Anton Webern (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the 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 technique later known as total serialism.
Contents |
Webern was born in Vienna, Austria, as Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a civil servant, and Amelie (née Geer) who was a competent pianist and accomplished singer - the only obvious source of the future composer's talent.[1] He never used his middle names and dropped the von in 1918 as directed by the Austrian government's reforms after World War I. 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 by employing palindromic form on both the micro- and macro-scale and the economic use of musical materials.
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 run Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances from 1918 through 1922 and conducted the "Vienna Workers Symphony Orchestra" from 1922 to 1934.
Webern's music was denounced as "cultural Bolshevism" and "degenerate art" by the Nazi Party in Germany, even before they seized power in Austria in 1938.[2] Although Webern had sharply attacked Nazi cultural policies in private lectures given in 1933, their intended publication did not take place at that time, which proved fortunate since this later "would have exposed Webern to serious consequences."[3] During the war, however, his patriotic fervor led him to endorse the regime in a series of letters to Joseph Hueber, where he described Hitler on 2 May 1940 as "this unique man" who created "the new state" of Germany.[4] As a result of official disapproval, he found it harder (though at no stage impossible) to earn a living, and had to take on work as an editor and proofreader for his publishers, Universal Edition.
It was thanks to the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart that Webern was able to attend the festive premiere of his Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30 in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1943. Reinhart invested all the financial and diplomatic means at his disposal to enable Webern to travel to Switzerland. In return for this support, Webern dedicated the work to him.[5]
He left Vienna near the end of the war, and moved to Mittersill in Salzburg, believing he would be safer there. On 15 September 1945, during the Allied occupation of Austria, he was shot dead by an American Army soldier following the arrest of his son-in-law for black market activities, when, despite the curfew in effect, he stepped outside the house to enjoy a cigar so as not to disturb his sleeping grandchildren. The soldier responsible, army cook Pfc. Raymond Norwood Bell, was overcome by remorse and died of alcoholism in 1955.[6]
| Problems listening to this file? See media help. |
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.[8] However, his influence on later composers, and particularly on the post-war avant garde, was 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, Luigi Nono, 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); wide-ranging melodic lines, often with leaps greater than an octave; and brevity: the Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913), for instance, last about three minutes in total.
Webern's 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 than his earlier orchestral work. 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 Concerto, the String Trio and String Quartet, and the piano and orchestral Variations) in a modern harmonic and melodic language.
For a number of years, Webern wrote pieces which were freely atonal, much in the style of Schoenberg's early atonal works. With the Drei Geistliche Volkslieder (1925) he used Schoenberg's twelve tone technique for the first time, and all his subsequent works used this technique. The String Trio (1927) was both the first purely instrumental work using the twelve tone technique (the other pieces were songs) and the first cast in a traditional musical form.
Webern's tone rows are often arranged to take advantage of internal symmetries; for example, a twelve-tone row may be divisible into four groups of three pitches which are variations, such as inversions and retrogrades, of each other, thus creating invariance. This gives Webern's work considerable motivic unity, although this is often obscured by the fragmentation of the melodic lines. This fragmentation occurs through octave displacement (using intervals greater than an octave) and by moving the line rapidly from instrument to instrument (sometimes, and somewhat erroneously, called Klangfarbenmelodie).
Webern's last pieces seem to indicate another development in style. The two late Cantatas, for example, use larger ensembles than earlier pieces, last longer (No. 1 around nine minutes; No. 2 around sixteen), and are texturally somewhat denser.
The works with opus numbers are the ones that Webern saw fit to have published in his own lifetime, plus a few late works published after his death. They constitute the main body of his work, although several pieces of juvenilia and a few mature pieces that do not have opus numbers are occasionally performed today.
, October 1912]]Anton Webern (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the 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 technique later known as total serialism.
Contents |
Webern was born in Vienna, Austria, as Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a civil servant, and Amelie (née Geer) who was a competent pianist and accomplished singer - the only obvious source of the future composer's talent.[1] He never used his middle names and dropped the von in 1918 as directed by the Austrian government's reforms after World War I. 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 by employing palindromic form on both the micro- and macro-scale and the economical use of musical materials.
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 run Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances from 1918 through 1922 and conducted the "Vienna Workers Symphony Orchestra" from 1922 to 1934.
Webern's music was denounced as "cultural Bolshevism" and "degenerate art" by the Nazi Party in Germany, even before they seized power in Austria in 1938.[2] Although Webern had sharply attacked Nazi cultural policies in private lectures given in 1933, their intended publication did not take place at that time, which proved fortunate since this later "would have exposed Webern to serious consequences."[3] During the war, however, his patriotic fervor led him to endorse the regime in a series of letters to Joseph Hueber, where he described Hitler on 2 May 1940 as "this unique man" who created "the new state" of Germany.[4] As a result of official disapproval, he found it harder (though at no stage impossible) to earn a living, and had to take on work as an editor and proofreader for his publishers, Universal Edition.
It was thanks to the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart that Webern was able to attend the festive premiere of his Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30 in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1943. Reinhart invested all the financial and diplomatic means at his disposal to enable Webern to travel to Switzerland. In return for this support, Webern dedicated the work to him.[5]
He left Vienna near the end of the war, and moved to Mittersill in Salzburg, believing he would be safer there. On 15 September 1945, during the Allied occupation of Austria, he was shot dead by an American Army soldier following the arrest of his son-in-law for black market activities, when, despite the curfew in effect, he stepped outside the house to enjoy a cigar so as not to disturb his sleeping grandchildren. The soldier responsible, army cook Pfc. Raymond Norwood Bell, was overcome by remorse and died of alcoholism in 1955.[6]
Webern was survived by his wife, Wilhelmine Mörtl, and their three daughters. His only son, Peter, died on 14 February 1945 of wounds suffered in a strafing attack on a military train two days earlier.[7]
| Sample of "Sehr langsam" from String Trio Op. 20, an example of the twelve-tone technique, which is a type of serialism.
|
|
| Problems listening to this file? See media help. | |
Doomed to a total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had such a perfect knowledge.[8]
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.[9] However, his influence on later composers, and particularly on the post-war avant garde, was 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, Luigi Nono, 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); wide-ranging melodic lines, often with leaps greater than an octave; and brevity: the Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913), for instance, last about three minutes in total.
Webern's 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 than his earlier orchestral work. 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 Concerto, the String Trio and String Quartet, and the piano and orchestral Variations) in a modern harmonic and melodic language.
For a number of years, Webern wrote pieces which were freely atonal, much in the style of Schoenberg's early atonal works. With the Drei Geistliche Volkslieder (1925) he used Schoenberg's twelve tone technique for the first time, and all his subsequent works used this technique. The String Trio (1927) was both the first purely instrumental work using the twelve tone technique (the other pieces were songs) and the first cast in a traditional musical form.
Webern's tone rows are often arranged to take advantage of internal symmetries; for example, a twelve-tone row may be divisible into four groups of three pitches which are variations, such as inversions and retrogrades, of each other, thus creating invariance. This gives Webern's work considerable motivic unity, although this is often obscured by the fragmentation of the melodic lines. This fragmentation occurs through octave displacement (using intervals greater than an octave) and by moving the line rapidly from instrument to instrument (sometimes, and somewhat erroneously, called Klangfarbenmelodie).
Webern's last pieces seem to indicate another development in style. The two late Cantatas, for example, use larger ensembles than earlier pieces, last longer (No. 1 around nine minutes; No. 2 around sixteen), and are texturally somewhat denser.
The works with opus numbers are the ones that Webern saw fit to have published in his own lifetime, plus a few late works published after his death. They constitute the main body of his work, although several pieces of juvenilia and a few mature pieces that do not have opus numbers are occasionally performed today.
| Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Anton Webern |
Anton Webern (1883-12-03 – 1945-09-15) was an Austrian composer of atonal music.
Anton Webern (born Vienna 3 December 1883; died Mitterill 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer. Webern and Alban Berg were the most famous pupils of Arnold Schoenberg, the composer who had invented the twelve tone system. This style of composition is often called the “Second Viennese School”. Webern was probably Schoenberg’s first pupil, and Berg joined them a few weeks later. Webern used the rules of the twelve tone system very strictly in his music. His compositions had a lot of influence on composers of the mid-20th century who were interested in serialism, especially Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Most of Webern’s compositions are very short.
Contents |
Anton was born Anton von Webern. Webern’s father was a mining engineer who later got an important government job. The family had belonged to the nobility which is why they had “von” before the family name. In 1918 a law was made in Austria to stop people from using “von” as part of their name, and so from then onwards he was always known as “Anton Webern”. Anton learned to play the cello and the piano. They had a country house where the family spent the summer, and the young boy spent a lot of time composing, especially songs to the poems of famous German poets such as Stefan George and Richard Dehmel. Together with his friend and cousin Ernst he read the philosophical books of Friedrich Nietzsche, studied modern paintings and listened to the music of Richard Wagner. His father took him to the Bayreuth Festival.
He went to study at the University of Vienna where he continued to compose a lot of music. By 1906 he had been given a doctorate for writing about the composer Heinrich Isaac.
When Webern became a pupil of Schoenberg he was joining a small group of musicians who were to be life-long friends. Alban Berg was a member of this group. The music these people were writing sounded very modern at the time and they had to face a lot of criticism. Berg and Webern were official pupils of Schoenberg only for two years, but they continued to work with him, often copying out music for him. They also helped him financially and, when Schoenberg moved to Berlin, Webern moved there to be near him.
Webern composed more and more twelve-tone music in these years. He also had conducting jobs which brought in some money. He was a very good conductor. He was only interested in music by German and Austrian composers. He tried to get several teaching jobs, but the only one he managed to get was at the Israel Institute for the Blind in Vienna, where he taught for six years.
During the 1930s Webern faced many difficulties. He did not have much money, Schoenberg went to live in France and then United States because of the political situation in Europe. Alban Berg died in 1935 and his own conducting career came to an end. When the Nazis came to power in Austria they banned Webern’s music because they thought it was bad (they called it “degenerate art”). His son was killed fighting in World War II. Four months after the war had ended he was sitting on the veranda of his daughter’s house smoking a cigar after dinner when he was shot dead by one of the occupying troops. He was supposed to have been inside because there was a curfew on. His son-in-law had just been arrested for selling things on the black market.
Webern’s early music is in an Expressionist. Later he used more and more the twelve tone system. He liked using very high and very low notes, as well as silences in his music. Although most of his pieces are very short they are very concentrated: every note is part of a careful plan. Officially he composed 31 works, and these fit onto 6 CDs. A lot of his music still sounds very modern to us today.
Groves Dictionary of Music Online
   | Das Synthese-Denken bei Anton Webern - Karlheinz Essl's Webern-Dissertation |
| | WebernUhrWerk - WebernUhrWerk 2.2 - generative music generator for MacOS X |
| | Anton Webern Langsamer Satz (1905) for String Quartet Sound-bite - Sheet Music & Books S to Z |
| | OCLC 512111 - The death of Anton Webern; a drama in documents. [WorldCat.org] |
| | Complete Webern Edition - Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft - Boulez 2000: Boulez on Webern |
| | IMSLP - Category:Webern, Anton - IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library: Free Public Domain Sheet Music |
|
|
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
