Musicians - Anton Webern

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	Musicians - Anton Webern

Anton Webern (December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945) was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the so called Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the Twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of pitch, rhythm and dynamics were formative in the musical style later known as serialism.

Biography

Webern was born in Vienna, Austria, as Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern. He never used his middle names, dropping the von in 1918. After spending much of his youth in Graz and Klagenfurt, Webern attended Vienna University from 1902. There he studied musicology with Guido Adler, writing his thesis on the Choralis Constantinus of Heinrich Isaac. This interest in early music would greatly influence his compositional technique in later years.

He studied composition under Arnold Schoenberg, writing his Passacaglia, Op. 1 as his graduation piece in 1908. He met Alban Berg, who was also a pupil of Schoenberg's, and these two relationships would be the most important in his life in shaping his own musical direction. After graduating, he took a series of conducting posts at theatres in Ischl, Teplitz, Danzig, Stettin, and Prague before moving back to Vienna. There he helped to run Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances and conducted the Vienna Workers Symphony Orchestra from 1922 to 1934.

Webern's music was denounced as "cultural Bolshevism" when the Nazi Party seized power in Austria in 1938. As a result, he found it harder to earn a living, and had to take on work as an editor and proof-reader for his publishers, Universal Edition. Webern left Vienna in 1945 and moved to Mittersill in Salzburg, believing he would be safer there. On September 15 however, during Allied occupation of Austria, he was shot dead by a drunk American Army soldier following the arrest of his son-in-law for black market activities.

Webern's music

:Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge. -- Igor Stravinsky

Webern was not a prolific composer; just thirty-one of his compositions were published in his lifetime, and when Pierre Boulez oversaw a project to record all of his compositions, including those without opus numbers, the results fit on just six CDs. However, his influence on later composers, and particularly on the post-war avant garde is acknowledged as immense. His mature works, using Arnold Schoenberg's twelve tone technique, have a textural clarity and emotional coolness which greatly influenced composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Like almost every composer who had a career of any length, Webern's music changed over time. However, it is typified by very spartan textures, in which every note can be clearly heard; carefully chosen timbres, often resulting in very detailed instructions to the performers and use of extended instrumental techniques (flutter tonguing, col legno, and so on); frequent melodic leaps over the interval of a minor second or major seventh; and brevity: the Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913), for instance, last about three minutes in total.

Webern's very earliest works are in a late Romantic style. They were neither published nor performed in his lifetime, though they are sometimes performed today. They include the orchestral tone poem Im Sommerwind (1904) and the Langsamer Satz (1905) for string quartet.

Webern's first piece after completing his studies with Schoenberg was the Passacaglia for orchestra (1908). Harmonically speaking, it is a step forward into a more advanced language, and the orchestration is somewhat more distinctive. However, it bears little relation to the fully mature works he is best known for today. One element that is typical is the form itself: the passacaglia is a form which dates back to the 17th century, and a distinguishing feature of Webern's later work was to be the use of traditional compositional techniques (especially canons) and forms (the Symphony, the String Trio, the piano Variations) in a much more modern harmonic and melodic language.

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