AntonWebern

When Peter Stadlen prepared the first performance of Webern’s Piano Variations in Vienna in 1937, the composer covered his score with instructions about expression. One phrase needed more vigour; another was an echo. Webern compared the opening movement to a late Brahms intermezzo. In the preface to his annotated edition, published in 1979, Stadlen recalled a “fervently lyrical mind bent on expressiveness”.

1883–⁠1908Childhood, studies and Schoenberg

Webern was born in Vienna on 3 December 1883 and grew up in Graz and Klagenfurt, with holidays at Preglhof, the family estate in Carinthia. His mother, Amalie, played the piano and sang; he learnt piano and cello and joined the orchestra of the local concert society. The family played chamber music together. Later, when he was living away from home, he wrote in his letters about the woods and meadows around Preglhof and about his mother’s grave at nearby Schwabegg.

In 1902 he entered the University of Vienna to study musicology with Guido Adler. His doctorate of 1906 was an edition of music from Heinrich Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus, sacred vocal music in which the parts cross and answer one another. Composition lessons with Schoenberg began in 1904, when Berg also joined the class. That summer Webern wrote Im Sommerwind, an orchestral idyll after Bruno Wille. His unnumbered String Quartet of 1905 took its three-part design from Giovanni Segantini’s Alpine triptych.

1909–⁠13Opp. 5 and 9, theatre posts

In the Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, the players bow at the bridge, strike the strings with the wood of the bow or play harmonics, and within a few seconds the four instruments change sound. The Six Bagatelles, Op. 9, written in 1911–⁠13, are shorter still. Several movements last less than a minute. Recalling them in a Vienna lecture in 1932, Webern said: “I had the feeling: once the twelve notes have run their course, the piece is finished.” The fifth uses faint pizzicatos and bowing near the bridge.

Meanwhile he was earning money in theatre pits. Engagements took him to Teplitz, Danzig, Stettin and Prague. Much of the work was operetta, and he resigned repeatedly. In February 1911 he married Wilhelmine Mörtl, known as Minna. They had four children. During the First World War he did intermittent military service and had little time to compose. He returned to the Vienna area, settling first in Mödling, where Schoenberg also lived, and later in Maria Enzersdorf.

After 1918Conducting, teaching and the Society

At Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, Webern supervised rehearsals and arranged orchestral scores for the players available. Critics were excluded, and applause was forbidden. Outside the Society, he conducted workers’ choirs and the Social Democratic Workers’ Symphony Concerts. His programmes included Mahler and Brahms, and from 1927 Vienna radio also broadcast his conducting. Between 1925 and 1931 he also taught piano and directed a choir at Vienna’s Jewish Institute for the Blind.

Setting texts allowed him to write beyond the instrumental miniature. He worked on the Six Songs, Op. 14, between 1917 and 1921. They set poems by Georg Trakl, with their forests and ruined walls, for voice and changing combinations of clarinets and strings. In Abendland II the singer is accompanied by clarinet, violin and cello. Later, Hildegard Jone’s poetry provided the texts for songs and for both cantatas, which brought a chorus into his music.

The Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, followed in 1934. Its opening sets out four three-note groups, each given a different instrument and rhythm. After a rest the piano plays the row alone. Each group contains the same semitone and major third, inverted or reversed. The piano alternates with the ensemble.

1934–⁠45Webern under Dollfuss and Nazi rule

In 1934 the Dollfuss dictatorship crushed Austria’s Social Democratic movement and dismantled the organisations that had employed Webern. His conducting career in Austria came to an end, and he came to depend more on private pupils and editorial work. Schoenberg had left for America in 1933; Berg died in 1935. Under Nazi rule Webern’s music was branded degenerate, and performances of his mature works took place largely outside the Reich.

Webern supported Hitler. On 2 May 1940 he wrote to his friend Josef Hueber praising the National Socialist state: “Created by this one man!” Hueber, then serving in the army, had sent him Mein Kampf; Webern’s reply of 4 March welcomed the book and predicted the pacification of the whole world, perhaps as far as the Pacific. He also helped Jewish friends: he wrote a recommendation for Otto Jokl to emigrate and remained in contact with Josef Polnauer. His devotion to Schoenberg continued; in 1944 he sent birthday greetings through Willi Reich.

The late scoresRicercar, Variations and Second Cantata

The Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30, grow from two ideas in the opening bars, given to double bass and oboe. Webern heard Hermann Scherchen conduct them in Winterthur in 1943. That year he finished his Second Cantata, Op. 31, setting Jone for soprano, bass, mixed chorus and orchestra in six movements. The orchestra includes an alto saxophone and celesta. He never heard the cantata performed; its première took place in Brussels in 1950.

September 1945Webern’s death at Mittersill

His son Peter was killed in an air attack in February 1945. In April Webern and Minna fled to Mittersill to join their family. On the evening of 15 September he went outside to smoke. American soldiers were carrying out an operation against the black-market dealings of his son-in-law, Benno Mattel, and one of them, Raymond Bell, shot Webern. He was sixty-one. Minna lived until 1949 and helped to secure publication of the music he left.

After the war, Boulez and Stockhausen studied the canons and short instrumental exchanges as starting points for their own music. Performances remained scarce. Robert Craft’s recordings, made in Los Angeles in 1954–⁠56, made the entire numbered output available on records, from the Passacaglia for large orchestra to the Bagatelles and the late cantatas.