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Anton Webern (German: [ˈantoːn ˈveːbɐn] ⓘ; 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its concision and use of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques in an increasingly rigorous manner, somewhat after the Franco-Flemish School ...
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- Life and works
Anton Webern (born Dec. 3, 1883, Vienna, Austria—died Sept. 15, 1945, Mittersill, near Salzburg) Austrian composer of the 12-tone Viennese school. He is known especially for his passacaglia for orchestra, his chamber music, and various songs (Lieder).
Webern’s father, a mining engineer, rose to the highest rank of his profession, becoming chief of mining in the Habsburg government. Nobility had been conferred upon the family as early as 1574 by Emperor Maximilian II. Although the predicate von was outlawed in Austria after the 1918 revolution, and the composer’s music had to be published under the name Anton Webern, he upheld his aristocratic heritage throughout his life.
Webern’s father’s career caused the family to move to two provincial capitals, Graz and Klagenfurt, and then back to Vienna. Webern received his first musical instruction from his mother, an amateur pianist. In Klagenfurt, Edwin Komauer instructed him in the rudiments of musical theory, as well as in piano. Webern also learned to play the cello and participated in the local orchestra.
His first compositions, Two Pieces for Cello and Piano (1899) and several songs, date from the Klagenfurt period. In 1902, after graduation from the Klagenfurt Humanistisches Gymnasium, he attended performances of Wagner operas at the Bayreuth Festival, and these left a deep impression on the young musician. That fall, he entered the University of Vienna, studying musicology and composition. He received a Ph.D. degree (1906) with a dissertation on the Choralis Constantinus II of the Dutch composer Heinrich Isaac. Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1904, Webern had become a private pupil of the composer Arnold Schoenberg. The association proved to be a decisive influence. With Schoenberg, and soon also his friend the young composer Alban Berg, Webern explored new dimensions of musical expression, leading to the breakthrough that established “atonality”—a revolutionary concept abnegating the necessity of a governing tonal centre. But from the start Webern created a style distinctly his own.
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Schoenberg’s direction of Webern’s musical development ended in 1908. By then, Webern had already written many works, including the orchestral idyll Im Sommerwind (1904; antedating his study with Schoenberg), several string quartets, the songs based on poems of Richard Dehmel, the orchestral Passacaglia (1908), and the choral canon Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen (1908). These still adhere to traditional tonality, but, with the Stefan George songs (1908–09), Webern entered the realm of music no longer based on a fixed tonal centre.
- Hans Moldenhauer
Mar 28, 2013 · From BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week: "Donald Macleod explores the life and works of Anton Webern, who studied under Arnold Schoenberg and became one of the best-known serialist...
- 87 min
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- Maarten Marxveldt
Anton Webern - Serialism, Atonality, Expressionism: Inherently poetic, Webern’s music mirrors his remarkable sensibility. Nature worship, from mountain grandeur to the microcosmos of flowers, influenced his creative thinking.
- Hans Moldenhauer
Jan 6, 2015 · Learn about the life and work of Anton Webern, a prominent Austrian composer and member of the Second Viennese School. Explore his relationship with Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and other contemporaries, and how he coped with the political and cultural challenges of his time.
His death was tragic and haphazard: while he was enjoying a post-curfew cigarette four months after the end of World War Two, the glow from his cigar was spotted by a trigger-happy soldier, and he was shot. The biography of Anton Webern on Deutsche Grammophon. Read it now.
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Sep 14, 2015 · Seventy years ago this Tuesday, the seminal 20th-century composer Anton Webern stepped out of his house in Mittersill, Austria, to enjoy a cigar and was shot to death by an American soldier. It was 1945: Webern's homeland was occupied by the Allies.
