectively obscuring and undermining formative facets of Webern's musical identity.[129] Thus when Boulez first oversaw a project to record "all" of Webern's music, not including the juvenilia, the results fit on three rather than six CDs.[130]

Webern's earliest works consist primarily of lieder, the genre that most testifies to his roots in Romanticism, specifically German Romanticism; one in which the music yields brief but explicit, potent, and spoken meaning manifested only latently or programmatically in purely instrumental genres; one marked by significant intimacy and lyricism; and one which often associates nature, especially landscapes, with themes of homesickness, solace, wistful yearning, distance, utopia, and belonging. Robert Schumann's "Mondnacht" is an iconic example; Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, whose lyric poetry inspired it, is not far removed from the poets (e.g., Richard Dehmel, Gustav Falke, Theodor Storm) whose work inspired Webern and his contemporaries Berg, Reger, Schoenberg, Strauss, Wolf, and Zemlinsky.[132] Wolf's Mörike-Lieder were especially influential on Webern's efforts from this period. But well beyond these lieder alone, all of Webern's music may be said to possess such concerns and qualities, as is evident from his sketches, albeit in an increasingly symbolic, abstract, spare, introverted, and idealized manner.[133]

Webern's first piece after completing his studies with Schoenberg in 1908 was his Passacaglia, with its more chromatic harmonic language and somewhat more distinctive orchestration relative to Webern's earlier works. Although it may appear to bear little relation to later works, it nonetheless foreshadows them.[134] For example, a distinguishing feature of Webern's later work was to be the use of traditional compositional techniques (especially canons) and forms (as in the Symphony, the Concerto, the String Trio, and String Quartet, and the Piano and Orchestral Variations) like the passacaglia, though in a far more idiosyncratic and personal musical language.[135]

Webern wrote freely atonal music somewhat in the style of Schoenberg starting with Op. 3. The two were so close in their artistic development that in 1951 Schoenberg reflected that he sometimes no longer had known who he was. But Webern did not merely follow Schoenberg.[137] Ethan Haimo noted the swift, radical influence in summer 1909 of Webern's novel and arresting Fünf Sätze for string quartet, Op. 5, on Schoenberg's subsequent Klavierstück Op. 11, No. 3 (which differs markedly from Op. 11, Nos. 1 and 2 of February 1909);[lower-alpha 32] Fünf Orchesterstücke for orchestra, Op. 16; and monodrama Erwartung, Op. 17.[139] In 1949 Schoenberg still remembered being "intoxicated by the enthusiasm of having freed music from the shackles of tonality" and believing with his pupils "that now music could renounce motivic features and remain coherent and comprehensible nonetheless".[140]

With Opp. 18–20, Schoenberg began to retreat somewhat. In Pierrot lunaire (1912), Op. 21, there are elements of Kabarett,[lower-alpha 33] neoclassicism, and neo-Romanticism (e.g., canon and passacaglia in "Nacht," canon and fugue in "Der Mondfleck," waltz in "Serenade," triadic harmony in "O alter Duft," grotesque satire throughout), as befits the text's protagonist. With its contrapuntal procedures and nonstandard ensemble, Pierrot was received by Webern as a direction for the composition of his own Opp. 14–16.[144]

Of some fifty-six songs on which Webern worked during and after World War I (1914–1926), he ultimately finished and later published only thirty-two, carefully ordered into sets as Opp. 12–19.[145] "How much I owe to your Pierrot", he wrote Schoenberg upon completing a setting of Georg Trakl's "Abendland III", Op. 14, No. 4,[146] in which, distinctly, there is no silence or rest until a pause at the concluding gesture. A recurring theme is that of the wanderer, estranged or lost and seeking return to or at least retrieval from an earlier time and place. This wartime theme of wandering in search of home or rest fits with two complex, interrelated concerns more broadly evident in Webern's work: first, the loss and memory of his mother, father, and nephew, usually from a religious perspective; and second, Webern's broad and spiritual, even pantheistic sense of Heimat in the form of abstracted and idealized rural landscapes, such as that of the lost Preglhof estate or the Alps.[147] In a stage play he wrote in October 1913, Tot, Webern drew on Emanuel Swedenborg's notion of correspondence to explore these concerns over the course of six alpine scenes of reflection and self-consolation.

Johnson argued that the whole of Webern's music takes on the nature of such dramatic and visual tableaux, if in a more abstract and formal manner in some of the late works. Melodies frequently begin and end on weak beats, settle into or arise out of ostinati, or otherwise dynamically and texturally emerge or fade away.[148] Tonality, useful for communicating direction and narrative in programmatic pieces, becomes more tenuous, fragmented, static, symbolic, and visual or spatial in function, thus mirroring the concerns and topics, explicit or implicit, of Webern's music and his textual selections for lieder, especially from the poetry of George and Trakl. Expanding on the orchestration of Mahler, Webern characteristically sought a colorful and novel but idiosyncratically fragile and intimate sound, not infrequently bordering on silence at a typical ppp, often in consistent association with certain lyrical topics, whether the female or an angelic voice as evoked by solo violin or the use of harmonics;[149] luminosity or darkness as sought by different voicings or the use of sul ponticello;[150] absence, emptiness, or loneliness metaphorically through compressed range by contrast to fulfillment or (often spiritual) presence or transcendence through registral expansion;[151][lower-alpha 34] the celestial and ethereal in the use of celesta, harp, glockenspiel;[152] or angels and heaven, for example, in the use of harp and trumpet in the circling ostinati of Op. 6, No. 5,[147] and winding to conclusion at the very end of Op. 15, No. 5).[153]

For Webern especially, text-setting became a means of composing more than atonal aphorisms, but Schoenberg sought other means, "long ... yearning for a style for large forms ... to give personal things an objective, general form."[lower-alpha 35] From as early as 1906 Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern indulged a shared interest in esotericism, Swedenborgian mysticism, and Theosophy, reading Honoré de Balzac (Louis Lambert and Séraphîta) and August Strindberg (Till Damaskus and Jacob lutte) as they explored ways forward in their own work. Gabriel, the protagonist of Schoenberg's semi-autobiographical Die Jakobsleiter (1914–1922, rev. 1944)[lower-alpha 36] begins by describing a journey: "whether right, whether left, forwards or backwards, uphill or down – one must keep on going without asking what lies ahead or behind."[lower-alpha 37] Webern interpreted this line as a metaphor for pitch space, as did Schoenberg,[lower-alpha 38] who later considered Jakobsleiter a "real twelve-tone composition" for its opening hexachordal ostinato and a "Scherzo [theme] ... which accidentally consisted of all the twelve tones," well aware that "[a]n historian will probably one day find ... how enthusiastic [Webern and I] were about this." On the journey to composition with twelve tones, Webern revised many of his middle-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 and Felix Meyer have described.

The symmetry of Webern's tone row from Variations, Op. 30, is apparent from the equivalent, P1=IR1 and R12=I12, and thus reduced number of row forms, two, P and R, plus transpositions. Consisting of three related tetrachords: a and c consisting of two minor seconds and one minor third and b consisting of two minor thirds and one minor second. Notes 4–7 and 6–9 also consist of two minor seconds and one minor third. "The entire series thus consists of two intervals and has the greatest possible unity of series form, interval, motif, and chords.[34]

With the Drei Volkstexte (1925), Op. 17, Webern used Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique for the first time, and all his subsequent works used this technique. The String Trio (1926–1927), Op. 20, was both the first purely instrumental work using the twelve-tone technique (the other pieces were songs) and the first cast in a traditional musical form.[160]

Like that of both Brahms and Schoenberg, Webern's music is marked by its emphasis on counterpoint and formal considerations, and his commitment to systematic pitch organization in the twelve-tone method is inseparable from this prior commitment.[161] His tone rows are often arranged to take advantage of internal symmetries: a row may be divided into four groups of three pitches which are variations, such as inversions and retrogrades, of each other, thus creating invariance. This gives Webern's work considerable motivic unity, although this is often obscured by the fragmentation of the melodic lines. This fragmentation occurs through octave displacement (using intervals greater than an octave) and by moving the line rapidly from instrument to instrument in a technique referred to as Klangfarbenmelodie.[162]

Webern's late cantatas seem to indicate new developments in style as he noted ecstatically in letters to the Humpliks,[163] or at least a thoroughgoing synthesis of the formal rigors of his mature instrumental works with the word painting of his lieder on a larger, orchestral scale.[164] They are texturally somewhat denser and more homophonic at the surface through nonetheless contrapuntal polyphonic means,[163] with "Schweigt auch die Welt" increasingly abandoning lines for points and culminating twice (at the center and end) in twelve-note simultaneities.[165]

An apparent third cantata (1944–1945), setting "Das Sonnenlicht spricht" from Jone's Lumen cycle, was left in his sketchbook, having been planned initially as a concerto.[166]

In his youth (1903), Webern orchestrated at least five of Franz Schubert's various lieder, giving the piano accompaniment to an appropriately Schubertian orchestra of strings and pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns: "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";[167] in 1934, he did the same for Schubert's six Deutsche Tänze (German Dances) of 1824.

For Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1921, Webern arranged, among other things,[168] 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 Franz Liszt's Arbeiterchor (Workers' Chorus, c. 1847–1848)[169] for bass solo, mixed chorus, and large orchestra; it was premièred for the first time in any form on 13 and 14 March 1925, with Webern conducting the first full-length concert of the Austrian Association of Workers Choir. A review in the Amtliche 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").[170] The text, in English translation, reads 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." Liszt, initially inspired by his revolutionary countrymen, had left it in manuscript at publisher Carl Haslinger's discretion.[171]

Webern insisted on lyricism, nuance, rubato, sensitivity, and both emotional and intellectual understanding in performance of music;[173] this is evidenced by anecdotes, correspondence, extant recordings of Schubert's Deutsche Tänze (arr. Webern) and Berg's Violin Concerto under his direction, many such detailed markings in his scores (including a specially marked score of the Piano Variations),[174] and finally by his compositional process as both publicly stated and later revealed in the musical and extramusical metaphors and associations everywhere throughout his sketches. As both a composer and conductor, he was one of many (e.g., Wilhelm Furtwängler, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Scherchen) in a contemporaneous tradition of conscientiously and non-literally handling notated musical figures, phrases, and even entire scores so as to maximize expressivity in performance and to cultivate audience engagement and understanding.[175]

This aspect of Webern's work had been typically missed in his immediate post-war reception, however, even as it may radically affect the music's reception.[176] Felix Galimir of the Galimir Quartet told The New York Times in 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."[177]

Somewhat independently and singularly,[lower-alpha 40] identifying with Webern as a "solitary soul" amid 1940s wartime fascism,[181] Luigi Dallapiccola found inspiration especially in Webern's lesser-known middle-period lieder, blending elements of bel canto, Viennese expressionism, and the ethereal qualities of Webern's music.[182] Stunned by Webern's Op. 24 at its 1935 ISCM festival world première under Heinrich Jalowetz in Prague, Dallapiccola left the concert early with "food for thought" and an impression of the work's "aesthetic and stylistic unity on which one could not wish to improve."[183] His 1943 Sex carmina alcaei[lower-alpha 41] are dedicated "with humility and devotion" to "the Master," with whom he met in 1942 through Schlee, coming away initially open-mouthed at Webern's emphasis then on tradition, specifically "our great Central European tradition."[184] Dallapiccola's 1953 Goethe-Lieder especially recall Webern's Op. 16 in style.[185]

In 1947, Schoenberg remembered and expressed solidarity with Berg and Webern despite rumors of the latter's having "fallen into the Nazi trap":[lower-alpha 42] "Let us—for the moment at least—forget all that might have at one time 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, once perceived, 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."[lower-alpha 43] Krasner notes that this "puts 'Vienna's Three Modern Classicists' into historical perspective," summarizing it as "what bound us together was our idealism."[186]

In part because he had largely remained somewhat obscure and arcane during his own lifetime,[178] interest in Webern's music increased in the aftermath of World War II[190] as it came to represent a universally or generally valid, systematic, and compellingly logical model of new composition,[191] with his œuvre acquiring "a saintly, visionary aura".[178] His gradual innovations in schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and melodic contour; his later adaptation and generalization of imitative contrapuntal techniques such as canon and fugue; and his inclination toward athematicism, abstraction, and lyricism variously informed and oriented European, typically serial or avant-garde composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Sylvano Bussotti, Bruno Maderna, Henri Pousseur, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and György Ligeti. This was made possible in large part by René Leibowitz as he championed, performed, promulgated, and published Schoenberg et son école,[192] but Adorno, Herbert Eimert, and others also contributed.[193] When Webern's Piano Variations were performed at Darmstadt in 1948, young composers listened in a quasi-religious trance.[178] In 1955, the second issue of Eimert and Stockhausen's journal Die Reihe was devoted to Webern's œuvre, and in 1960 his lectures were published by UE.[190]

Less so in the United States, his music attracted the interest of Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland, whose critical ambivalence was marked by a certain enthusiasm and fascination nonetheless;[194] Milton Babbitt, who ultimately derived more inspiration from Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice than that of Webern;[195] and particularly Igor Stravinsky, to whom it was very fruitfully reintroduced by Robert Craft, and without which Stravinsky's late works might have taken different shape. Indeed, Stravinsky staked his contract with Columbia Records to see that Webern's "complete" music was first both recorded and widely distributed.[196] Among the more interdisciplinary New York School, John Cage and Morton Feldman both cited the staggering effect of its sound on their own music, first meeting at a performance of Webern's Symphony and even singing the praises of Christian Wolff distinctly as "our Webern".

Some composers' fascination with Webern's music post-WWII may have been partly due to its concision and apparent simplicity, thereby facilitating musical analysis.[197] Gottfried Michael Koenig speculates on the basis of his personal experience that since Webern's scores represented such a highly concentrated source, they may have been considered the better for didactic purposes than those of other composers. Robert Beyer criticized the approach of early serialists to Webern's music as reductive and narrowly focused on some of Webern's apparent methods rather than on his music more generally, especially neglecting timbre in their typical selection of Opp. 27–28. Karel Goeyvaerts recalled that at least on first impression, the sound of Webern's music reminded him of "a Mondrian canvas," explaining that "things of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality."[198] Expressing a related opinion, contemporaneous German music critic and contributor to Die Reihe Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski wrote in the Darmstädter Tagblatt (3 September 1959) that some of the later and more radical music at Darmstadt was "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing"; several days later, one of his articles in the Der Kurier was similarly headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at."[199]

Continuing through the late 1950s onward, Webern's work reached musicians even as far removed as Joel Thome and Frank Zappa,[200] yet many post-war European musicians and scholars had already begun to look beyond[201] as much as back at Webern: there was some rapprochement with Berg and advocacy for more engagement with the expressionism of Webern's atonal works in contrast to some earlier post-Webernism. In Adorno's 1954 lecture "The Aging of the New Music," he claimed that in the prevailing climate "artists like Berg or Webern would hardly be able to make it"; 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."

Even as the first scene of Pousseur's Votre Faust (1960–1968) quotes the opening of "Schweigt auch die Welt," dramatizing the composer Henri's analysis of Webern's Op. 31, it already has several elements of late or postmodernism, with its extreme plurality of historically developed styles, mobile form, and polyvalent roles in the service of a self-reflexive theme of relative, unstable identity[202] (traces perhaps of Berg, whose example Pousseur cites,[203] from whose music he quotes in the second scene, and whose writings he translated into French in the 1950s).[204][lower-alpha 44] 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 and echoing Adorno's praise for Lulu,[lower-alpha 45] the première of which Boulez conducted in 1979 after its finished orchestration by Friedrich Cerha.

Engaging particularly with Webern's atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism, both Brian Ferneyhough and Helmut Lachenmann found much in Webern on the way to complexity in the case of the former and musique concrète instrumentale in the case of the latter. Ferneyhough and Lachenmann sympathetically expanded upon and poetically went further than Webern in attention to the smallest of details and the use of ever more radically extended techniques: for example, Ferneyhough's 1967 Sonatas for string quartet comprise not only serial, but also atonal sections much in the style of Webern's Op. 9 yet more intensely sustained; and Lachenmann wrote in the 1985 essay, "Hearing [Hören] is Defenseless—without Listening [Hören]," of "a melody made of a single note [...] in the viola part" in mm. 2–4 of Webern's Op. 10, No. 4, amid "the mere ruins of the traditional linguistic context," in a comparison to his own 1969 Air, in which even "the pure tone, now living in tonal exile, has in this new context no aesthetic advantage over pure noise."

In the Communist Bloc, the music of the Second Viennese School proved an often bewildering or professionally dangerous but sometimes exciting or inspiring alternative to socialist realist art music, given access. Whereas Berg's Lyric Suite, performed by the Kolisch Quartet at the 1927 Baden-Baden ISCM festival where Bartók performed his own Piano Sonata, could inspire Bartók in his subsequent third and fourth string quartets[205] and later Concerto for Orchestra,[206] Second Viennese influence on composers behind the Iron Curtain was mediated by anti-fascist and anti-German sentiment[207] and obstructed by anti-formalist cultural policies[208] and Cold War separation more generally. In 1970 Ligeti explained, "In countries where there exists a certain isolation, in Eastern Europe, one cannot obtain correct information. One is cut off from the circulation of blood."[209] Following the 1956 uprising in Hungary, the influence of Webern initially predominated, bearing on Pál Kadosa, Endre Szervánszky, and György Kurtág.[210] Among Czechs, Marek Kopelent, who discovered the Second Viennese School as an editor and was particularly taken by Webern,[211] was ostracized and blacklisted for his avant-garde music at home and despaired, unable to attend performances of his own works abroad;[212] while Pavel Blatný, who attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and wrote music with serial techniques in the late 1960s, returned to tonality in Brno and was rewarded.[213]

In Soviet Russia specifically, as official condemnation and restricted access eased somewhat with the repeal of anti-formalist resolutions amid the post-Stalinist Khrushchev Thaw in the late 1950s and early 1960s, modernist and avant-garde scores and recordings entered through family (e.g., the relationship between Sergei Slonimsky and Nicolas Slonimsky), friends, journalists, composers, and especially musicians (e.g., Igor Blazhkov, Gérard Frémy, Alexei Lubimov, Maria Yudina) as they traveled more.[214] Kholopov risked arrest for obtaining scores from West Berlin and the Leipzig office of Schott Music while stationed nearby in Zossen as a military band arranger (1955–1958).[215] Philip Herschkowitz, poverty-stricken, had been teaching privately with cautious emphasis on Beethoven and the tradition from which Webern emerged,[216] while in Soviet Music Marcel Rubin criticized "Webern and His Followers" (1959), by contrast to Berg and Schoenberg, precisely for going too far;[217] and Alfred Schnittke complained in an open letter (1961) of composers' restricted education.[218] 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, Vladimir Martynov, Boris Tischenko,[lower-alpha 46] Viktor Yekimovsky) ironically learned more about what had been and even was still forbidden.[220]

Via Andrei Volkonsky, Lydia Davydova recalled, "Russia heard the music of the Renaissance and the early Baroque for the first time. He also had scores that his relatives sent him from abroad and also records sent by his relatives. You could say the same about modern music, because at his apartment I heard for the first time Schoenberg—Pierrot Lunaire—and the Webern cantatas."[221] Tischenko similarly remembered: "Precisely he [Volkonsky], precisely in the 1960s, discovered the regularity of the music that he composed. He was the first swallow of the avant-garde. And those who came after him ... they already followed in his tracks. I consider A. Volkonsky the discoverer."[221] Edison Denisov described the 1960s as his "second conservatory" and also credited Volkonsky not only for introducing the likes of Webern and his followers, but also of Carlo Gesualdo.[222]

This tolerance did not survive Brezhnev and the Stagnation:[223] 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.[224]

Webern's music remains polarizing and provocative within various communities of musicians and scholars.[225] Its legacy (or canonic status) has been celebrated, confirmed, and challenged[193] with recourse or reference to culture, history, ideology, philosophy, politics, social context, and public opinion or audience reception as a critical basis, ranging from the earlier interdisciplinary aesthetics and sociomusicology of Adorno and Ernst Bloch to the New Musicology of Susan McClary and more adjacently Richard Taruskin in the US. Complementing formal musical analysis, which itself was enriched by David Lewin's work toward a more integrative (or "phenomenological") approach, Julian Johnson worked toward a hermeneutics of Webern's music, building on the middle-period lieder sketch studies of Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler as well as the work of the Moldenhauers.

Since the "Restoration of the 1980s," as Martin Kaltenecker termed a paradigm shift from structure more toward perception within the discourse of New Music, challenges have been raised within historical musicology (including those of a historiographical nature), prompting controversy and admonishments: Charles Rosen scorned a "kind of historical criticism ... avoiding any serious engagement with a work or style that one happens not to like";[226] Andreas Holzer warned of "the spread of post-factual tendencies in musicology";[227] and Pamela M. Potter cautioned that "[i]t is important to consider all the scholarship on musical life in the Third Reich that, taken together, reveals the complexity of the day-to-day existence of musicians and composers", as "[i]t seems inevitable that debates about the political culpability of individuals will persist, especially if the stakes remain so high for composers, for whom an up or down vote can determine inclusion in the canon."[228][lower-alpha 47] Taruskin's work, noted for its polemicism,[230][lower-alpha 48] was criticized as to New Music since and including the Second Viennese School[232][lower-alpha 49] by Holzer[lower-alpha 50] and Rosen,[lower-alpha 51] as well as by Max Erwin,[lower-alpha 52] Rodney Lister,[lower-alpha 53] Larson Powell,[lower-alpha 54] Christian Utz, Martin Zenck,[lower-alpha 55] and Franklin Cox, who faulted him as an unreliable historian and "ideologist of tonal restoration," arguing that his "reactionary historicist" project opposed the Second Viennese School's "progressivist historicist" emancipation of the dissonance.[244] Taruskin acknowledged his "dubious reputation" on the Second Viennese School but stood by his criticisms of their "idiosyncratic view of the past," drawing a line from Webern and Adler to Hanslick and "neo-Hegelian historians", especially Franz Brendel.[245][lower-alpha 56] In relation to post-Webernism more generally, Holzer warned of attempts "to place Darmstadt in a fascistoid corner or even identifying it as a US propaganda institution amid the Cold War"[lower-alpha 57] through "unbelievable distortions, exaggerations, reductions and propagation of clichés".[lower-alpha 58]