Anton Webern

Anton Webern (born December 3, 1883, Vienna; died September 15, 1945, Mittersill), alongside Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg, was the most important representative of the Second Viennese School and a significant catalyst for New Music. Webern came from an aristocratic family; his father, Karl Freiherr von Webern, was a civil engineer, and his mother ensured that the musically gifted boy received early piano, cello, and composition lessons. From 1902–06, he studied musicology at the University of Vienna, and from 1904, he also studied composition with Arnold Schönberg, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. From 1908, Anton Webern worked as a theater Kapellmeister in Vienna, Danzig, Stettin, and Prague, was a member of Schönberg's "Society for Private Musical Performances," and from 1921–34, he conducted the Vienna Workers' Symphony Concerts and the Vienna Workers' Choral Society. In 1927, he became a conductor, and three years later, a specialist advisor for Austrian radio, but in 1938, he was banned from performing and publishing by the National Socialists. He lived in seclusion until his death. On September 15, 1945, Anton Webern was accidentally shot by an American soldier in Mittersill near Zell am See, where he had fled from the Red Army. Anton Webern's musical journey quickly led from late Romanticism ("Passacaglia" for orchestra, op.1, 1908; "Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen," op.2, 1908) to atonality ("George-Lieder," op.3 and op.4, 1908/09). It was important to him to condense musical expressiveness into a motivic concentrate, which he formulated exemplarily in the five "String Quartets" (1909) and the "Six Pieces for Large Orchestra, op.6" (1909/10). After a creative phase exclusively dedicated to vocal works (op.12 to op.19) exploring twelve-tone technique, he composed the first important instrumental works on a dodecaphonic basis with a tendency towards serial design in the following years. Anton Webern collaborated closely with the poet Hildegard Jone for many years, who, alongside expressionist poets like Georg Trakl and classics like Goethe, Rilke, Strindberg, and contemporaries like Karl Kraus, provided texts for his compositions ("Drei Lieder, op.25," 1934/35; Das Augenlicht, op.26. 1935). Anton Webern's radically consistent approach to tonal material became a crucial inspiration for the subsequent generation of New Music composers (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono).