Anton Webern

Anton Webern was born in Vienna on 3 December 1883 into a family of minor Austrian nobility; he bore the name Anton von Webern until titles of nobility were abolished in 1918. His father, a mining engineer, became a senior civil servant. The family moved successively to Graz and Klagenfurt in Carinthia, where Anton learned piano and cello and played in the local orchestra. He spent his holidays on the family estate, the Preglhof, in the mountains, and all his life kept a deep love of Alpine nature.

In 1902 he entered the University of Vienna to study musicology with Guido Adler, one of the founders of the discipline. In 1906 he obtained a doctorate with a thesis on the Choralis Constantinus, a large work by the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac, whose score he edited. This knowledge of early polyphony and its canonic games deeply influenced his own music. In 1904 he and Alban Berg became private pupils of Arnold Schoenberg.

For four years Schoenberg taught him composition, and the two remained bound by deep friendship and admiration. In 1908 Webern composed his Passacaglia Op. 1 for orchestra, still Romantic, to mark the end of his studies. With his teacher and Berg he formed the “Second Viennese School”. Like Schoenberg he soon abandoned tonality. In 1911 he married his cousin Wilhelmine Mörtl; they had four children.

Webern took the concentration of music to an extreme. His works are astonishingly brief: the Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913) last less than four minutes in all, and some pieces are only a few bars long. Schoenberg wrote that they express “a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a single breath”. Every note is carefully weighed, surrounded by silence, often played very softly, like a painting made of a few dots of colour.

To earn his living Webern became a conductor in provincial theatres and then in Vienna. From 1922 to 1934 he conducted the Vienna Workers’ Symphony Concerts, organised by the Social Democratic Party to introduce great music to working people, as well as a workers’ choir. He programmed Mahler, Bruckner, Schubert and modern music. He also taught privately and lectured on composition.

From 1924 he adopted Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, applying it with remarkable rigour and clarity. His Symphony Op. 21 (1928), Quartet Op. 22, Concerto Op. 24 and Piano Variations Op. 27 (1936) are built like crystals, with note rows arranged in mirrors and canons. In 1935 he orchestrated the six-part Ricercar from Bach’s Musical Offering, passing each small fragment of the melody from one instrument to another like flashes of colour.

After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, his music was declared “degenerate” and banned. He lived in poverty, working as a proofreader for a publisher. At the end of the war he took refuge with his daughter at Mittersill near Salzburg. On 15 September 1945, as he stepped outside one evening to smoke a cigar in front of the house despite the curfew, he was shot by mistake by an American soldier. After his death his music became a model for a whole generation of avant-garde composers, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.