Anton Webern

Anton (von) Webern (Vienna, December 3, 1883-Mittersill, Salzburg, September 15, 1945) was an Austrian composer.

He was a member of the so-called Second Viennese School. As a student and brilliant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he is one of the best-known exponents of dodecaphonism; Furthermore, his innovations regarding the systematic organization of pitch, rhythm, and dynamics were decisive for the musical style later known as serialism.

Biography

Beginnings

Webern was born in Vienna, Austria, and was baptized Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern. He always dispensed with his middle names, stopping using von in 1918. After spending much of his youth in Graz and Klagenfurt, Webern entered the University of Vienna in 1902. He studied musicology with Guido Adler, and presented a thesis on the Choralis Constantinus of the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac. This interest in early music would greatly influence his compositional technique years later.

The Second Vienna School

He studied composition with Arnold Schönberg, upon graduation he wrote his Passacaglia, Op. 1 in 1908. He met Alban Berg, who was also a student of Schönberg's, and these two friendships would be the most important of his life by decisively marking his musical path. After finishing his studies, he took up musical directing positions at the theaters in Ischl, Teplitz, Danzig, Stettin and Prague before returning to Vienna. There he helped start the Society for Private Musical Performances directed by Schönberg and directed the Vienna Workers' Symphony Orchestra from 1922 to 1934. Webern had worked closely with the cultural branch of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (directing workers' musical groups) until the party It was banned in 1934 by the austrofascist regime of Kurt Schuschnigg.

During Nazism

Webern's music was denounced as "Cultural Bolshevism" when the Nazi Party triumphed in Austria in 1938. He therefore found it difficult to work, and took a position as editor and proofreader for the publisher that published his music, Universal Edition. Webern left Vienna in 1945 and went to Mittersill in Salzburg, thinking he would be safer there.

Death in Austria

Webern was assassinated in his home on September 15, 1945, during the Allied occupation of Austria. He was mortally wounded by a US Army soldier while his son-in-law was being detained, as he was related to activities within the black market. The soldier responsible for his death was North Carolina cook Raymond Norwood Bell, who eventually died in 1955 from the remorse and subsequent alcoholism he faced for killing the composer.

Webern's music

Condemned to the total failure in a world deaf of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably continued to polish his diamonds, his impressive diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

Igor Stravinski

Anton Webern at the age of 29 (in 1912).

Webern was not a prolific composer; only thirty-one of his compositions were published during his lifetime, and when Pierre Boulez led a project to record all of his works, including those without opus numbers, the final result spanned only six CDs. However, his influence on later composers, and particularly on the postwar avant-garde, is well known and immense. His mature works, using Arnold Schönberg's dodecaphonism, have a clarity of texture and an emotional density that profoundly influenced composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Features

As with most composers, Webern's music changed over time. However, it is distinguished by its very Spartan textures, in which each note can be clearly heard; carefully choosing timbres, he gives very detailed instructions to the performers and uses extended instrumental techniques ( flatterzunge / frullato, col legno among others); he has frequent melodic leaps over intervals of minor second, major seventh, and minor ninth; and they are generally very brief: the Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913), for example, lasts about three minutes in total.

Webern's very early works are in a Post-Romantic style. They were not published while he lived. These include the symphonic orchestral poem Im Sommerwind (1904) and the Langsamer Satz (1905) for string quartet.

Harmony

The work with which Webern finished his studies was the Passacaglia for orchestra (1908). Harmonically speaking, it is still conservative with respect to the Schönberg of the Kammersymphonie or Salomé de Strauss. The orchestration is, however, very personal. Yet it bears little relation to the mature works for which he is known today. A distinctive element is the chosen musical form: the passacaglia is a form dating from the 17th century, and a distinguished feature of the Webern's later works was the use of traditional compositional techniques (especially the canon) and traditional forms (the Symphony, the String Trio, the Variations for piano) in a much more modern harmonic and melodic language.

For several years, Webern wrote pieces in so-called free atonality, following the style of Schönberg's early atonal works. In the Drei Volkstexte für Singstimme und drei Instrumente op. 17 (1924) he first employed Schönberg's serialism, and all of his subsequent works used the same technique. The String Trio op. 20 (1927) was the first instrumental work by him to use the serial technique (the earlier ones were songs) and the first to use a traditional musical form.

Webern's twelve-tone series are very rigorously constructed. He almost always respects the hexachordal division proposed by Schönberg. Often they are series that coincide with some transposition of their retrogradation or their inverted retrogradation. Other times they are made up of three groups of four notes or four groups of three with similar interval or melodic content, which produces an invariance. This gives Webern's work a great motivic unity. Without actually practicing a complete integral serialism, he does frequently use rhythmic series, although not with twelve values, generally four. Only occasionally can a rhythmic organization derived from the melodic series be observed. Another typical feature of his music is his technique of giving each two, three or four notes of a simple melodic line to different instruments, which he called Schönberg Klangfarbenmelodie or timbre melody.

Webern's later works seem to indicate a new development in his style. The last two Cantatas op. 29 and 31, and the Variationen op. 30 use larger instrumental groups than his previous works, are longer and show denser textures. His death after finishing his Cantata No. 2 of 1943 prevented the future evolution of this style.

List of works

Works with opus number

Works with opus numbers are those that Webern saw published during his lifetime, plus a few works published after his death. These constitute the main corpus of his work, in addition to several of his youthful works and a few mature works that do not have opus numbers are occasionally performed today.

• Op. One. Passacagliafor orchestra (1908)
• Op. Two. Entflieht auf Leichten Kähnenfor choir to cappella (1908)
• Op. 3, Five lieer of "Der Siebente Ring"for voice and piano (1907-1908)
• Op. 4, Five lieder about Stefan George's poemsfor voice and piano (1908-1909)
• Op. 5, Five movements for string quartet (1909)
• Op. 6. Six pieces for big orchestra (1909-1910, revised in 1928)
• Op. 7. Four pieces for violin and piano (1910)
• Op. 8, Two lieder about poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, for voice and piano (1910)
• Op. 9, Six bagatelas for string quartet (1913)
• Op. 10, Five pieces for orchestra (1911-1913)
• Op. 11, Three small pieces for chelo and piano (1914)
• Op. 12, Four voice and piano lieder (1915-1917)
• Op. 13 Four voice and piano lieder (1914-1918)
• Op. 14 Six voice-mining, clarinet, low clarinet, violin and chelo (1917-1921)
• Op. 15, Five sacred songs for voice and small set (1917-1922)
• Op. 16, Five canons on Latin texts for soprano, clarinet and low clarinet (1923-1924)
• Op. 17 Three traditional rhymes for voice, violin (also viola), clarinet and low clarinet (1924)
• Op. 18, Three voice lieer, clarinet and guitar in my bemol (1925)
• Op. 19, Two Mixed Choir Lieer, Celesta, Guitar, violin, clarinet and low clarinet (1926)
• Op. 20, Threesome of strings (1927)
• Op. 21, Symphony (1928)
• Op. 22, violin quartet, clarinet, saxophone and piano (1928-1930)
• Op. 23, Three songs from the Viae inviae by Hildegard Jone for voice and piano (1934)
• Op. 24, Concert for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, violin, viola and piano (1934)
• Op. 25, Three lieer on Hildegard Jone texts for voice and piano (1934-1935)
• Op. 26, Das Augenlicht about a text by Hildegard Jone for mixed choir and orchestra (1935)
• Op. 27, Variations for piano solo (1936). Example of the first compass (in ogg format, 19 seconds, 85 KB).
• Op. 28, String Quartet (1937-1938). The Dominican series of this work is based on the BACH motive.
• Op. 29, Cantatata #1 for soprano, mixed choir and orchestra (1938-1939)
• Op. 30, Variations for orchestra (1940)
• Op. 31, Sintata n.o 2 for soprano, bass, choir and orchestra (1941-1943)

Works without opus number

• Two pieces for violin and piano (1899)
• Three poems for voice and piano (1899-1903)
• Eight youth songs for voice and piano (1901-1904)
• Three Avenarius songs for voice and piano (1903-1904)
• Im sommerwind, idilio para gran orchestra (1904)
• Langsamer satz for string quartet (1905)
• String Quartet (1905)
• Sound movement for piano (1906)
• Five songs with Dehmel text for voice and piano (1906-1908)
• Fifth for piano and strings (1907)
• 5 pieces for orchestra (1913)
• Sonata for cello and piano (1914)
• Infant (1924)
• Orchestra of 6 German dances by Franz Schubert (1931)
• Orquestación del ricercare de la Musical offer, BWV 1079 by Johann Sebastian Bach (1935)