1883–1908: Upbringing between fin-de-siècle Vienna and countryside

• (left) Schloss Preglhof, Webern's childhood home, in Oberdorf
• (middle) A brick barn in a field of wildflowers on the Preglhof estate^[4]
• (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,^[5] and owner of the Lamprechtsberg copper mine in the Koralpe; and Amalie (née Geer), a competent pianist and accomplished singer.^[6]

He lived in Graz and Klagenfurt for much of his youth, but his distinct and lasting sense of Heimat was shaped by reading Rosegger^{[7][lower-alpha 4]} and by summers with his parents, sisters, and cousins at their country estate, the Preglhof.^[8] 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.

After a trip to Bayreuth,^[9] Webern studied musicology at the University of Vienna (1902–1906) with Guido Adler, a friend of Mahler, composition student of Bruckner,^{[lower-alpha 5]} and devoted Wagnerian who had been in contact with both Wagner and Liszt.^{[10][lower-alpha 6]} He learned the historical development of musical styles and techniques, writing his doctoral thesis on Heinrich Isaac's Choralis Constantinus.^[10] Webern also studied art history and philosophy under professors Max Dvořák, Laurenz Müllner, and Franz Wickhoff,^[11] joining the Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft^{[lower-alpha 7]} in 1903.^[9] 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.^[12] The panels^{[lower-alpha 8]} of Segantini's Trittico della natura^{[lower-alpha 9]} are echoed in the preface of Webern's correspondingly tripartite, single-movement string quartet (1905) as "Werden–Sein–Vergehen",^{[13][lower-alpha 10]} which quoted Jakob Böhme.^[14]

In 1904, he approached Hans Pfitzner for composition lessons but left angrily when Pfitzner criticized Mahler and Richard Strauss.^[15] Guido Adler, who admired Schoenberg's work, may have sent Webern to Schoenberg for composition lessons. Webern progressed quickly under Schoenberg; the Passacaglia, Op. 1 (1908) was his graduation piece. He also met Berg, then another of Schoenberg's pupils. The three became devoted, lifelong friends and shared similar musical trajectories.

1908–1918: Early adulthood and war in Austria-Hungary

Webern, 1912

Webern revisited the Preglhof (sold by his father in 1912 and mourned as a "lost paradise"), the family grave at the cemetery in Schwabegg, and the surrounding Carinthian-Styrian Alps for the rest of his life.^[16] He associated these places with the memory of his mother, whose 1906 loss profoundly affected him.^[17] He wrote Schoenberg (Sept. 1912), "When I read letters from my mother, I could die of longing for the places where all these things have occurred".^[18] His music reflected these memories: "my compositions ... relate to the death of my mother";^{[lower-alpha 11]} "through my work, all that is past becomes like a childhood".^{[lower-alpha 12]}

With Alexander Zemlinsky's help,^[20] Webern worked as a conductor and musical coach in various towns and cities (e.g., Ischl, Teplitz,^{[lower-alpha 13]} Danzig,^{[lower-alpha 14]} Stettin,^{[lower-alpha 15]} Prague). Enraptured by Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande in 1908, he conducted Debussy's music in 1911. But he was unhappy and returned to Mödling to be near Schoenberg, despite Schoenberg's and his father's advice that he not leave his theater post in Prague.^[21] In 1912–1913 he had a breakdown and saw Alfred Adler, who noted his idealism and perfectionism in evaluating his symptoms as psychogenic responses to unmet expectations. Webern found this psychoanalysis helpful and insightful, as he shared with Schoenberg.^[22]

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

Webern, 1927, portrait by Georg Fayer

From 1918 to 1921, Webern worked for the Society for Private Musical Performances, giving concerts of new music by Bartók, Berg, Busoni, Debussy, Korngold, Mahler, Ravel, Max Reger, Satie, Strauss, Stravinsky, and Webern himself. After their Society performances in 1919 and while working on his own Opp. 14–15, Webern wrote Berg about Stravinsky's "indescribably touching" Berceuses du chat and "glorious" Pribaoutki.^[23] Like Berceuses du chat, Webern's subsequent Five Canons, Op. 16, were each only several measures long and scored for vocalist and clarinet(s).

After the Society's dissolution amid catastrophic hyperinflation in 1921, Webern worked as director of the Wiener Schubertbund and in 1922 of the mixed-voice amateur Singverein der Sozialdemokratischen Kunstelle^{[lower-alpha 16]} and the Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte^{[lower-alpha 17]} through David Josef Bach, Director of the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle.^{[24][lower-alpha 18]} In 1926, Webern resigned as chorusmaster of the Mödling Männergesangverein^{[lower-alpha 19]} for hiring Jewish soprano Greta Wilheim as a stand-in soloist for Schubert's cantata Mirjams Siegesgesang.^[25] Österreichischer Rundfunk aired his performances at least twenty times starting in 1927. In 1933 he hired Erich Leinsdorf as Singverein pianist;^{[lower-alpha 20]} they performed Stravinsky's ballet-cantata Les Noces, which may have influenced Webern.^{[27][lower-alpha 21]}

The Schattendorfer Urteil further polarized and radicalized Social Democrat–Social Christian relations.^[34] Webern and others^{[lower-alpha 22]} signed an "Announcement of Intellectual Vienna"^{[lower-alpha 23]} published on the front page of the Social Democrats' daily Arbeiter-Zeitung^{[lower-alpha 24]} days before the 1927 Austrian legislative election.^[35] On Election Day in Die Reichspost, Ignaz Seipel of the Einheitsliste officially applied the term "Red Vienna" pejoratively, attacking Vienna's educational and cultural institutions.^[34] Social unrest escalated to the July Revolt of 1927,^[34] unsettling Webern and intensifying his nostalgia for social order.^[36]

Webern's music was performed more widely starting in the latter half of 1920s, yet he found no great success as Berg enjoyed with Wozzeck 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. He twice received the Preis der Stadt Wien für Musik.^{[lower-alpha 25]}

Though 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" (1928),^[40] they were marginalized and ostracized in Central Europe with few exceptions.^{[41][lower-alpha 26]} In Der Weg zur Neuen Musik (1932–1933)^{[lower-alpha 27]} 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)",^{[lower-alpha 28]} and warning "Imagine what will be destroyed, wiped out, by this hate of culture!"^[45]

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

Financial crises, complex social and political movements, pervasive anti-Semitism, culture wars, and renewed military conflicts^{[lower-alpha 30]} continued to shape Webern's world, profoundly circumscribing his life.^[48] In the Austrian Civil War, Austrofascists^{[lower-alpha 31]} executed, exiled, and imprisoned Social Democrats, outlawed their party,^[49] and abolished cultural institutions. Webern lost a promising conducting career, which might have been better recorded.^[50] He worked as a UE editor and IGNM-Sektion Österreich President (1933–1938, 1945).^[51]

His music and that of Berg, Krenek, Schoenberg, et al. was declared "Jewish" in Austria^{[lower-alpha 32]} and "Entartete Kunst" by Nazis.^[57] 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";^{[lower-alpha 33]} 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!"^[59] The Vienna Philharmonic nearly refused to play Berg's Violin Concerto (1936).^{[lower-alpha 34]} Peter Stadlen's 1937 Op. 27 premières were the last Viennese Webern performances until after World War II.^[61] Though prevented from attending, 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.^[62]

Webern's views of National Socialism were variously described.^{[lower-alpha 35]} Published items^{[lower-alpha 36]} reflected Webern's vacillations or ambivalence as well as his audience or context.^[64] Secondary literature reflected limited evidence, musicological polemics, or broader ideological orientations^{[lower-alpha 37]} and commonly admitted uncertainty.^[66] Musicologist Julie Brown noted hesitancy to approach the topic and echoed the Moldenhauers, considering the issue "vexed" and Webern a "political enigma".^[67] Bailey Puffett considered his politics "somewhat vague" and his situation "complex", noting that he practically avoided definitive political association.^[68] Johnson described him as "personally shy, a man of private feeling and essentially apolitical",^[24] "prone to identify with Nazi politics as ... other ... Austrians".^[69] Violinist Louis Krasner found Webern "idealistic and rather naive".^{[lower-alpha 38]}

Webern's friends, family, and colleagues contained vast differences,^[72] from Austrian National Socialists in his family^{[lower-alpha 39]} and friends^[74] to the Zionist Schoenberg,^{[lower-alpha 40]} the left-leaning Berg,^{[lower-alpha 41]} and others of their mostly Jewish, Social Democratic milieu in once "red" Vienna.^[84] Webern mediated,^[85] presuming power would moderate Hitler, an optimistic, perhaps self-soothing, complacency that exasperated his threatened friends,^[86] and he found himself surrounded mostly by one side as Schoenberg emigrated to the US (1933), Berg died (1935), and DJ Bach, among others, fled or worse.^[87]

1938–1939: Inner emigration in the German Reich

Krasner's last Webern visit was interrupted by the Anschluss: Webern turned on the radio to hear the news, urging Krasner to flee.^[88] Krasner wondered whether Webern knew the Anschluss was planned that day, as Webern's family included Nazis, and whether this was for his safety or to save Webern the embarrassment of Krasner's presence during a time of possible celebration in Webern's home or indeed in most of Mödling.^[89] Bailey Puffett suggested otherwise, noting Webern wrote his lyricist and collaborator Hildegard Jone and her spouse, sculptor Josef Humplik that day, "I am totally immersed in my work [composing] and cannot, cannot be disturbed."^[90]

Bailey Puffett wrote that Webern likely hoped to conduct and to secure a firmer future for his family under a new regime proclaiming itself "socialist" no less than nationalist.^[51] As an expression of pan-Germanism and populism, many German-speaking Volk^{[lower-alpha 42]} hoped for stability and prosperity within a nation-state (the Reich). In opposition to the Austrofascists and after years of Nazi soft power proceeding to occupation,^{[lower-alpha 43]} some on the Austrian left^{[lower-alpha 44]} had promoted unification and now supported the post hoc 1938 Austrian Anschluss referendum^[91] on premises of Realpolitik and self-determination in line with the Grossdeutsche Lösung (1848), the Provisional National Assembly's unanimous support (1918),^{[lower-alpha 45]} and the Linzer Programm (1926-1933).^{[lower-alpha 46]}

Kristallnacht shocked Webern, and he visited and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach, Otto Jokl, Josef Polnauer, and Hugo Winter.^[92] 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.^[93] Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian whose emigration Schoenberg and Webern were unable to secure,^[94] 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.^[95] Webern moved Humplik's 1929 gift of a Mahler bust to his bedroom.^[96]

Webern found himself increasingly isolated,^[97] with "almost all his friends and old pupils ... gone",^[98] and his financial situation was poor. He had considered following Schoenberg to the US but was reluctant to leave home and family. He entered a period of "inward emigration",^[99] writing to artist Franz Rederer in 1939, "We live completely withdrawn. I work a lot."^[93] He corresponded extensively to maintain relationships, but the coming war limited postal service.^[100]

1939–1945: Hope and disillusionment during World War II

Sharing in wartime public sentiment at the height of Hitler's popularity (spring 1940), Webern expressed high hopes, crediting him as "unique" and "singular"^{[lower-alpha 47]} for "the new state for which the seed was laid twenty years ago" in patriotic letters to Joseph Hueber, a close friend, active soldier, mountaineering companion, and baritone who often sent Webern gifts.^[101] (Indeed, Hueber had just sent Webern Mein Kampf.)^{[lower-alpha 48]} Unaware of Stefan George's aversion to the Nazis, Webern marveled suggestively at the wartime leader envisioned in rereading Das neue Reich, but "I am not taking a position!" he wrote active soldier, singer, and onetime Social Democrat, Hans Humpelstetter.^[103] 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."^[104]

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

By Aug. 1940, Webern was financially dependent on his children.^[105] He attended 1940 Swiss performances of Op. 1 and Op. 4 as well as Scherchen's 1943 Op. 30 première with support from the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur and Werner Reinhart. He intimated to Willi Reich that he might emigrate but failed to obtain foreign conducting opportunities.^[106] These were his last trips outside the Reich, within which he also hoped for opportunities.^[107]

His 1943–1945 letters are strewn with references to bombings, deaths, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order; several grandchildren were born.^[108] 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.^[108] His only son Peter, intermittently conscripted since 1940,^[109] was killed by an air attack (14 Feb. 1945).^[110]

With the Red Army's April 1945 arrival imminent, the Weberns gave Schoenberg's first son Görgi assistance and ultimately their Mödling apartment, the property and childhood home of Webern's son-in-law Benno Mattl.^{[lower-alpha 49]} 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".^[108]

On the night of 15 Sept. 1945, Webern was smoking outside when he was shot and killed by a US soldier in an apparent accident.^[112] 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, and her grief was compounded by no commemoration in Vienna. With the abolition of the Entartete Kunst ban, Alfred Schlee 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."^[113] Minna died in 1949.

1899–1908: Formative juvenilia and emergence from study

Webern published little early work and was meticulous, revising extensively, not unlike Brahms.^[134] Not all of Webern's works were published in his lifetime.^{[lower-alpha 57]} Webern's rediscovery prompted the publication of his juvenilia, some of which was unknown into (and beyond) the 1960s, partly until the work of the Moldenhauers, effectively obscuring and undermining formative facets of his musical identity.^[135] 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.^[136]

Webern's earliest works primarily comprise lieder. Poets such as Richard Dehmel, Gustav Falke, and Theodor Storm inspired him and his contemporaries,^[137] and Wolf's Mörike-Lieder were especially influential on Webern's efforts from this period. The genre demonstrates that his roots lay in Romanticism, and as is evident from his sketches, all of Webern's music may be said to arise from Romanticism's lyricism and intimacy and its concerns with themes of belonging, yearning, and solace, albeit in an increasingly abstract, spare, and introverted manner.^[138]

Webern's first piece after completing his studies with Schoenberg in 1908 was his Passacaglia, which has more chromatic harmonic language and somewhat more distinctive orchestration than his earlier works. Although superficially very different from his later works, it foreshadows them.^[139] 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) in a highly idiosyncratic musical language.^[140]

1908–1924: Atonality, aphorism, and lieder

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.^[142] 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 Feb. 1909);^{[lower-alpha 58]} Fünf Orchesterstücke for orchestra, Op. 16; and monodrama Erwartung, Op. 17.^[144] 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".^[145] Some of their music from this time was published in Der Blaue Reiter.^[146]

With Opp. 18–20, Schoenberg began to retreat somewhat. In Pierrot lunaire (1912), Op. 21, there are elements of Kabarett,^{[lower-alpha 59]} 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.^[150]

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.^[151] "How much I owe to your Pierrot", he wrote Schoenberg upon completing a setting of Georg Trakl's "Abendland III", Op. 14, No. 4,^[152] 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.^[153] In a stage play he wrote in Oct. 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.^[154] 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;^[155] luminosity or darkness as sought by different voicings or the use of sul ponticello;^[156] absence, emptiness, or loneliness metaphorically through compressed range by contrast to fulfillment or (often spiritual) presence or transcendence through registral expansion;^{[157][lower-alpha 60]} the celestial and ethereal in the use of celesta, harp, glockenspiel;^[158] or angels and heaven, for example, in the use of harp and trumpet in the circling ostinati of Op. 6, No. 5,^[153] and winding to conclusion at the very end of Op. 15, No. 5).^[159]

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 61]} 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 62]} 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 63]} Webern interpreted this line as a metaphor for pitch space, as did Schoenberg,^{[lower-alpha 64]} 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.

1924–1945: Formal coherence and expansion

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.^[30]

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.^[166]

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.^[167] 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.^[168]

Webern's late cantatas seem to indicate new developments in style as he noted ecstatically in letters to the Humpliks,^[169] 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.^[170] They are texturally somewhat denser and more homophonic at the surface through nonetheless contrapuntal polyphonic means,^[169] with "Schweigt auch die Welt" increasingly abandoning lines for points and culminating twice (at the center and end) in twelve-note simultaneities.^[171]

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.^[172]

Arrangements and orchestrations

In his youth (1903), Webern orchestrated at least five Schubert 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";^[173] 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,^[174] 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)^[175] 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 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").^[176] 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.^[177]

1935–1947: Contemporaries' perspectives

Somewhat independently and singularly,^{[lower-alpha 66]} identifying with Webern as a "solitary soul" amid 1940s wartime fascism,^[186] 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.^[187] 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."^[188] His 1943 Sex carmina alcaei^{[lower-alpha 67]} 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."^[189] Dallapiccola's 1953 Goethe-Lieder especially recall Webern's Op. 16 in style.^[190]

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 68]} "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 69]} Krasner notes that this "puts 'Vienna's Three Modern Classicists' into historical perspective," summarizing it as "what bound us together was our idealism."^[191]

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

Interest in Webern's music, much of it recently published after World War II, grew and acquired "a saintly, visionary aura".^{[195][lower-alpha 70]} 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; his its inclination toward athematicism, abstraction, and lyricism variously informed and oriented European, typically serial or avant-garde composers (e.g., Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Pousseur, Ligeti, Sylvano Bussotti, Bruno Maderna, Bernd Alois Zimmermann). This was made possible in large part by René Leibowitz as he championed, performed, promulgated, and published Schoenberg et son école,^[196] but Adorno, Herbert Eimert, and others also contributed.^[197] When Webern's Piano Variations were performed at Darmstadt in 1948, young composers listened in a quasi-religious trance.^[181] 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.^[198] Thus Webern's work came to represent a universally or generally valid, systematic, and compellingly logical model of new composition.^[199]

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;^[200] Milton Babbitt, who ultimately derived more inspiration from Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice than that of Webern;^[201] and particularly 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.^[202] 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.^[203] Gottfried Michael Koenig speculated 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."^[204] Expressing a related opinion, contemporaneous German music critic and contributor to Die Reihe Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski wrote in the Darmstädter Tagblatt (3 Sept. 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."^[205]

1950s onward: Beyond (late) Webern

Continuing through the late 1950s onward, Webern's work reached musicians as far removed as Joel Thome and Frank Zappa,^[206] yet many post-war European musicians and scholars had already begun to look beyond^[207] as much as back at Webern: there was some rapprochement with Berg^[208] 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^[209] coinciding with a wider rapprochement with Berg (whose example Pousseur cited,^[210] from whose music he quoted in the second scene, and whose writings he translated into French in the 1950s).^{[211][lower-alpha 71]} 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 72]} 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 respectively 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."

Eastern Europe as exception

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^[212] and later Concerto for Orchestra,^[213] Second Viennese influence on composers behind the Iron Curtain was mediated by anti-fascist and anti-German sentiment^[214] and obstructed by anti-formalist cultural policies^[215] 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."^[216] Following the 1956 uprising in Hungary, the influence of Webern initially predominated, bearing on Pál Kadosa, Endre Szervánszky, and György Kurtág.^[217] Among Czechs, Marek Kopelent, who discovered the Second Viennese School as an editor and was particularly taken by Webern,^[218] was ostracized and blacklisted for his avant-garde music at home and despaired, unable to attend performances of his own works abroad;^[219] 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.^[220]

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.^[221] 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).^[222] Philip Herschkowitz, poverty-stricken, had been teaching privately with cautious emphasis on Beethoven and the tradition from which Webern emerged,^[223] while in Soviet Music Marcel Rubin criticized "Webern and His Followers" (1959), by contrast to Berg and Schoenberg, precisely for going too far;^[224] and Alfred Schnittke complained in an open letter (1961) of composers' restricted education.^[225] 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 73]} Viktor Yekimovsky) ironically learned more about what had been and even was still forbidden.^[227]

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."^[228] 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."^[228] 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.^[229]

This tolerance did not survive Brezhnev and the Stagnation:^[230] 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.^[231]

Since the 1980s: Reappraisals and polemics

Webern's music remains polarizing and provocative within various communities of musicians and scholars.^[232] Its legacy (or canonic status) has been celebrated, confirmed, and challenged^[197] 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 postmodernism and the "Restoration of the 1980s," as Martin Kaltenecker termed a paradigm shift from structure more toward perception within the discourse of New Music, challenges were raised within historical musicology and more broadly intellectual and cultural history, including those of a historiographical nature.^[233] This prompted 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";^[234] Andreas Holzer warned of "the spread of post-factual tendencies in musicology";^[235] 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."^[236] Taruskin's work, noted for its polemicism,^{[237][lower-alpha 74]} was criticized as to New Music since and including the Second Viennese School^{[239][lower-alpha 75]} by many,^{[lower-alpha 76]} including 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.^[252] 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.^{[253][lower-alpha 77]} 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 78]} through "unbelievable distortions, exaggerations, reductions and propagation of clichés".^{[lower-alpha 79]}

Performance practice

Webern insisted on lyricism, nuance, rubato, sensitivity, and both emotional and intellectual understanding in performance of music;^[257] 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),^[258] 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.^[259]

This aspect of Webern's work was typically missed in his immediate post-war reception, however,^[260] one that was roughly coterminous with the early music revival (i.e., with the rediscovery of other "music that is at the same time old and new," as Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople glossed it and as addressed by Richard Taruskin).

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."^[261]