Anton Webern

Anton Webern (German: [ˈantoːn ˈveːbɐn] ^ⓘ; 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor. 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 of his studies under Guido Adler. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School. He was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in a style lauded for its aphoristic, expressionist potency, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process.

Unhappy and peripatetic in his early conducting career, Webern came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher in Red Vienna. With a publication agreement through Emil Hertzka's Universal Edition and Schoenberg away at the Prussian Academy of Arts, Webern wrote music of increasing confidence, independence, and scale from the 1920s onward. He maintained his "path to the new music" while marginalized as a "cultural Bolshevist".

Posthumously Webern's later music was celebrated by a variety of mid-century musicians, especially composers, in a phenomenon known as post-Webernism. Yet most understanding was fledgling after years of severe disruption when his work was dismissed or opposed, nor were his musical semantics or semiotics, performance practices, or sociocultural contexts widely studied. This situation was gradually improved by musicians and scholars who helped publish and record his complete works as well as establish his music as modernist repertoire.