| Anton Webern |
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| 1883 births | |
| 1945 deaths | |
| 20th century classical composers | |
| austrian composers | |
| deaths by firearm in austria | |
| expressionism | |
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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 proponents 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 proofreader 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. 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 Timbre s, 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 Orchestra l 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). , and a distinguishing feature of Webern's later work was to be the use of traditional compositional techniques (especially Canon s) and forms (the ''Symphony'', the ''String Trio'', the piano ''Variations'') in a much more 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 Song s) and the first to use a traditional musical form. Webern's Tone Row s are often very intricately arranged such that within each twelve note row, the pitches are arranged into four groups of three which are variations on each other, which creates Invariance . This gives Webern's work a great motivic unity, although this is often disguised by his technique of moving a single melodic line around different instruments. 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), are texturally somewhat denser, and use simpler tone rows, without the internal motivic organisation of his middle-period works. His death after completing his ''Cantata No. 2'' of 1943 makes it impossible to know where this apparently new direction might have taken him. LIST OF WORKS Works with opus numbers 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 juvenalia and a few mature pieces that do not have opus numbers are occasionally performed today.
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