Anton Webern (German: [ˈantoːn ˈveːbɐn] ; 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist whose modernist music was among the most radical of its milieu in its lyrical, poetic concision and use of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. His approach was typically rigorous, inspired by his studies of the Franco-Flemish School under Guido Adler and by Arnold Schoenberg's emphasis on structure in teaching composition from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the First Viennese School, and Johannes Brahms. Webern, Schoenberg, and their colleague Alban Berg were at the core of what became known as the Second Viennese School.
Webern was likely the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in an aphoristic and expressionist style, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process. Working from personal experience, he treated themes of love, nature, mysticism, and nostalgia. Unhappily peripatetic and often assigned light music or operetta in his early conducting career, he aspired to conduct what was seen as more respectable, serious music at home in Vienna. Following Schoenberg's guidance, Webern tried writing music of greater length during and after their World War I service, relying on the structural support of texts in many Lieder.
He rose as a choirmaster and conductor, championing Gustav Mahler's music in Red Vienna and abroad. With Schoenberg based in Berlin, Webern began writing music of increasing confidence, independence, and scale using twelve-tone technique. Marginalized as a "cultural Bolshevist" in Fascist Austria and Nazi Germany, he maintained "the path to the new music", enjoyed international recognition, and relied more on teaching for income. He opposed fascist cultural positions but espoused pan-Germanism and was torn, like friends and family, among uncertainties. His hope for moderate, stable, and successful governance of Austria within Nazi Germany proved misplaced, and he helped Jewish friends emigrate and hide while repeatedly considering emigrating himself.
A soldier accidentally killed Webern after World War II. In a phenomenon known as post-Webernism, his music was celebrated by composers, musicians, and scholars. René Leibowitz, Pierre Boulez, Robert Craft, and Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer established it as an important part of modernism through performance, study, and advocacy. Igor Stravinsky assimilated it. To many, it represented a path to serialism. Broader understanding of Webern's expressive agenda, performance practice, and complex sociocultural and political context lagged. A historical edition of his music is currently underway.
1883–1908: Upbringing between late Imperial Vienna and countryside
Anton Webern, of the Webern noble family, was born on 3 December 1883 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a decorated army veteran, high-ranking civil servant, and mining engineer who owned the Lamprechtsberg copper mine. He grew up mainly in Graz (1890–1894) and Klagenfurt (1894–1902), with one stay in Olomouc and more in Vienna for his father's work. He excelled only in the humanities and likely sang in choir at school.
He began piano and sang opera with his mother Amalie (née Geer), a trained pianist and accomplished singer, danced with his sisters Rosa and Maria, and received drums, then a trumpet, and later a violin as Christmas gifts. Local musician Edwin Komauer also taught him piano, cello, and likely counterpoint from Bach's music and cello suites. The family played chamber music, including Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven, and Webern played in local orchestras.
The children spent Easter holidays (Osterferien) and summer vacations (Sommerfrischen) at the Preglhof, the extended family's country estate near Schwabegg in Carinthia. They played in forests under the Koralpe and on a high meadow by the parish church, where cattle grazed pasture under the care of herders. Webern drove horses to a fair in Bleiburg, fought a wildfire, and saved Rosa from drowning in the bathing pond. In winter, they ice-skated the Lendkanal to the Wörthersee. These experiences, and reading Peter Rosegger, an Austrian contributor to the broader Heimatkunst (lit. 'homeland art') movement, shaped his distinct and lasting sense of Heimat (lit. 'homeland').
Before studying at the University of Vienna (1902–1906), Webern immersed himself in concerts, operas, plays, galleries, and cultural history, visiting the Bayreuth Festival, Musikverein, Neue Pinakothek, Prinzregententheater, and Wahnfried. He took counterpoint with Karel Navrátil, harmony with Hermann Graedener, cello with Josef Háša, and piano, in which he was less proficient, with an unidentified Theodor Leschetizky pupil.
While enrolled, he kept attending many performances to learn the standard and emerging repertoire at the Burgtheater, Vienna Court Opera, and other venues, listening to many works by Brahms, Mahler, Schumann, Strauss, Wagner, and Wolf. He encountered singers like Theodor Bertram, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, and Hermann Winkelmann and conductors like Mahler, Strauss, Arthur Nikisch, and Felix Weingartner. He sang under Siegfried Wagner in Bruckner's Te Deum as a Wagner Society member and visited the Munich Kammerspiele for Frank Wedekind's Hidalla.
At school, he analyzed Beethoven's late quartets at the piano with classmate Egon Wellesz, took a Wagner seminar, and learned the historical development of musical styles and techniques mainly from Guido Adler, an acquaintance of Wagner and Liszt, pupil of Bruckner, and friend of Mahler. For his musicology doctorate under Adler, he edited the Choralis Constantinus II. As a composer, he would emulate its "subtle organization in the interplay of parts", which he described at length:The voices proceed ... in [much] equality[, each with] its own development [as] a completely self-contained, separately comprehensible, wonderfully animated structural unit [...]. ... [C]anonic devices [are used] in the greatest profusion [with] the keenest observation of tone colourings in the various registers of the human voice [and] frequent ... interlacing of voices ... by leaps.
He also studied art history and philosophy with Max Dvořák, Laurenz Müllner, and Franz Wickhoff, and joined the Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft (lit. 'Albrecht Dürer Society') in 1903, later serving on its board. His cousin Ernst Diez, then a University of Graz art history student, may have introduced him to the work of Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, which he admired along with that of Ferdinand Hodler and Moritz von Schwind. He prized Segantini's landscapes as highly as Beethoven's music, diarying in 1904:I long for an artist in music such as Segantini was in painting ... far away from all turmoil of the world, in contemplation of the glaciers, of eternal ice and snow, of the sombre mountain giants. ... [A]n alpine storm, ... the radiance of the summer sun on flower-covered meadows—all these would have to be in the music, born ... of alpine solitude. That man would then be the Beethoven of our day.
Finally, Webern studied Catholic liturgy and nationalism, shaped by his upbringing. He first found those in his new milieu smug, alien, and distinctly Jewish amid antisemitic reaction to the December Constitution's 1867 Jewish emancipation. By 1902, he had close Jewish friends like fellow student Heinrich Jalowetz, likely altering his views.
Adler pupil Karl Weigl brought Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande to class in 1903, riveting Webern, who attended performances of his songs and Verklärte Nacht in 1903–04. In 1904, Webern tried Hans Pfitzner's composition lessons in Berlin but left over attacks on Mahler and R. Strauss. Adler admired and may have recommended Schoenberg, or Webern may have seen his Schwarzwald School newspaper ads before starting lessons in fall 1904, perhaps as his first Vienna pupil.
Thus Webern met Berg as another Schoenberg pupil, and Schoenberg's brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky, through whom he may have worked as an assistant coach at the Volksoper in Vienna (1906–1909). Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern became lifelong friends following similar musical paths. Adler, Jalowetz, and Webern played Schoenberg's quartets under the composer, accompanying Gutheil-Schoder in rehearsals for Op. 10.