Anton Webern

Anton Webern (December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945) was a composer of classical music and a member of the so called Second Viennese School. He was born Anton Friedrich Ernst von Webern but never used his middle names, and dropped the von in 1918.

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. -- Igor Stravinsky

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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.

Related Topics:
Pierre Boulez - Arnold Schoenberg - Twelve tone technique - Karlheinz Stockhausen

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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); 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.

Related Topics:
Timbre - Flutter tonguing - Col legno - Interval

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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 orchestral tone poem Im Sommerwind (1904) and the Langsamer Satz (1905) for string quartet.

Related Topics:
Romantic - Orchestra - Tone poem - String quartet

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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. 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 String Trio, the piano Variations) in a much more modern harmonic and melodic language.

Related Topics:
Harmonically - Orchestration - 17th century - Canon

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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 to use a traditional musical form.

Related Topics:
Atonal - Twelve tone technique - Song

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Webern's tone rows 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.

Related Topics:
Tone row - Invariance

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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.

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