Anton Webern

The following contains excerpts from the book, The Life of Webern (Kathryn Bailey).

Anton Webern was one of the most influential 20th Century composers, one of the three main figures making up the Second Viennese School, which included himself, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg. Webern and Berg both studied under Schoenberg, who developed a new system of composition known as the 12-tone technique, later developing into what is now known as Serialism. All three of these composers lived in and around Germany and spend much time in Vienna, Austria. We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the fundamentals of serialism.

The most distinguishing feature of Webern’s compositions was their brevity. He managed to pack into a few minutes, what took most composers a much longer time to express. Although his music, due to the incorporation of the 12-tone technique, was seen as highly avant-garde, he was a traditionalist in his core aesthetics. He had a high regard for the German masters before him: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler. Webern was also one of the most important conductors of his time, although his nervous conditions prohibited him from having a very long and established career.

“Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern was born on 3 December 1883 at the home of his parents, Carl and Amalie von Webern…in Vienna’s Third District…The Weberns were a middle-class family…Carl von Weber was a mining engineer.”

Anton Webern was “a child who loved nature, possessed a vivid imagination and was sensitive to the point of being nervous – all prominent attributes of the mature Webern…Webern’s mother started teaching him to play the piano at the age of five.” When he was twelve, “he began taking lessons…on both piano and cello. His prowess on the latter instrument led to a family trio” playing Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven. His first compositions were from when he was about fifteen, two pieces for cello and piano. Around 1900 he began keeping personal notebooks. Journaling is an especially important life-skill that we encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to utilize.

He participated in Musikverein concerts as a cellist, and his “reverence for Beethoven, already firmly in place at seventeen, would remain a central pillar of his musical life.”

His father was concerned “that the boy’s talent was sufficient to ensure his success in a life of music…The doubts about his musical abilities seem to have infected Webern himself.” He wrote to his cousin, “God, if only I also could amount to something! But I have such small hands and also my memory is so weak that to memorize is difficult. This causes me a great deal of worry and grief.’”

“It was in Vienna, in the years 1902-6, that he met most of the people who would prove to be his closest lifelong friends…Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg…And it was here that the Passacaglia, the work which he finally gave the distinction of being Op. 1, was written in the spring of 1908 and given its first performance on 4 November of the same year, with Webern conducting – almost certainly his first appearance as a conductor in Vienna.”

In Vienna, Webern saw Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss conduct for the first time. He was very impressed with Mahler. “Webern, in the autumn of 1904, made what was probably the most momentous move of his life. He sought out Arnold Schoenberg, a self-taught Viennese composer, himself only thirty years of age, who had advertised in the local newspapers for pupils…Webern was probably Schoenberg’s first private pupil in Vienna. He was joined almost immediately by Karl Horwitz and Heinrich Jalowetz, with Alban Berg and Erwin Stein following very shortly. This nucleus of Schoenberg disciples was to remain faithful and close-knit; all gained prominence in their fields – composition, conducting, music publishing – and all were to remain lifelong friends.”

“Schoenberg must have had great personal magnetism: the depth of devotion shown by his original students over the course of several decades is difficult to understand in the light of surviving anecdotes and documents, in which he almost invariably appears to be a person of monumental arrogance and megalomania…described him as tyrannical…It is embarrassing to read his students’ immoderate expressions of adoration and self-flagellation in response to their master’s terse and bad-tempered, and often mean, rebukes. This is especially true in the case of Berg, whose courtesy, patience and generosity seem never to been flagged in the face of the older man’s constant fault-finding. Webern’s subservience and self-abnegation were equal to Berg’s, but for some reason he was always treated more respectfully by Schoenberg: as the years passed Schoenberg wrote to Webern as an equal while Berg was always treated as a child, remaining until his death the object of irritation and annoyance and the subject of humiliation. Possibly Schoenberg felt closer to Webern – and felt him to be less of a threat – because throughout his life Webern suffered a public rejection like that on which his teacher thrived and made his reputation, while Berg enjoyed the occasional success.” Teachers in our music school in Odessa, Texas endeavor to be worthy of this kind of devotion from their students.

“A thumbnail description of Schoenberg at this time would show a self-made man of very slight stature, no particular physical attraction and an abrasive personality, who had no social position, no money and few friends, and who abhorred – or, defensively, claimed to abhor – society. He must have been intimidated by the tall and physically handsome Berg, as well as envious of the sophistication that came so easily to him. Berg was universally described by those who knew him as possessing a natural nobility and gentleness. Webern, on the other hand, was, like Schoenberg, physically diminutive, and with his provincial background and his nervous disposition, which manifested itself in the expression of alternately unbridled enthusiasm and intemperate rage, he must have experienced the same social unease as Schoenberg. Perhaps it is not surprising that Schoenberg felt more sympathy for Webern, insulting Berg whenever possible.”

“Schoenberg’s opinions and attitudes were absolute and allowed for neither opposition nor adjustment. And it must be said that his focus was very narrow. His notions of developing variation and counterpoint derived from an almost exclusively German/Austrian repertoire of instrumental ‘absolute’ music, and he saw very little of any value outside this canon. He had little or no time for descriptive or programme music .”

Schoenberg believed “that only Germans could write counterpoint, and his almost complete reliance on examples from German music in his teaching and his pedagogical books was sometimes indistinguishable from German nationalism, a case in point being the way in which he chose to announce his twelve-note technique in 1923: ‘Today I have discovered something which will ensure the superiority of German music for the next hundred years’. It is one of the greater ironies of music history that Schoenberg, who was forced to leave Germany because he was not considered to be sufficiently German, was himself a strong German nationalist.”

Schoenberg helped Webern acquire a theater position in Prague, but Webern’s propensity for indecision kept him vacillating. “On March 9 Webern returned to Vienna, to be joined there by his family a week later. Webern had married his first cousin Wilhelmine Mörtl. “He was involved immediately in preparations for what was to become a notorious concert on 31 March. The programme, conducted entirely by Schoenberg, consisted of Webern’s Op. 6 orchestral pieces, Zemlinshy’s Maeterlinck songs with orchestra, Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, two of Berg’s Altenberg Lieder and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. The concert resulted in one of the two biggest scandals in the history of music, the other being the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris two months later.”

In 1908 Schoenberg’s wife Mathilde was having an affair. “From all accounts Schoenberg was both astonished and devastated at his wife’s defection. It was Webern who, pursuing her in the middle of the night and arguing her moral obligation to her children, succeeded in bringing her back…He also interceded on Schoenberg’s behalf in another quarter that year as well: in a letter to Schoenberg written on 13 December form Berlin…that he has asked his father to have a word with the president of the Vienna Academy about a teaching post there for Schoenberg. A lectureship in composition at the Academy followed in 1910.”

“Friendship with Schoenberg was a very demanding business; there seems to have been no task too onerous or too burdensome for him to ask of his devotees. I was apparently perfectly clear to him…that his music and his business were of greater importance than theirs and that whatever time or energy – or money – them contributed towards his well-being was well spent…As Webern’s own financial situation was always precarious, this was often a hardship for him. But he supplied money gratefully, as he did time and energy, which were also sometimes in short supply.”

“For Webern the period between 1908, when his lessons with Schoenberg ended, and 1914, when his world was suddenly rent by the Great War, was a time of tough lessons in reality incompletely learned. It was a time of transition…reflected in the music that dates from these years, music that spans the gap between the tonal forms of Webern’s youth and the text-determined structures of the period after 1914, through a no-man’s-land of aphoristic and unstructured miniatures. These years produced the music for which Webern will probably always be best known, and which was most uniquely his.”

Webern kept vacillating between his opportunity in Prague and his desire to join the military. “Webern’s letters from his army days betray the same lack of perspective and control as those from his many short-lived positions prior to the war. His life was apparently quite a comfortable one: nearly everywhere he lived privately with his family, in most of his postings he had very little to do, and in Leoben he played chamber music regularly with distinguished companions who must have been interesting people.”

He was finally discharged from military duty because of his short-sightedness. When he heard that Schoenberg was moving to Mödling, he immediately wanted to move there as well, but “Schoeberg urged Webern to hold on to his job and remain in Prague.” But he didn’t listen. “Schoenberg, who had urged him not to leave Prague three months earlier, was furious and replied that he didn’t wish to waste any more time discussing Webern’s future. On 9 September, after a visit to Vienna, Berg wrote to his wife:

Webern…seems once more to have rather lost favour with Schoenberg. I gathered this from remarks like ‘Webern want to go to Prague again’, and when I looked puzzled and asked what he meant, Schoenberg wouldn’t explain.”

And in another letter,

[Schoenberg] just refused to go on advising him, because, as the facts show, it isn’t good giving him any advice. He couldn’t go on taking responsibility for Webern’s continual changes of mind.”

Subsequently, Webern broke off his friendship with Schoenberg.

That didn’t last long, however. “In the late summer of 1918 Schoenberg told Berg of his wonderful idea…for the Society form Private Musical Performances…to provide a venue for the performance of new works before a private audience from which critics were excluded.”

“Schoenberg was the President and had absolute power. He was assisted by a secretary, a treasurer, and archivist and several musical directors, among them Webern and Berg.”

“Webern saw five of his own compositions performed by the Society, all more than once.”

In 1922, Webern “was about to begin a new career, once that would bring him satisfaction and recognition. He was about to find maturity on both fronts…Three very important things occurred in Webern’s life in the decade following the decline of the Society for Private Musical Performances. He enjoyed a conducting career that was, if not very lucrative, more than moderately successful; he began to write music using the twelve-note technique; and he met Hildegard Jone. He also became a teacher.” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to pursue a wide skill-set and to consider many different avenues to develop their innate abilities.

“His growing family would appear to have been an important influence in the settling of Webern; his diary makes it clear that the details of their day-to-day existence together were of great importance to him, and this must have given his life a new dimension and, indeed, a core of stability and happiness that it had not previously had…The Webern children’s small rituals and ceremonies are carefully recorded…The dates of the children’s school opening ceremonies and of the first day of school…first Communion, of their Confirmation.”

“Perhaps the most space was devoted to Webern’s frequent walking trips in the Alps with friends and family. Without question these occasions routinely evoke the longest single entries. The mountains and the alpine flowers there were a consuming passion for him. In the rarefied mountain air, removed from the business of the world, he found the serenity and the mental/emotional equilibrium that seemed to elude him to such an extent the rest of the time. From an early age the mountains had held a mystical attraction and a deep significance for him.”

Berg attended one of the concerts Webern conducted and wrote to his wife, “‘Last night we had Mahler’s Third, and you just can’t imagine it. Without exaggeration: Webern is the greatest conductor since Mahler himself, in every respect…Webern’s achievement is such that it can only be compared with that of Mahler himself, and such that all doubts, even those of Mathilde, were swept away to be replaced by unreserved admiration.’” And in another letter, Berg writes, “‘Webern is the greatest living conductor…It’s indescribable what he has managed to do in just one rehearsal.’”

“In view of his obvious talent as a conductor, it seems likely that it was his uncompromising attitude and nervous instability that prevented his becoming one of the really great conductors. His resignation of the hope-for Konzertverein position in the autumn of 1922 shocked his friends.”

“In the years when Webern flourished as a conductor he had little time to compose. Composition was usually done in the summer, between concert seasons.”

The only…conducting Webern did in 1926 was at the fourth ICM festival in Zurich…The performances were very successful, even in Webern’s eyes, and his orchestral pieces were highly praised by audience, players and critics alike. The whole experience must have been magical for him.”

“Two predispositions that consistently shape Webern’s twelve-note writing are his propensity for canon and his fascination with symmetry. These preoccupations converge in the Op. 21 Symphony, composed in 1928. This work is a brilliant tour de force of simultaneous horizontal and vertical symmetries (mirrors and palindromes) unfolding through a series of double canons.”

To develop everything else from one principle ide! That’s the strongest unity…
(Webern, 3 April 1933)

“Webern’s career as a conductor really flourished for only five years, 1929-33. It is impossible to know what he might have achieved had his progress not been thwarted by the political situation from 1933 onwards. As a consequence of his busy conducting schedule he composed relatively little during these years…It was in 1929 that Webern began to make an international reputation for himself as a conductor.”

“One of the most important fundamentals of Schoenberg’s teaching was the necessity for unity. He explained this endlessly as the synthesis of the horizontal and the vertical, something that was in his view ensured by the proper use of twelve-note rows as the basis of composition. This idea of synthesis was carried out relentlessly by his one-time pupil. Webern felt that he had found a very significant analogue in the Urpflanzei, Goethe’s concept of a plant as a single substance, in which stem and leaf and blossom are all manifestations of the same fundamental element. He must have thought that he had found a perfect musical parallel when he build this twelve-note row.” We teach composition students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the value of thematic unity and cohesion in their writing.

“While Webern was puzzling over ways to control his super-symmetrical row things were going badly awry in Germany and surrounding Europe. Hitler and the National Socialists seized power in Germany…Webern…refused to recognize the reality of the horrors perpetrated by the German National Socialists, remarked nevertheless in his Path to the New Music lecture on 14 March 1933, ‘What’s going on in Germany at the moment amounts to the destruction of spiritual life!’”

Schoenberg had been forced to leave Germany and was concerned about Webern’s political position. In a letter he writes, “‘Is it true that you have become a supporter, or even a member, of the Nazi party? There are few things that could give me greater joy than your answering no to the questions.”

In late December of 1935, Alban Berg died of blood-poisoning from an abscess. “Berg was only 50. The shock of his death was very great.” Webern writes, “‘the saddest aspect’ of Berg’s premature death: that, of the three composers, he was the only one who had any success and in whom the public had any faith, and that, had he lived, he would have been able to enjoy these things which his two friends could only long for.”

Politically, though Webern, “was not himself Jewish, he had been sufficiently tainted by his association with Schoenberg to make his music unacceptable to the ruling government. Very soon Universal Edition was taken over by the Nazis, and both publication and performance of his music were banned. The Austrian chapter of the ISCM, of which Webern was president, was disbanded in 1938.”

By 1939, “nearly all of his students had fled by this time. Universal Edition, who had once published and enthusiastically supported his music, now offered him small occasional jobs as reader, proofreader and arranger. Webern’s financial situation became desperate.”

“The fact is that Webern seems to have led a schizophrenic sort of existence during the 1920s and early 1930s: at home, as his children reached adulthood three of the four became Nazis, as were, later, two of his sons-in-law (his son, Peter, and his youngest daughter, Christine, and her husband were particularly zealous), while his professional life in the city was led almost entirely in the company of, and was financed almost entirely by, socialists and Jews.”

“No one could accuse Webern of antisemitism: he is known to have hidden and helped a number of Jewish friends and acquaintances in the dark days after the Anschluss.”

In 1945, “Webern and his wife and their eldest daughter, Amalie, and her two children (the younger only six months old) set out on foot to make their way to Mittersill, in the mountains in the Pinzgau, towards Salzburg, where they joined Christine and Maria and their children in what was hoped would be a safe haven.”

“Two American soldiers came to the house to the house to see the Mattels after dinner; unbeknownst to the Mattels (and certainly to the Weberns) they had come with the express purpose of catching Benno Mattel in the act of concluding a black-market purchase of American goods.”

Webern stepped outside to smoke a cigar, “and while doing so he was shot three times in the abdomen and chest. He stumbled back into the sitting-room of the house and said to his wife, ‘I’ve been shot. It is over.’

There is still conjecture as to why, or how, this happened. One theory, “was that it was a question of mistaken identity: that whoever shot Webern thought he was shooting Benno Mattel.”

“Whatever the details of Webern’s death actually were, the three gunshots fired at the front door…15 September 1945 put an untimely end to the work of one of this century’s most original composers. A romantic, a lyricist, whose creations were often so fleeting that many must have felt through the years as his own father had, that ‘they were over before they began’.

“When the war was over…the young composers of Darmstadt raised his all-embracing organization as their banner, ignoring – or perhaps not even knowing – that their hero was a traditionalist who valued and strove above all for comprehensibility in his music.”

“We have been concerned with the man Webern: a man who was at the same time complex and naïve, whose ardent German nationalism led him to make the most aggressive militaristic statements, yet who was happiest in the peaceful solitude of a mountain plateau surrounded by gentians and wild narcissus…A man who was described by nearly everyone whose path he crossed as a truly good and honest human being, a devoted husband and father, a loyal friend, a teacher who gave free lessons to gifted students who were too poor to pay when he himself was also destitute. But perhaps most importantly for future generations, the composer of some of the world’s loveliest brief moments of music.” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to study Webern’s music, as it presents structure, symmetry, and motivic development at the highest artistic levels.

Undoubtedly, Anton Webern produced some of the greatest examples of contemporary Classical composition. I have yet to have any affection for the kind of composition developed by Schoenberg, although I respect the effort to historically push forward with the traditions given by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

There are many directions one could take to analyze how a history of such beautiful music, coming from such a rich tradition in one geographical region, could end up culminating in the dissonant (yet organized) works of the composers of the Second Viennese School. Socially, how could the same society in which Martin Luther brought forth Christian Reformation, with Bach’s beautifully-crafted examples of music for worship end in Hitler’s genocide?

The music of the Second Viennese School is extremely focused, and highly structured. Yet, even a hundred years later, it is still difficult to listen to. It parallels the terse history it was birthed in.

In my opinion, the established systems of musical composition Bach used, that of equal-temperament came to its historical end in the early part of the 20th Century. What was originally meant to give music freedom from tonal constraints, finally ended in ‘atonality’.

Historically, we have just arrived at a new point in history, in which tonality and organizational unity are possible through technological tools that are for the first time available, giving us the capacity to have a high degree of organization (like that of serialism), while at the same time being completely harmonic. My terminology for this is: Integrated Frequency, which I have been developing for a number of years.

I feel particularly familiar with Webern’s story since the composer my father studied with in Vienna was directly influenced by Webern and Schoenberg. My father taught me these principles as I began writing. (I continue to use them, yet with a tonal center and harmonic underpinnings.) I also played in Vienna on the Musikverein stage that Webern played his cello and also conducted. During the trip to Vienna, I travelled the countryside and saw much of the landscape that inspired Webern. The 1940s doesn’t seem that long ago to me.

Webern’s work has echoed through the recent decades as, if not an example to follow, at least an example to study.