Anton Webern was born on December 3, 1883, into a well-to-do Austrian aristocratic family, the son of Carl von Webern, a mining engineer who worked as a civil servant of the government of the Hapsburg Empire, and Amalie von Webern an amateur pianist and mezzo-soprano singer from whom he received his first musical instruction. It was most probably her influence that led him to become above all a vocal composer—more than half of his output is for the voice. An enthusiastic cellist from an early age, Webern also played chamber music with his sisters Maria and Rosa, and participated in his local orchestra.

In 1902, Webern enrolled in the University of Vienna to study history of art, music, and musicology with the Bohemian-Austrian musicologist Guido Adler (1855-1941)—founder of modern musicology. Adler introduced him to the Renaissance Netherlandish composers Josquin des Prez, Johannes Ockeghem, and Heinrich Isaac, whose musical intricacy and purity of expression would have such a decisive influence on his compositional approach. Adler was also a close friend of Gustav Mahler—at the time the director of the Vienna Court Opera—and an admirer of Arnold Schoenberg, who was to become Webern’s private composition teacher two years later, in 1904.

The second work, composed in 1904, at the age twenty, a few months before starting his four-year study period with Schoenberg, is a twelve-minute tone poem titled Im Sommerwind, (In The Summer Wind), which he subtitled “Idyll for Large Orchestra.” Written in late-Romantic vein for a—large indeed—orchestra of 13 woodwind players, six horns, a pair of trumpets, percussion, two harps, and, of course, strings, it was his most ambitious project up to that point and reflects the influence of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, whose music Webern was consuming as an avid concert-goer in Vienna during those student days.

Listen for the hushed introduction by the strings, marked Ruhig bewegt (Quietly agitated), which are soon joined by the lush sounds of the rest of the orchestra. A solo oboe introduces a lighthearted motif that plays a significant role throughout the work followed by contrasting episodes characterized by quick changes of mood and color. When the atmosphere calms down again, the ethereal quality of the opening measures returns to end the piece.

The third early work, the Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement) for string quartet, composed in June 1905— “love music” in Webern’s own words—is his longest original composition with a little over thirteen minutes in duration. Written in traditional sonata-form in the key of C minor, it was originally intended as the slow movement of a string quartet. Its inspiration came from a trip to the valleys of lower Austria with his first cousin, Wilhelmine Mörtl, who became his wife in 1911. Webern wrote in his diary: "To walk forever like this among the flowers, with my dearest one beside me, to feel oneself so entirely at one with the Universe, without care, free as the lark in the sky above—oh what splendor...when night fell (after the rain) the sky shed bitter tears but I wandered with her along a road."

With his Passacaglia Op. 1, Webern takes us fully into the vague musical landscape of atonality. Although some of the expressivity of late Romanticism is still there, the music is no longer built around a fixed tonal center. Critics obviously hated it.

Critics attending the Zurich 1924 ISCM Festival hailed Webern as a "true musical poet." This performance, and the premiere of his choral work Das Augenlicht (Through Our Open Eyes Light Flows Into the Heart) Op. 26 at a later 1938 ISCM Festival in London, might have been the only two successful evenings in Webern's career from the music critic's point of view. For the most part, his compositions would otherwise elicit ridicule from audiences and the press' invective. A humble, gentle, and kind man, Webern was, however, intransigent in musical matters. He temperament wasn’t well suited to follow Mahler’s maxim: "I run with my head against the wall, but it is the wall which will crack". On the contrary, as time went by, Webern became increasingly reclusive and compulsive. His sketchbooks are full of corrections, reworked beginnings, and revisions upon revisions.

Dodecaphonism and Serialism After WWI

The Trio, Op. 20, marks the largest leap in Webern’s compositional evolution and is now acclaimed as one of his greatest creations.

Even more than Schoenberg or Berg, Webern was absorbed in the symmetrical possibilities of twelve-tone music. With its intricate canons, where he takes pointillism even further than before, the Symphony Op. 21—dedicated to his daughter Christine—is probably the best known of his twelve-tone pieces. The "phrases" assigned to each instrument are often so short that they consist of one or two notes. The overall effect is that of constantly changing colors that merge into one another. This time, however, there are no sudden contrasts between the changing textures.

In the first movement of Op. 21, Webern clearly shows his predilection for simultaneous horizontal and vertical symmetries, mirror images, and palindromes. Thankfully, both halves of the movement are repeated so it’s somewhat easier to orient oneself. Granted, this is not easy music to listen, but the pattern of the music might start emerging as you listen for repeated intervals and the drone-like quality of the strings playing above and below other instruments.

Under the policy of Gleichschaltung (Coordination)—the process by which Nazis aimed to establish totalitarian control of every aspect of society including art—music composed under their regime had to fit their standards for "good" German music. The only composers who fit those standards were the three that the German people revered: Beethoven, Wagner—for whom Hitler had an almost fanatical devotion—and Bruckner, all of whom lived prior to the 20th century. Together with music by progressive composers, and that of all Jewish composers, Webern’s work was classified as too radical, even ‘degenerate,’ and its performance and publication was banned. Listening to banned composers in Nazi Germany was considered a subversive act that had potentially dreadful consequences.

Nonetheless, Webern didn’t stop composing. Important works of this period include the Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24 (1934), Variations for Piano, Op. 27 (1935), String Quartet, Op. 28 (1938), and the Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30 (1940), which became especially influential because of its intervallic treatment and originality of texture and tone color.

It was Webern rather than his mentor, Arnold Schoenberg, who exerted the greatest influence on the generation of post-WWII avant-garde and electronic music composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Young musicians, specially those associated with the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in Germany during the 1950s, such as Bruno Maderna, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, John Cage, György Ligeti, and Luigi Nono, but chief among them Pierre Boulez, were strongly influenced by Webern's atonal and serial composition techniques. The label “post-Webern serialism” is still applied to some of their music. Boulez (1925-2016), who as composer took Webern’s serialism to its ultimate consequences, and as conductor recorded his complete works, once hailed him as the "The Last Threshold" to the future of music.

In America, Webern’s influence was further extended by his students Ren é Leibowitz (1913-1972)—who also promoted Schoenberg's music in France, and is the author of one of the earliest theoretical treatises on twelve-tone technique—and Jacques-Louis Monod (b. 1927), who also championed Schoenberg and Berg in during the late 40s and much of the 1950s. It wasn’t just young composers who were attracted to Webern, however. Well-established figures such as Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland, and jazz musicians working in the US also used serial composition techniques in the 1950s. Nonetheless, most of Webern’s music, like Schoenberg’s, continues to challenge mainstream audiences.