Anton Webern

Anton Webern was a key figure in the history of 20th-century music. He was at the center of what was, for most of the second half of the century, its most influential technical development—twelve-note serialism—and his own music remains the purest manifestation of that method. He became a pupil of the inventor of the serial method, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), in 1904, and remained close to Schoenberg (if not physically, at least emotionally, and in the spirit of a devoted acolyte) until his death, in 1945. His music, however—unlike Schoenberg’s—is, to an extreme degree, economical and rarefied: a conscious rejection of the rich textures and passionate expression of late-Romantic music in Germany and Austria. Its intellectual austerity and needlepoint precision inspired some of the more advanced manifestations of modernism in the two or three decades immediately after the Second World War.

Early Years: The Viennese Student of a Viennese Composer

Webern was born in Vienna, the son of an army veteran and mining engineer who became head of the Austrian government’s Department of Mining. But much of his childhood was spent in provincial Austria, particularly on the aristocratic Webern family’s country estate in Carinthia. His mother was a trained pianist and a good singer, and Anton’s upbringing was profoundly musical: he studied piano and cello, sang at home and in choirs, and played cello in chamber music and the local orchestra. All this is worth emphasizing because his later—apparently, purely cerebral—approach to composition led to frequent accusations of soulless, unmusical intellectualism.

In Vienna, where he matriculated at the University in 1902, he immersed himself in the rich musical and artistic life of turn-of-the-century Austria and Germany. He went to Bayreuth for the Wagner festival, and, in Vienna, attended concerts and operas conducted by the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. At the university, as well as music, he studied art history. In 1904 he travelled to Berlin with the intention of taking composition lessons with Hans Pfitzner, but is said to have been so infuriated by Pfitzner’s dismissive attitude towards Mahler and the German composer Richard Strauss that he changed his mind, returned to Vienna, and enrolled in Schoenberg’s class at the school of Eugenie Schwarzwald.

Webern: Langsamer Satz for String Quartet

This was the period of Schoenberg’s most sumptuous late-Romantic scores, including the 50-minute orchestral tone poem Pelleas und Melisande (1902–03) and the First String Quartet (1904–05)—works that stretched tonality to the limits but did not yet abandon it (“extended tonality”). Webern already had a number of compositions to his own name, including songs with piano and a 15-minute orchestral tone poem, Im Sommerwind (In the Summer Wind), composed in 1904. These works are entirely tonal, mostly with key signatures, though the tonality is sometimes eccentric, and, in Im Sommerwind, highly anecdotal. During Webern’s official time of study with him (1904–08), Schoenberg progressed from extended tonality to free atonality (early, unsystematic explorations of atonality), as in the final two movements of his Second String Quartet, which he completed in 1908. That same year, Webern composed his orchestral Passacaglia, Op. 1, and the motet Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen, Op. 2 (to a text by the Expressionist poet Stefan George), works that remain just about tonal. (The motet ends firmly in G major, after a complicated harmonic journey.) Meanwhile, Webern had graduated from the university in 1906, with an edition of the Choralis Constantinus by 15th-century German composer Heinrich Isaac. The intense study of polyphony this entailed was to leave its mark in unexpected ways on his own music.

In Schoenberg’s class Webern had important fellow pupils, including Alban Berg (1885–1935). These two were to remain extraordinarily dedicated to their teacher long after the conclusion of their study with him, even after he moved to Berlin in 1911. They acted as his copyists and arrangers, and raised money to ensure he did not need to take full-time employment of his own. Webern even followed Schoenberg to Berlin in 1911, before taking a conducting post in Stettin, Germany (now Poland) in 1912–13. Subsequently he was accepted as conductor at the Deutches Landestheater (now the Estates Theatre) in Prague, but, not for the first time, found it impossible to face regular employment, and quickly returned to Vienna; afterwards he reapplied several times for the same post, took it up briefly on three or four occasions, but always soon reneged. It says a good deal about his talent that the theater persevered in this somewhat unproductive association. In December 1915 Webern even used the Prague connection to secure his release from wartime military service, but again lasted only a short time at the Landestheater.

Middle Period: Explorations in Atonality

Meanwhile, Webern’s music had emulated his person and followed Schoenberg into the world of atonality. Between 1908 and 1914 he composed a series of works, including several for chamber combinations, in a more and more esoteric style, which, in his case, involved increasing compression of his ideas—to the point that individual movements last no more than a few seconds. The first works in this series are songs, Op. 3 and Op. 4 (both 1908–09; further settings of Stefan George), then Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5 (1909), and Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9 (1911–13), of which the shortest plays for less than half a minute. There are also sets of tiny pieces for violin and piano (Op. 7, 1914) and cello and piano (Op. 11, 1914), as well as two orchestral suites, Op. 6 (1909) and Op. 10 (1911–13). The songs set the tone for this development, with exquisite, gasping phrases of a highly condensed character and extreme rhythmic intricacy: Expressionism reduced to near-inarticulacy. Transferred to instruments, the brevity verges on the arcane.

Webern later explained that, at the time, he began to feel that once the 12 notes of the octave had all been sounded, the piece was effectively over. In due course, this became a problem, and in the ten years following the outbreak of war in 1914, he completed very few works. Then Schoenberg himself “solved” the problem with the invention of his twelve-tone technique, which provided a theoretical method for extending works on the principle of the 12 notes as an ordered set which would govern the entire pitch content of each work or movement.

Late Period: The Perfection of a Method

Schoenberg himself used his method to generate music that is in many ways a natural continuation of the late 19th-century German symphonic tradition—albeit without the sense of key. Webern, however, used it to enhance the hyper-austere language of his prewar music. The few works he composed between about 1924 and his death, in 1945, all use the method with a strictness and purity that seem to defy Schoenberg’s claim that he was merely fulfilling the implications of advanced tonal music. Webern’s String Trio, Op. 20 (1926–27), molds the series into a polyphony of fragmentary gestures, with a detectable ancestry in the gasping phraseology of the early songs, but no longer with their Expressionist agony. The technique is further refined in the Symphony, Op. 21 (1927–28), and the Saxophone Quartet, Op. 22 (1928–30). Later works show little relaxation of this approach, except a number of settings of the Expressionist poet Hildegard Jone—particularly the two Cantatas, Op. 29 (1938–39) and Op. 31 (1941–43)—in which the fragments, to some extent, reassemble in the choral and solo vocal parts, out of respect for the poems’ verbal syntax, and (less obviously) the limitations of the human voice.

In the 1920s and ‘30s Webern achieved modest celebrity as a conductor of mainly local (Austrian) choirs and orchestras, while also undertaking engagements abroad, which brought him a measure of fame at a time when his music was not widely known. But, under the Nazis, his association with modern music (and with the Jewish Schoenberg, who had emigrated to the US in 1933) brought an end to his conducting career. His work was included in the Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1938, and he spent the Second-World-War years quietly, in Mödling, a few miles from Vienna. In March 1945 he and his family fled from the Vienna bombings to Mittersill (in the Salzburg region), and there, six months later (one month after the war ended), while stepping outside to smoke a cigar, he was shot dead by a soldier of the American occupation.

Watching and Listening

Webern’s chamber music provides an excellent picture of his work, from early to late. There is a number of posthumously published works for string quartet, from the time of his study with Schoenberg, that clarify the derivation of his early mature style from German late Romanticism; then, the Op. 5 string quartet and Op. 9 Bagatelles chart his retreat into extreme compression and fragmentation. Finally, the String Trio, Saxophone Quartet, and String Quartet, Op. 28 (1936–38) represent his serial music at various stages. These works are all well worth listening to: they are short (or shorter), and draw one into a unique sound world that, after the war, influenced composers as various as Igor Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage.

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