Anton Webern

Anton Webern
Webern in Stettin, October 1912
Born	3 December 1883 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	15 September 1945(1945-09-15) (aged 61) Mittersill, Allied-occupied Austria
Occupations	Composer conductor
Works	List of compositions
Signature

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 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.

Their atonal music brought them fame and stirred debate. Webern was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in an aphoristic, expressionist style, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process. Peripatetic, unhappy, and often assigned light music and operetta in his early conducting career, he aspired to conduct more established repertoire with more autonomy at home in Vienna. During and after World War I, he set folk, lyric, and spiritual texts in texturally dense Lieder.

He came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher in Red Vienna. With a publication contract through Emil Hertzka's Universal Edition and Schoenberg away at the Prussian Academy of Arts, Webern wrote music of increasing confidence, independence, and scale using twelve-tone technique. He maintained his "path to the new music" while marginalized as a "cultural Bolshevist" effectively until his death.

A variety of post-World War II musicians celebrated his music, much of which was first published only then or later still. Among these were many composers influenced especially by his twelve-tone music in a phenomenon known as post-Webernism, linking but not restricting Webern's legacy to serialism. Understanding of his musical semantics or semiotics, performance practice, and sociocultural contexts was widely fledgling after years of severe disruption. This was gradually improved by musicians and scholars who helped publish and record his works as well as establish his music as modernist repertoire. A Gesamtausgabe (complete edition) is pending.

Biography

1883–1908: Upbringing between late Imperial Vienna and countryside

• (left) A brick barn in a field of wildflowers on the Preglhof estate
• (right) Pfarrkirche Schwabegg against southern foothills from a snowy field

Bucolic Heimat

Webern was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a descendant of minor nobility, high-ranking civil servant, mining engineer, and owner of the Lamprechtsberg copper mine in the Koralpe. Much of Webern's early youth was in Graz (1890–1894) and Klagenfurt (1894–1902), though his father's work briefly took the family to Olmütz and back to Vienna.

His mother Amalie (née Geer) was a pianist and accomplished singer. She taught Webern piano and sang opera with him. He received first drums, then a trumpet, and later a violin as Christmas gifts. With his sisters Rosa and Maria, Webern danced to music and ice-skated the Lendkanal to the Wörthersee. Edwin Komauer taught him cello, and the family played chamber music, including that of Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven. Webern learned to play Bach's cello suites and may have studied Bach's polyphony under Komauer.

The extended Webern family spent summers, holidays, and vacations at their country estate, the Preglhof. The children played outside in the forest and on a high meadow with pasture grazed by herded cattle and with a church-and-mountain view; they bathed in a pond (where Webern once saved Rosa from drowning). He drove horses to Bleiburg and fought a wildfire encroaching on the estate. These experiences and reading Peter Rosegger's Heimatkunst shaped Webern's distinct and lasting sense of Heimat.

University

After a trip to Bayreuth, Webern studied musicology at the University of Vienna (1902–1906) with Guido Adler, a friend of Mahler, composition student of Bruckner, and devoted Wagnerian who had been in contact with both Wagner and Liszt. He quickly joined the Wagner Society, meeting popular conductors and musicians. Egon Wellesz recalled he and Webern analyzed Beethoven's late quartets at the piano in Adler's seminars. Webern learned the historical development of musical styles and techniques, editing the second volume of Heinrich Isaac's Choralis Constantinus as his doctoral thesis. Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer noted Webern's scholarly engagement with Isaac's music as a formative experience for Webern the composer. Webern especially praised Isaac's voice leading or "subtle organization in the interplay of parts":

The voices proceed ... in ... equality ... . Each ... has its own development and is a ... self-contained ... structural unit ... . ... Isaac uses ... canonic devices in ... profusion ... . ... Added ... is the keenest observation of tone colourings in ... registers of the human voice. This is partly the cause of ... interlacing of voices and ... their movement by leaps.

Webern studied art history and philosophy under professors Max Dvořák, Laurenz Müllner, and Franz Wickhoff, joining the Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft in 1903. His cousin Ernst Diez, an art historian studying in Graz, may have led him to the work of Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, which he admired along with that of Ferdinand Hodler and Moritz von Schwind. Webern idolized Segantini's landscapes on a par with Beethoven's music, diarying in 1904:

Spring Pastures, 1896, by Giovanni Segantini

I long for an artist in music such as Segantini was in painting. ... [F]ar away from all turmoil of the world, in contemplation of the glaciers, of eternal ice and snow, of ... mountain giants. ... [A]n alpine storm, ... the radiance of the summer sun on flower-covered meadows—all these ... in the music, ... of alpine solitude. That man would ... be the Beethoven of our day.

Webern also studied nationalism and Catholic liturgy, shaped by his mostly provincial Catholic upbringing, which provided little exposure to the relatively cosmopolitan people of Vienna. At the time, antisemitism was resurging in Austria, fueled by Catholic resentment after Jewish emancipation in the 1867 December Constitution. Initially, Webern viewed his Jewish peers as ostentatious and unfriendly, but his attitude shifted by 1902. He quickly and durably made many close friends, most of them Jewish; Kathryn Bailey Puffett wrote that this likely affected his views.

Schoenberg and his circle

In 1904, Webern approached Hans Pfitzner for composition lessons but left angrily when Pfitzner criticized Mahler and Richard Strauss. Adler admired Schoenberg's work and may have sent Webern to him for composition lessons. Thus Webern met Berg, another Schoenberg pupil, and Schoenberg's brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky, through whom Webern may have worked as an assistant coach at the Volksoper in Vienna (1906–1909). Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern became devoted, lifelong friends with similar musical trajectories. Adler, Heinrich Jalowetz, and Webern played Schoenberg's quartets under the composer, accompanying Marie Gutheil-Schoder in rehearsals for Op. 10.

Also through Schoenberg, who painted and had a 1910 solo exhibition at Hugo Heller's bookstore, Webern met Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer (with whom he corresponded on ich–Du terms), Egon Schiele, and Emil Stumpp. In 1920, Webern wrote Berg about the "indescribable impression" Klimt's work made on him, "that of a luminous, tender, heavenly realm". He also met Karl Kraus, whose lyrics he later set, but only to completion in Op. 13/i.

1908–1918: Early adulthood in Austria-Hungary and German Empire

Marriage

Webern married Wilhelmine "Minna" Mörtl in a 1911 civil ceremony in Danzig. She had become pregnant in 1910 and feared disapproval, as they were cousins. Thus the Catholic Church only solemnized their lasting union in 1915, after three children.

They met in 1902, later hiking along the Kamp from Rosenburg-Mold to Allentsteig in 1905. He wooed her with John Ruskin essays (in German translation), dedicating his Langsamer Satz to her. Webern diaried about their time together "with obvious literary aspirations":

We wandered ... The forest symphony resounded. ... A walk in the moonlight on flowery meadows—Then the night—"what the night gave to me, will long make me tremble."—Two souls had wed.

Photograph of Webern (1912)

Early conducting career

Webern conducted and coached singers and choirs mostly in operetta, musical theater, light music, and some opera in his early career. Operetta was in its Viennese Silver Age. Much of this music was regarded as low- or middlebrow; Kraus, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Krenek found it "uppity" in its pretensions. In 1924 Ernst Décsey recalled he once found operetta, with its "old laziness and unbearable musical blandness", beneath him. J. P. Hodin contextualized the opposition of the "youthful intelligentsia" to operetta with a quote from Hermann Bahr's 1907 essay Wien:

everyone knows ... it is always Sunday in Vienna ... one lives in a world of half-poetry which is very dangerous for the real thing. They can recognize a few waltzes by Lanner and Strauss ... a few Viennese songs ... It is a well-known fact that Vienna has the finest cakes ... and the most cheerful, friendly people. ... But those who are condemned to live here cannot understand all this.

"What benefit ... if all operettas ... were destroyed", Webern told Dietz in 1908. But in 1912, he told Berg that Zeller's Vogelhändler was "quite nice" and Schoenberg that J. Strauss II's Nacht in Venedig was "such fine, delicate music. I now believe ... Strauss is a master." A summer 1908 engagement with Bad Ischl's Kurorchester was "hell". Webern walked out on an engagement in Innsbruck (1909), writing in distress to Schoenberg:

a young good-for-nothing ... my 'superior!' ... what do I have to do with such a theatre? ... do I have to perform all this filth?

Webern wrote Zemlinsky seeking work at the Berlin or Vienna Volksoper instead. He started at Bad Teplitz's Civic Theater in early 1910, where the local news reported his "sensitive, devoted guidance" as conductor of Fall's Geschiedene Frau, but he quit within months due to disagreements. His repertoire likely included Fall's Dollarprinzessin, Lehár's Graf von Luxemburg, O. Straus's Walzertraum, J. Strauss II's Fledermaus, and Schumann's Manfred. There were only 22 musicians in the orchestra, too few to perform Puccini's operas, he noted.

Webern then summered at the Preglhof, composing his Op. 7 and planning an opera. In September, he attended the Munich premiere of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand and visited with his idol, who gave Webern a sketch of "Lob der Kritik". Webern then worked with Jalowetz as assistant conductor in Danzig (1910–1911), where he first saw the "almost frightening" ocean. He conducted von Flotow's Wintermärchen, George's Försterchristl, Jones' Geisha, Lehár's Lustige Witwe, Lortzing's Waffenschmied, Offenbach's Belle Hélène, and J. Strauss II's Zigeunerbaron. He particularly enjoyed Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann and Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia, but only Jalowetz was allowed to conduct this more established repertoire.

Webern soon expressed homesickness to Berg; he could not bear the separation from Schoenberg and their world in Vienna. He returned after resigning in spring 1911, and the three were pallbearers at Mahler's funeral in May 1911. Then in summer 1911, a neighbor's antisemitic abuse and aggression caused Schoenberg to quit work, abandon Vienna, and go with his family to stay with Zemlinsky on the Starnbergersee. Webern and others fundraised for Schoenberg's return, circulating more than one hundred leaflets with forty-eight signatories, including G. Adler, H. Bahr, Klimt, Kraus, and R. Strauss, among others. But Schoenberg was resolved to move to Berlin, and not for the first or last time, convinced of Vienna's fundamental hostility.

Webern soon joined him (1910–1912), finishing no new music in his devoted work on Schoenberg's behalf, which entailed many editing and writing projects. He gradually became tired, unhappy, and homesick. He tried to persuade Schoenberg to return home to Vienna, continuing the fundraising campaign and lobbying for a position there for Schoenberg, but Schoenberg could not bear to return to the Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst due to his prior experiences in Vienna. At the same time, Webern began a cycle of repeatedly quitting and being taken back by Zemlinsky at the Deutsches Landestheater Prague (1911–1918). He also had a short-lived conducting post in Stettin (1912–1913).

Psychotherapy

Webern had little time (mostly summers) to compose. There were conflicts at work (e.g., he emphasized that a director called him a "little man"). His ambivalence toward sales-oriented popular music theater contributed ("I ... stir the sauce", he wrote). "It appears ... improbable that I should remain with the theatre. It is ... terrible. ... I can hardly ... adjust to being away from home", he wrote Schoenberg in 1910. Miserably ill, he sought medical advice and took rest at a sanatorium in Semmering. In 1912–1913 he had a breakdown and saw Alfred Adler, who noted his idealism and perfectionism. Adler evaluated his symptoms as psychogenic responses to unmet expectations. Webern wrote Schoenberg that Adler's psychoanalysis was helpful and insightful.

"Old song" of "lost paradise"

Webern's father sold the Preglhof in 1912, and Webern mourned it as a "lost paradise". He revisited it and the family grave in nearby Schwabegg his entire life, associating these places with the memory of his mother, whose 1906 loss profoundly affected him. In July 1912, he confided in Schoenberg:

• (left) Schloss Preglhof, Webern's childhood home, in Oberdorf
• (right) Webern family grave at the cemetery in Schwabegg, on a meander spur of the Drava

I am overwhelmed with emotion when I imagine everything ... . My daily way to the grave of my mother. The infinite mildness of the entire countryside, all the thousand things there. Now everything is over. ... If only you could ... have seen ... . The seclusion, the quiet, the house, the forests, the garden, and the cemetery. About this time, I had always composed diligently.

Shortly after the anniversary of his mother's death, he wrote Schoenberg in September 1912:

When I read letters from my mother, I could die of longing for the places where all these things have occurred. How far back and ... beautiful. ... Often a ... soft ... radiance, a supernatural warmth falls upon me— ... from my mother.

For Christmas in 1912, Webern gifted Schoenberg Rosegger's Waldheimat, from which Johnson highlighted:

Childhood days and childhood home!
It is that old song of Paradise. There are people for whom ... Paradise is never lost ... in them God's kingdom ... rises ... more ... in ... memory than ... ever ... in reality; ... children are poets and retrace their steps.

Rosegger's account of his mother's death at the book's end ("An meine Mutter") resonated with Webern, who connected it to his Op. 6 orchestral pieces. In a January 1913 letter to Schoenberg, Webern revealed that these pieces were a kind of program music, each reflecting details and emotions tied to his mother's death. He had written Berg in July 1912, "my compositions ... relate to the death of my mother", specifying in addition the "Passacaglia, [String] Quartet, most [early] songs, ... second Quartet, ... second [orchestral pieces, Op. 10] (with some exceptions)".

Julian Johnson noted that Webern's deeply personal idea of a maternal homeland, built from memories of pilgrimages to his mother's grave, the "mild", "lost paradise" of home, and the "warmth" of her memory, reflected his sense of loss and his yearning for return. Johnson contended that Webern understood his cultural origins with a maternal view of nature and Heimat, which became central themes in his music and thought. Drawing loosely on V. Kofi Agawu's semiotic approach to classical music, specifically his idea of musical topics, Johnson held that all of Webern's music, though rarely directly representational, was enriched by its associative references and more specific musical and extra-musical meanings. In this he claimed to echo Jalowetz, Krenek, Robert Craft, the Moldenhauers, and Webern himself.

Mürzzuschlag, 1908 postcard photograph

In particular, Webern associated nature with his personal (often youthful and spiritual) experiences, forming a topical nexus that recurred in his diaries, letters, and music, sometimes explicitly in sketches and set texts. He frequented the surrounding mountains, summering in resort towns like Mürzzuschlag and backpacking (sometimes summiting) the Gaisstein, Grossglockner, Hochschober, Hochschwab, and Schneealpe (among others) throughout his life. The alpine climate and föhn, glaciers, pine trees, and springs "crystal clear down to the bottom" fascinated him. He treasured this time "up there, in the heights", where "one should stay".

He collected and organized "mysterious" herbs and flowers in pressed albums, and he gardened at his father's home in Klagenfurt and later at his own homes in the Mödling District (first in Mödling, then in Maria Enzersdorf). Karl Amadeus Hartmann remembered that Webern gardened "as a devotion" to Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants, and Johnson compared Webern's composing to his gardening, highlighting his engagement with nature and structured approach in both pursuits. Johnson also likened these gardens to cemeteries, describing them as cultivated, closed spaces of rebirth and quiet reflection.

Such habits endured in Webern's life and œuvre. In 1933, Joseph Hueber recalled Webern stopped in a fragrant meadow, dug his hands into the soil, and breathed in the flowers and grass before rising to ask: "Do you sense 'Him' ... as strongly as I, 'Him, Pan'?" In 1934, Webern's lyricist and collaborator Hildegard Jone described his work as "filled ... with the endless love and delicacy of the memory of ... childhood". Webern told her, "through my work, all that is past becomes like a childhood".

World War I

As World War I broke out and nationalist fervor swept Europe, Webern found it "inconceivable", he wrote Schoenberg in August 1914, "that the German Reich, and we along with it, should perish." Yielding in his distrust of Protestant Germany, he compared Catholic France to "cannibals" and expressed pan-German patriotism amid wartime propaganda. He cited his "faith in the German spirit" as having "created, almost exclusively, the culture of mankind". Despite his high regard of French classical music, especially Debussy's, Webern revered the tradition as centered on counterpoint and form, and as mainly German since Bach.

Webern served intermittently for nearly two years. The war cost him professional opportunities, much of his social life, and the necessary leisure time to compose (he completed only nine Lieder). Moving frequently and tiring, he began to despair, explaining to Schoenberg in November 1916 that the reality of war was "Old Testament" and "'Eye for eye'", "as if Christ had never existed". Webern was discharged in December 1916 for myopia, which had disqualified him from frontline service.

His 1917 Lieder show that he reflected on his patriotism and processed his sorrow. He treated the loss of life and, with the 1916 death of Franz Joseph I of Austria, the end of an era. In "Fahr hin, o Seel'", he selected a lament sung at a funeral in a Rosegger novel. In "Wiese im Park", he selected a text from Kraus recognizing that the day was "dead", "und alles ... so alt" ("and everything ... so old"). Webern also set several disturbing poems of Georg Trakl, not all of which he could finish. With uninterrupted contrapuntal density, by turns muscular and murmured, he word painted Trakl's "great cities" and "dying peoples", "leafless trees", "violent alarm", and "falling stars" in "Abendland III".

Austrian defeat and socioeconomic strain

During and after the end of the war, Webern, like other Austrians, contended with food shortages, insufficient heating, socioeconomic volatility, and geopolitical disaster in defeat. He had considered retreating to the countryside and purchasing a farm since 1917, specifically as an asset better than war bonds at shielding his family's wealth from inflation. (In the end, he lost all that remained of his family's wealth to hyperinflation by 1924.) He proposed to Schoenberg that they might be smallholders together.

Despite Schoenberg's and his father's advice that he not quit conducting, Webern followed to Schoenberg to Mödling in early 1918, hoping to be reunited with his mentor and to compose more. But Webern's finances were so poor that he soon explored a "voluntary exile" to Prague again. Nonetheless, he continued to raise funds, including his own, for Schoenberg, with whom he spent every day.

Yet soon after he arrived, Webern broke his friendship with Schoenberg. The break was multifactorial but involved Webern's dissatisfaction with his career and financial turmoil. Berg learned of the Weberns' ill temperaments and "latent antisemitism" from Schoenberg, and noted that Schoenberg "wouldn't explain" further than "'Webern wants to go to Prague again'". Bailey Puffett argued that Webern's actions in and after the 1930s suggested that he was not antisemitic, at least in his maturity. She noted that Webern later wrote Schoenberg that he felt "a sense of the most vehement aversion" against German-speaking people who were.

After meeting with Webern, Berg saw "the matter in a different light", considering Webern "by and large innocent" in light of what Webern said was Schoenberg's "kick in the teeth": after laying plans for a New Music society, Schoenberg was angry upon learning that Webern was instead considering Prague again, calling him "secretive and deceitful". They reconciled in October 1918, not long before Webern's father died in 1919. Webern was changed by these events; he slowly began to grow more independent of Schoenberg, who was like a father to him. For his part, Schoenberg was not infrequently dubious of Webern, who he still considered his closest friend.

1918–1933: Rise in Rotes Wien (Interwar Vienna)

Society for Private Musical Performances

Webern stayed in Vienna and worked with Berg, Schoenberg, and Erwin Stein at the Society for Private Musical Performances (1918–1921), promoting new music through performances and contests. Music included that of Bartók, Berg, Busoni, Debussy, Korngold, Mahler, Novák, Ravel, Reger, Satie, Strauss, Stravinsky, and Webern himself. Webern wrote Berg about Stravinsky's "indescribably touching" Berceuses du chat and "glorious" Pribaoutki, which Schoenberg conducted at a sold-out 1919 Society concert. There was perhaps some shared influence among Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern at this time. The Society dissolved amid hyperinflation in 1921, having boasted some 320 members and sponsored more than a hundred concerts.

Mature conducting career

Webern, 1927, portrait by Georg Fayer

Webern worked as director of the Wiener Schubertbund and in 1922 of the mixed-voice amateur Singverein der Sozialdemokratischen Kunstelle and the Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte through David Josef Bach, Director of the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle. In 1926, Webern resigned as chorusmaster of the Mödling Männergesangverein for hiring Jewish soprano Greta Wilheim as a stand-in soloist for Schubert's cantata Mirjams Siegesgesang. Webern hired Erich Leinsdorf as Singverein pianist in 1933; they performed Stravinsky's ballet-cantata Les Noces.

"Webern is the greatest conductor since Mahler himself", wrote Berg to Erwin Stein after Webern led Mahler's Third in 1922. RAVAG aired his performances at least twenty times starting in 1927. He was applauded as much as Willem Mengelberg in Holland. In Le Ménestrel (1930), Armand Machabey noted Webern's regional reputation as a conductor of "haute valeur" for his meticulous approach to then contemporary music.

Perhaps on religious grounds, Krenek speculated, Webern seemed uneasy in his dependence on the Social Democrats for conducting work. Citing Roberto Gerhard and Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Walter Kolneder judged, "Artistic work for and with workers was [from] a ... Christian standpoint which Webern took very seriously". Some on the left, notably Oscar Pollak in Der Kampf (1929), criticized Webern's programming as more ambitious and bourgeois than popular and proletarian.

Relative success in a destabilizing society

Webern's finances were often precarious, even in his years of relative success. Relief came from family, friends, patrons, and prizes. He twice received the Preis der Stadt Wien für Musik. To compose more, he sought income while trying not to overcommit himself as a conductor. He contracted with Universal Edition only after 1919, reaching better terms in 1927, but he was not very ambitious or astute in business. Even with a doctorate and Guido Adler's respect, he never secured a remunerative university position, whereas in 1925 Schoenberg was invited to the Prussian Academy of Arts, ending their seven years together in Mödling.

Social Democrat–Christian Social relations polarized and radicalized amid the Schattendorfer Urteil. Webern and others signed an "Announcement of Intellectual Vienna" published on the front page of the Social Democrats' daily Arbeiter-Zeitung days before the 1927 Austrian legislative election. On Election Day in Die Reichspost, Ignaz Seipel of the Einheitsliste officially applied the term "Red Vienna" pejoratively, attacking Vienna's educational and cultural institutions. Social unrest escalated to the July Revolt of 1927 and beyond. Webern's nostalgia for social order intensified with increasing civil disorder. In 1928 friends fundraised for him, partly to fund a rest cure at the Kurhaus Semmering for his exhaustion and gastrointestinal complaints.

In 1928, Berg celebrated the "lasting works" and successes of composers "whose point of departure was ... late Mahler, Reger, and Debussy and whose temporary end point is in ... Schoenberg" in their rise from "pitiful 'cliques'" to a large, diverse, international, and "irresistible movement". But they were soon marginalized and ostracized in Central Europe with few exceptions. Webern's music was performed more widely starting in the latter half of the 1920s. Yet he found no great success as Berg enjoyed with Wozzeck nor as Schoenberg did, to a lesser extent, with Pierrot lunaire or in time with Verklärte Nacht. His Symphony, Op. 21, was performed in New York by the League of Composers (1929) and in London at the 1931 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival. Louis Krasner sensed some resentment, noting that Webern had "very little". Krenek's impression was that Webern resented his financial hardships and lack of wider recognition.

1933–1938: Perseverance in Schwarzes Wien (Austrofascist Vienna)

Marginalization at home

Financial crises, complex social and political movements, pervasive antisemitism, culture wars, and renewed military conflicts continued to shape Webern's world, profoundly circumscribing his life. In the Austrian Civil War, Austrofascists executed, exiled, and imprisoned Social Democrats, outlawed their party, and abolished cultural institutions. Stigmatized by his decade-long association with Social Democrats, Webern lost a promising domestic conducting career, which might have been better recorded. He worked as a UE editor and IGNM-Sektion Österreich board member and president (1933–1938, 1945).

Amid wars and crises, antisemitism grew to epidemic proportions by the late 1920s. Vienna's modern and popular culture, including the music Webern, Schoenberg, and Berg, was of a typically Jewish milieu. It was derided as Jewish in a pejorative sense, marking it as foreign by contrast to the conservatism and traditionalism of the Austrian countryside. An Austrian Gauleiter on Bayerischer Rundfunk named Berg and Webern as Jewish composers in 1933. They were exhibited for their "Entartete Musik" in Nazi Germany and again at the Vienna Künstlerhaus in Nazi Austria.

Webern delivered an eight-lecture series Der Weg zur Neuen Musik at Rita Kurzmann-Leuchter's and her physician husband Rudolf Kurzman's home (Feb.–Apr. 1933). He attacked fascist cultural policy, asking "What will come of our struggle?" He observed that "'cultural Bolshevism' is the name given to everything that is going on around Schoenberg, Berg, and myself (Krenek too)" and warned, "Imagine what will be destroyed, wiped out, by this hate of culture!" He lectured more at the Kurzmann-Leuchter home, privately in 1934–1935 on Beethoven's piano sonatas to about 40 attendees and later in 1937–1938.

Persevering, Webern wrote Krenek that "art has its own laws ... if one wants to achieve something in it, only these laws and nothing else can have validity"; upon completing Op. 26 (1935), he wrote DJ Bach, "I hope it is so good that (if people ever get to know it) they will declare me ready for a concentration camp or an insane asylum!" The Vienna Philharmonic nearly refused to play Berg's Violin Concerto (1936). Peter Stadlen's 1937 Op. 27 premieres were the last Viennese Webern performances until after World War II. The critical success of Hermann Scherchen's 1938 ISCM London Op. 26 premiere encouraged Webern to write more cantatas and reassured him after a cellist quit Op. 20 mid-performance, declaring it unplayable.

Besieged milieu and political confusion

Webern's milieu comprised increasingly vast differences. Like most Austrians, he and his family were Catholic, though not church regulars; Webern was perhaps devout if unorthodox. They became politically divided. His friends (e.g., then Zionist Schoenberg, left-leaning Berg) were of a mostly Jewish milieu in late Imperial and then "red" (Social Democratic) Vienna. Alma Mahler, Krenek, Willi Reich, and Stein preferred or supported the "lesser evil" of the Austrofascists (or aligned Italian fascists) vis-à-vis the Nazis. Presuming power would moderate Hitler, Webern mediated among friends with an optimistic, perhaps self-soothing, complacency, exasperating those who were at risk. He found himself surrounded mostly by one side as Schoenberg emigrated to the US (1933), Rudolf Ploderer died by suicide (1933), Berg died (1935), and DJ Bach, among others, fled or worse.

Webern's views of National Socialism were variously described. His published items reflected his audience or context. Secondary literature reflected limited evidence or ideological orientations and admitted uncertainty. Julie Brown noted hesitancy to approach the topic and echoed the Moldenhauers, considering the issue "vexed" and Webern a "political enigma". Bailey Puffett considered his politics "somewhat vague" and his situation "complex", noting that he practically avoided definitive political association. Johnson described him as "personally shy, a man of private feeling and essentially apolitical", "prone to identify with Nazi politics as ... other ... Austrians". Krasner surmised Webern's cognitive dissonance, finding him "idealistic and rather naive". In 1943 Kurt List described Webern as "utterly ignorant" and "perpetual[ly] confus[ed]" about politics, "a ready prey to the personal influence of family and friends".

Visiting conducting career

Webern conducted nine concerts as a BBC Symphony visiting conductor (1929–1936). He selected then little-known Mahler (including both nocturnes from the Symphony No. 7 in 1934), insisted on rehearsing at the piano with vocalists, and was criticized for coaching musical phrasing. Grief-stricken after Berg's death and overwhelmed by difficulties, he withdrew from the 1936 world premiere of Berg's Violin Concerto in Barcelona. There Krasner recalled,

[Webern] pleaded and exhorted the players to feel the inner expressive content of one, two, or three notes at a time—rehearsing repeatedly a single motif, one bar of music and only finally, a two- or four-bar phrase.

The two then played the concerto in London with BBC musicians, who rehearsed before Webern conducted. There Kenneth Anthony Wright observed Webern's "funny little explanations of the varying dynamics and flexibility of tempo"; "every syllable and every gesture of Webern was understood and lovingly heeded", said Krasner. The musicians "all admired and respected Webern", according to Sidonie Goossens. But Felix Aprahamian, Benjamin Britten, and Berthold Goldschmidt criticized Webern's conducting, and BBC management did not invite him back after 1936.

1938–1939: Inner emigration in Nazi Germany

Anschluss

Krasner's last visit with Webern was interrupted by Kurt Schuschnigg's broadcast speech that the Anschluss was imminent. Krasner had been playing some of Schoenberg's Violin Concerto for Webern and trying to convince him to write a sonata for solo violin. When Webern turned on the radio and heard this speech, he urged Krasner to flee. Because Webern's family included Nazis, Krasner wondered whether Webern had already known that the Anschluss was planned for that day. He also wondered whether Webern's warning had been solely for his safety or whether it had also been to save Webern the embarrassment of the violinist's presence in the event of celebration at the Webern home.

Much of Austria did celebrate. But Webern made only a terse note of the Anschluss in his notebook without registering any clear emotion. In fact, he wrote Jone and her husband Josef Humplik asking not to be disturbed as he was "totally immersed" in work on Op. 28. Thus, Bailey Puffett suggested that Webern may have received Krasner's visit as a distraction.

She further suggested that Krasner, with the benefit of hindsight from the perspective of his 1987 account, may have resented Webern for "refusing to see the reality of Hitler's antisemitism", at least until apparently after 1936. That year, Webern had insisted that Krasner and he travel through Nazi Germany to stop at a Munich train station café, where Krasner said "anything untoward was the least likely to happen", in an attempt to demonstrate the lack of danger. Krasner emphasized Webern's "naiveté" but reflected that he himself had been "foolhardy" as to the danger of antisemitism. Consensus had emerged on the center, left, and in some mainstream Jewish organizations that antisemitism was only a means to political power since its 1890s definition as the "socialism of fools". The Frankfurt School first treated it within the rubric of class conflict (Adorno began to consider it otherwise in his 1939 "Fragments on Wagner"), and Franz Neumann briefly contended that the Nazis would "never allow a complete extermination of the Jews" in his 1942 Behemoth (before revisions in 1944).

Support for the Anschluss rested on antisemitism, economic prospects, and the idea of a Greater Germany. Under some duress, Theodor Innitzer ushered in Catholic support. Karl Renner supported unification as a matter of self-determination before the years (1933–1938) of Gleichschaltung and Nazi soft power, and he and others now supported (or accepted as inevitable) the 1938 Anschluss. Otto Bauer, in exile, expressed some acceptance with profound resignation and misgivings, having worked toward Austria's German incorporation since Provisional National Assembly's 1918 vote. Webern had long shared in common pan-German sentiments, especially during wartime. He also likely hoped to conduct again, securing a firmer future for his family under a new regime proclaiming itself "socialist" no less than nationalist. According to Josef Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian, Webern's optimism was not dispelled until 1941.

Kristallnacht and recoil

Kristallnacht shocked Webern. He visited and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach, Otto Jokl, Polnauer, and Hugo Winter. For Jokl, a former Berg pupil, Webern wrote a recommendation letter to facilitate emigration. When that failed, Webern served as his godfather in a 1939 baptism. Polnauer, whose emigration Schoenberg and Webern were unable to secure, managed to survive the Holocaust as an albino; he later edited a 1959 UE publication of Webern's correspondence from this time with Humplik and Jone. Webern moved Humplik's 1929 gift of a Mahler bust to his bedroom.

Webern found himself increasingly alone, with "almost all his friends and old pupils ... gone", and his financial situation was poor. He had considered joining Schoenberg in the US since 1933 but was reluctant to leave home and family. He entered a period of "inward emigration", writing to artist Franz Rederer in 1939, "We live completely withdrawn. I work a lot." He corresponded extensively to maintain relationships, imploring his student George Robert to play Schoenberg in New York and expressing his loneliness and isolation to Schoenberg. Then war limited postal service, disrupting their direct correspondence completely by 1941.

1939–1945: Hope and disillusionment during World War II

Swiss and Reich prospects

Webern's music was performed mostly outside the Reich, where only his tonal music and arrangements were allowed as works not in the style of a "Judenknecht". Supported by IGNM-Sektion Basel, the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur, and Werner Reinhart, he attended three Swiss concerts, his last trips outside the Reich. In 1940, Erich Schmid conducted Op. 1 in Winterthur; soprano Marguerite Gradmann-Lüscher sang Op. 4 and most of Op. 12 (not No. 3) at the Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel, Schmid accompanying. In Feb. 1943, Scherchen gave the world premiere of Op. 30 at the Winterthur Stadthaus.

Webern intimated to Willi Reich that he might emigrate there, joking (Oct. 1939) "Anything of the sort did seem quite out of the question for me!" But Webern failed to find employment, even as a formality, likely due to anti-German sentiment in the context of Swiss neutrality and refugee laws.

In the Reich, he met with former Society violist Othmar Steinbauer about a formal teaching role in Vienna in early 1940, but nothing materialized. He lectured at the homes of Erwin Ratz and Carl Prohaska's widow Margaret (1940–1942). Many private pupils came to him between 1940 and 1943, even from afar, among them briefly Hartmann.

Wartime hopes and reality

Sharing in wartime public sentiment at the height of Hitler's popularity (spring 1940), Webern expressed high hopes, crediting him as "unique" and "singular" for "the new state for which the seed was laid twenty years ago". These were patriotic letters to Joseph Hueber, an active soldier, baritone, close friend, and mountaineering companion who often sent Webern gifts. Indeed, Hueber had just sent Webern Mein Kampf. Unaware of Stefan George's aversion to the Nazis, Webern reread Das neue Reich and marveled suggestively at the wartime leader envisioned therein, but "I am not taking a position!" he wrote active soldier, singer, and onetime Social Democrat, Hans Humpelstetter. For Johnson, "Webern's own image of a neue Reich was never of this world; if his politics were ultimately complicitous it was largely because his utopian apoliticism played so easily into ... the status quo."

By Aug. 1940, Webern depended financially on his children. He sought wartime emergency relief funds from Künstlerhilfe Wien and the Reichsmusikkammer Künstlerdank (1940–1944), which he received despite indicating non-membership in the Nazi Party on an application. Whether Webern ever joined the party was unknown. This represented his only income after mid-1942. He nearly exhausted his savings by 1944.

His 1943–1945 letters were strewn with references to bombings, death, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order, but several grandchildren were born. In Dec. 1943, aged 60, he wrote from a barrack that he was working 6 am–5 pm as an air-raid protection police officer, conscripted into the war effort. He corresponded with Willi Reich about IGNM-Sektion Basel's concert marking his sixtieth, in which Paul Baumgartner played Op. 27, Walter Kägi Op. 7, and August Wenzinger Op. 11. Gradmann-Lüscher sang both Opp. 3 and the world premiere of 23. For Schoenberg's 70th birthday (1944), Webern asked Reich to convey "my most heartfelt remembrances, ... longing! ... hopes for a happy future!" Webern's only son Peter, intermittently conscripted since 1940, was killed (14 Feb. 1945) in an air attack. Airstrike sirens interrupted the family's mourning.

Refuge and death in Mittersill

Grave of Webern and his wife Minna at the cemetery in Mittersill

The Weberns assisted Schoenberg's first son Görgi during the war; with the Red Army's April 1945 arrival imminent, they gave him their Mödling apartment, the property and childhood home of Webern's son-in-law Benno Mattl. Görgi later told Krasner that Webern "felt he'd betrayed his best friends." The Weberns fled west, resorting to traveling partly on foot to Mittersill to rejoin their family of "17 persons pressed together in the smallest possible space".

On the night of 15 Sept. 1945, Webern was outside smoking when he was shot and killed by a US soldier in an apparent accident. He had been following Thomas Mann's work, which the Nazis had burned, noting in 1944 that Mann had finished Joseph and His Brothers. In his last notebook entry, Webern quoted Rainer Maria Rilke: "Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything."

Webern's wife Minna suffered final years of grief, poverty, and loneliness as friends and family continued emigrating. She wished Webern lived to see more success. With the abolition of Entartete Kunst policies, Alfred Schlee solicited her for hidden manuscripts; thus Opp. 17, 24–25, and 29–31 were published. She worked to get Webern's 1907 Piano Quintet published via Kurt List.

In 1947 she wrote Dietz, now in the US, that by 1945 Webern was "firmly resolved to go to England". Likewise, in 1946 she wrote DJ Bach in London: "How difficult the last eight years had been for him. ... [H]e had only the one wish: to flee from this country. But one was caught, without a will of one's own. ... It was close to the limit of endurance what we had to suffer." Minna died in 1949.

Music

Further information: List of compositions by Anton Webern

Tell me, can one at all denote thinking and feeling as things entirely separable? I cannot imagine a sublime intellect without the ardor of emotion.

Webern wrote to Schoenberg (June 1910). Theodor Adorno described Webern as "propound[ing] musical expressionism in its strictest sense, ... to such a point that it reverts of its own weight to a new objectivity".

Webern's music was generally concise, organic, and parsimonious, with very small motifs, palindromes, and parameterization on both the micro- and macro-scale. His idiosyncratic approach reflected affinities with Schoenberg, Mahler, Guido Adler and early music; interest in esotericism and Naturphilosophie; and thorough perfectionism. He engaged with the work of Goethe, Bach, and the Franco-Flemish School in addition to that of Wolf, Brahms, Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Beethoven, Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), and Mozart. Stylistic shifts were not neatly coterminous with gradually developed technical devices, particularly in the case of his mid-period Lieder.

His music was also characteristically linear and song-like. Much of it (and Berg's and Schoenberg's) was for singing. Johnson described the song-like gestures of Op. 11/i. In Webern's mid-period Lieder, some heard instrumentalizing of the voice (often in relation to the clarinet) representing yet some continuity with bel canto. Lukas Näf described one of Webern's signature hairpins (on the Op. 21/i mm. 8–9 bass clarinet tenuto note) as a messa di voce requiring some rubato to execute faithfully. Adventurous textures and timbres, and melodies of wide leaps and sometimes extreme ranges and registers were typical.

For Johnson, Webern's rubato compressed Mahler's "'surging and ebbing'" tempi; this and Webern's dynamics indicated a "vestigial lyrical subjectivity." Webern often set carefully chosen lyric poetry. He related his music not only to nostalgia for the lost family and home of his youth, but also to his Alpinism and fascination with botanical aromatics and morphology. He was compared to Mahler in his orchestration and semantic preoccupations (e.g., memory, landscapes, nature, loss, often Catholic mysticism). In Jone, who he met with her husband Humplik via the Hagenbund, Webern found a lyricist who shared his esoteric, natural, and spiritual interests. She provided texts for his late vocal works.

Webern's and Schoenberg's music distinctively prioritized minor seconds, major sevenths, and minor ninths as noted in 1934 by microtonalist Alois Hába. The Kholopov siblings noted the semitone's unifying role by axial inversional symmetry and octave equivalence as interval class 1 (ic1), approaching Allen Forte's generalized pitch-class set analysis. Webern's consistent use of ic1 in cells and sets, often expressed as a wide interval musically, was well noted. Symmetric pitch-interval practices varied in rigor and use by others (e.g., Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók, Debussy, Stravinsky; more nascently Mahler, Brahms, Bruckner, Liszt, Wagner). Berg and Webern took symmetric approaches to elements of music beyond pitch. Webern later linked pitches and other parameters in schemes (e.g., fixed or "frozen" register).

Relatively few of Webern's works were published in his lifetime. Amid fascism and Emil Hertzka's passing, this included late as well as early works (in addition to others without opus numbers). His rediscovery prompted many publications, but some early works were unknown until after the work of the Moldenhauers well into the 1980s, obscuring formative facets of his musical identity. Thus when Boulez first oversaw a project to record Webern's music, the results fit on three CDs and the second time, six. A Gesamtausgabe has remained in progress.

1899–1908: Formative juvenilia and emergence from study

Webern published little juvenilia; like Brahms, he was meticulous and self-conscious, revising extensively. His earliest works were mostly Lieder on works of Richard Dehmel, Gustav Falke, and Theodor Storm. He set seven Ferdinand Avenarius poems on the "changing moods" of life and nature (1899–1904). Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf were important models. With its brief, potent expressivity and utopianization of the natural world, the (German) Romantic Lied had a lasting influence on Webern's musical aesthetic. He never abandoned its lyricism, intimacy, and wistful or nostalgic topics, though his music became more abstract, idealized, and introverted.

Webern memorialized the Preglhof in a diary poem "An der Preglhof" and in the tone poem Im Sommerwind (1904), both after Bruno Wille's idyll. In Webern's Sommerwind, Derrick Puffett found affinities with Strauss's Alpensinfonie, Charpentier's Louise, and Delius's Paris.

At the Pregholf in summer 1905, Webern wrote his tripartite, single-movement string quartet in a highly modified sonata form, likely responding to Schoenberg's Op. 7. He quoted Jakob Böhme in the preface and mentioned the panels of Segantini's Trittico della natura as "Werden–Sein–Vergehen" in sketches. Sebastian Wedler argued that this quartet bore the influence of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra in its germinal three-note motive, opening fugato of its third (development) section, and Nietzschean reading (via eternal recurrence) of Segantini's triptych. In its opening harmonies, Allen Forte and Heinz-Klaus Metzger noted Webern's anticipation of Schoenberg's atonality in Op. 10.

Danzig's Friedrich-Wilhelm-Schützenhaus in a 1906 postcard photograph

In 1906, Schoenberg assigned Webern Bach chorales to harmonize and figure; Webern completed eighteen in a highly chromatic idiom. Then the Passacaglia, Op. 1 (1908) was his graduation piece, and the Op. 2 choral canons soon followed. The passacaglia's chromatic harmonic language and less conventional orchestration distinguished it from prior works; its form foreshadowed those of his later works. Conducting the 1911 Danzig premiere of Op. 1 at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Schützenhaus, he paired it with Debussy's 1894 Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Ludwig Thuille's 1896 Romantische Ouvertüre, and Mahler's 1901–1904 Kindertotenlieder in a poorly attended Moderner Abend concert. The Danziger Zeitung critic derided Op. 1 as an "insane experiment".

In 1908 Webern also began an opera on Maeterlinck's Alladine et Palomides, of which only unfinished sketches remained, and in 1912 he wrote Berg that he had finished one or more scenes for another planned but unrealized opera, Die sieben Prinzessinnen, on Maeterlinck's Les Sept Princesses. He had been an opera enthusiast from his student days. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande enraptured him twice in Dec. 1908 Berlin and again in 1911 Vienna. As a vocal coach and opera conductor, he knew the repertoire "perfectly ... every cut, ... unmarked cadenza, and in the comic operas every theatrical joke". He "adored" Mozart's Il Seraglio and revered Strauss, predicting Salome would last. When in high spirits, Webern would sing bits of Lortzing's Zar und Zimmermann, a personal favorite. He expressed interest (to Max Deutsch) in writing an opera pending a good text and adequate time; in 1930, he asked Jone for "opera texts, or rather dramatic texts", planning cantatas instead.

1908–1914: Atonality and aphorisms

Webern's music, like Schoenberg's, was freely atonal after Op. 2. Some of their and Berg's music from this time was published in Der Blaue Reiter. Schoenberg and Webern were so mutually influential, the former later joked, "I haven't the slightest idea who I am". In Op. 5/iii, Webern borrowed from Schoenberg's Op. 10/ii. In Op. 5/iv, he borrowed from Schoenberg's Op. 10/iv setting of "Ich fühle luft von anderen planeten".

The first of Webern's innovative and increasingly extremely aphoristic Opp. 5–11 (1909–1914) radically influenced Schoenberg's Opp. 11/iii and 16–17 (and Berg's Opp. 4–5). Here, Martin Zenck considered, Webern did not seek "the new ... in [music of] the past but in the future". In writing the Op. 9 bagatelles, Webern reflected in 1932, "I had the feeling that when the twelve notes had all been played the piece was over." "[H]aving freed music from the shackles of tonality," Schoenberg wrote, he and his pupils believed "music could renounce motivic features". This "intuitive aesthetic" arguably proved to be aspirational insofar as motives persisted in their music.

Two enduring topics emerged in Webern's work: familial (especially maternal) loss and memory, often involving some religious experience, and abstracted landscapes idealized as spiritual (even pantheistic) Heimat (e.g., the Preglhof, the Eastern Alps). Webern explored these ideas via Swedenborg's correspondences in Tot (Oct. 1913), a stage play in six reflective, self-consoling Alpine tableaux vivants.

Webern's music took on the character of such static dramaticovisual scenes, with pieces frequently culminating in the accumulation and amalgamation (often the developing variation) of compositional material. Fragmented melodies frequently began and ended on weak beats, settled into or emerged from ostinati, and were dynamically and texturally faded, mixed, or contrasted. Tonality became less directional, functional, or narrative than tenuous, spatial, or symbolic as fit Webern's topics and literary settings. Stein thought that "his compositions should be understood as musical visions". Oliver Korte traced Webern's Klangfelder to Mahler's "suspensions".

Expanding on Mahler's orchestration, Webern linked colorful, novel, fragile, and intimate sounds, often nearly silent at ppp, to lyrical topics: solo violin to female voice; closed or open voicings, sometimes sul ponticello, to dark or light respectively; compressed range to absence, emptiness, or loneliness; registral expansion to fulfillment, (spiritual) presence, or transcendence; celesta, harp, and glockenspiel to the celestial or ethereal; and trumpet, harp, and string harmonics to angels or heaven.

With elements of Kabarett, neoclassicism, and ironic Romanticism in Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21 (1912), Schoenberg began to distance himself from Webern's and latterly Berg's aphoristic expressionism, which provoked the 1913 Skandalkonzert. Alma recalled Schoenberg telling her and Franz Werfel "how much he was suffering under the dangerous influence of Webern", drawing on "all his strength to extricate himself from it".

1914–1924: Mid-period Lieder

During and after World War I (1914–1926) Webern worked on some fifty-six songs. He finished thirty-two, ordered into sets (in ways that do not always align with their chronology) as Opp. 12–19. Schoenberg's recent vocal music had been motivated by the idea that "absolute purity" in composition couldn't be sustained, and Webern took Schoenberg's advice to write songs as a means of composing something more substantial than aphorisms, often making earnest settings of folk, lyric, or spiritual texts. The first of these mid-period Lieder was an unfinished setting of a passage ("In einer lichten Rose ...") from Dante's Paradiso, Canto XXXI.

By comparison to melodic "atomization" in Op. 11, Walter Kolneder noted relatively "long arcs" melodic writing in Op. 12 and polyphonic part writing to "control the ... expression" in Opp. 12–16 more generally. "How much I owe to your Pierrot", Webern told Schoenberg after setting Trakl's "Abendland III" (Op. 14/iv), in which, distinctly, there was no silence until a pause at the concluding gesture. The contrapuntal procedures and nonstandard ensemble of Pierrot are both evident in Webern's Opp. 14–16.

Schoenberg "yearn[ed] for a style for large forms ... to give personal things an objective, general form." Berg, Webern, and he had indulged their shared interest in Swedenborgian mysticism and Theosophy since 1906, reading Balzac's Louis Lambert and Séraphîta and Strindberg's Till Damaskus and Jacob lutte. Gabriel, protagonist of Schoenberg's semi-autobiographical Die Jakobsleiter (1914–1922, rev. 1944) described a journey: "whether right, whether left, forwards or backwards, uphill or down – one must keep on going without asking what lies ahead or behind", which Webern interpreted as a conceptual metaphor for (twelve-tone) pitch space. Schoenberg later reflected on "how enthusiastic we were about this."

On the journey to composition with twelve tones, Webern revised many of his mid-period Lieder in the years after their apparent composition but before publication, increasingly prioritizing clarity of pitch relations, even against timbral effects, as Anne C. Shreffler and Felix Meyer described. His and Schoenberg's music had long been marked by its contrapuntal rigor, formal schemes, systematic pitch organization, and rich motivic design, all of which they found in the music of Brahms before them. Webern had written music preoccupied with the idea of dodecaphony since at least the total chromaticism of his Op. 9 bagatelles (1911) and Op. 11 cello pieces (1914).

There are twelve-tone sets with repeated notes at the start of Op. 12/i and in some bars of Op. 12/iv, in addition to many ten- and eleven-tone sets throughout Op. 12. Webern wrote to Jalowetz in 1922 about Schoenberg's lectures on "a new type of motivic work", one that "unfolds the entire development of, if I may say so, our technique (harmony, etc)". It was "almost everything that has occupied me for about ten years", Webern continued. He regarded Schoenberg's transformation of twelve-tone rows as the "solution" to their compositional concerns. In Op. 15/iv (1922), Webern first used a tone row (in the voice's opening twelve notes), charted the four basic row forms, and integrated tri- and tetrachords into the harmonic and melodic texture. He systematically used twelve-tone technique for the first time in Op. 16/iv–v (1924).

1924–1945: Formal coherence and expansion

With Schoenberg leaving Mödling in 1925 and this compositional approach at his disposal, Webern obtained more artistic autonomy and aspired to write in larger forms, expanding on the extreme concentration of expression and material in his earlier music. Until the Kinderstück for piano (1924, intended as one of a set), Klavierstück (1925), and Satz for string trio (1925), Webern had finished nothing but Lieder since a 1914 cello sonata. The 1926–1927 String Trio, Op. 20, was his first large-scale non-vocal work in more than a decade. For its 1927 publication, Webern helped Stein write an introduction emphasizing continuity with tradition:

The principle of developing a movement by variation of motives and themes is the same as with the classical masters ... [only] varied more radically here ... . One 'tone series' furnishes the basic material ... . The parts are composed in a mosaic-like manner ...

Schoenberg exploited combinatorial properties of particular tone rows, but Webern focused on prior aspects of a row's internal organization. He exploited small, invariant pitch subsets (or partitions) symmetrically derived via inversion, retrograde, or both (retrograde inversion). He understood his compositional (and precompositional) work with reference to ideas about growth, morphology, and unity that he found represented in Goethe's Urpflanze and in Goethean science more generally.

The tone row from Webern's Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30, has only two intervals (minor seconds and minor thirds) and is derived from two hexachords or three tetrachords, yielding half as many basic tone-row forms and ensuring a unity of chords and motives.

Webern's large-scale, non-vocal music in more traditional genres, written from 1926 to 1940, has been celebrated as his most rigorous and abstract music. Yet he always wrote his music and tried his new compositional procedures with concern for (or at least some latent reference to) expressivity and representation. In sketches for his Op. 22 quartet, Webern conceived of his themes in programmatic association with his experiences—as an "outlook into the highest region" or a "coolness of early spring (Anninger, first flora, primroses, anemones, pasqueflowers)", for example. Studying his compositional materials and sketches, Bailey Puffett wrote,

... [Webern] seems perhaps not ... a prodigy whose music was the result of reasoned calculations [but a composer] who used his row tables as Stravinsky used his piano, to reveal wonderful surprises ... [like] he found on his walks in the Alps.

While writing the Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24, Webern was inspired by the Sator square, which is like a twelve-tone matrix. He concluded his Weg zur Neuen Musik with this magic square.

In Webern's late cantatas and songs, George Rochberg observed, "the principles of 'the structural spatial dimension' ... join[ed] forces with lyrico-dramatic demands". Specifically in his cantatas, Bailey Puffett wrote, Webern synthesized the rigorous style of his mature instrumental works with the word painting of his Lieder on an orchestral scale. Webern qualified the apparent connection between his cantatas and Bach's as general and referred to connections between the second cantata and the music of the Franco-Flemish School. His textures became somewhat denser yet more homophonic at the surface through nonetheless contrapuntal polyphonic means. In Op. 31/i he alternated lines and points, culminating twice in twelve-note simultaneities.

At his death he left sketches for the movement of an apparent third cantata (1944–1945), first planned as a concerto, setting "Das Sonnenlicht spricht" from Jone's Lumen cycle.

Arrangements and orchestrations

In his youth (1903), Webern orchestrated five or more Schubert Lieder for an appropriately Schubertian orchestra (strings and pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns). Among these were "Der Vollmond Strahlt auf Bergeshöhn" (the Romanze from Rosamunde), "Tränenregen" (from Die schöne Müllerin), "Der Wegweiser" (from Winterreise), "Du bist die Ruh", and "Ihr Bild".

After attending Hugo Wolf's funeral and memorial concert (1903), he arranged three Lieder for a larger orchestra, adding brass, harp, and percussion to the Schubertian orchestra. He chose "Lebe wohl", "Der Knabe und das Immlein", and "Denk es, o Seele", of which only the latter was finished or wholly survived.

For Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1921, Webern arranged, among other music, the 1888 Schatz-Walzer (Treasure Waltz) of Johann Strauss II's Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) for string quartet, harmonium, and piano.

In 1924 Webern arranged Liszt's Arbeiterchor (Workers' Chorus, c. 1847–1848) for bass solo, mixed chorus, and large orchestra; thus Liszt's work was finally premièred when Webern conducted the first full-length concert of the Austrian Association of Workers Choir (13 and 14 March 1925). A review in the Wiener Zeitung (28 March 1925) read "neu in jedem Sinne, frisch, unverbraucht, durch ihn zieht die Jugend, die Freude" ("new in every respect, fresh, vital, pervaded by youth and joy"). The text (in English translation) read in part: "Let us have the adorned spades and scoops,/Come along all, who wield a sword or pen,/Come here ye, industrious, brave and strong/All who create things great or small."

In orchestrating the six-voice ricercar from Bach's Musikalisches Opfer, Webern timbrally defined the internal organization (or latent subsets) of the Bach's subject. Joseph N. Straus argued that Webern (and other modernists) effectively recomposed earlier music, "projecting motivic density" onto tradition. After more conservatively orchestrating two of Schubert's 1824 Six German Dances on UE commission in 1931, he wrote Schoenberg:

I took pains to remain on the solid ground of classical ideas of instrumentation, yet to place them into the service of our idea, i.e., as a means toward the greatest possible clarification of thought and context.

Reception, influence, and legacy

Webern's music was generally considered difficult by performers and inaccessible by listeners alike. "To the limited extent that it was regarded", Milton Babbitt observed, it represented "the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition".

Composers and performers first tended to take Webern's work, with its residual post-Romanticism and initial expressionism, in mostly formalist directions with a certain literalism, departing from Webern's own practices and preferences in extrapolating from elements of his late style. This became known as post-Webernism. A richer, more historically informed understanding of Webern's music and his performance practice began to emerge in the latter half of the 20th century as scholars, especially the Moldenhauers, sought and archived sketches, letters, lectures, recordings, and other articles of Webern's (and others') estates.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Webern's marginalization under Gleichschaltung was appreciated, but his pan-Germanism, politics, and social attitudes (especially regarding antisemitism) were not as known or often mooted. For many, like Stravinsky, Webern never compromised his artistic identity and values, but for others the matter was less simple.

Performance practice

Eric Simon ... related ... : 'Webern was obviously upset by Klemperer's sober time-beating. ... [T]o the concert master [he] said: "... the phrase there ... must be played Tiiiiiiiiiii-aaaaaaaaa." Klemperer, overhearing ... said sarcastically: "... [N]ow you probably know exactly how you have to play the passage!"' Peter Stadlen ... [described Webern]'s reaction after the performance: ... '"A high note, a low note, a note in the middle—like the music of a madman!"'

The Moldenhauers detailed Webern's reaction to Otto Klemperer's 1936 Vienna performance of his Symphony (1928), Op. 21, which Webern played on piano for Klemperer "with ... intensity and fanaticism ... passionately".

Webern notated articulations, dynamics, tempo rubato, and other musical expressions, coaching performers to adhere to these instructions but urging them to maximize expressivity through musical phrasing. This was supported by personal accounts, correspondence, and extant recordings of Schubert's Deutsche Tänze (arr. Webern) and Berg's Violin Concerto under Webern's direction. Ian Pace considered Peter Stadlen's account of Webern's coaching for Op. 27 as indicating Webern's "desire for an extremely flexible, highly diaphanous, and almost expressively overloaded approach".

This aspect of Webern's work was often overlooked in his immediate post-war reception, which was roughly coterminous with the early music revival. Stravinsky engaged with Webern and Renaissance music in his later music; his amanuensis Craft performed Webern as well as Monteverdi, Schütz, Gabrieli, and Tallis. Many musicians performed "music that is at the same time old and new", as Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople glossed it and as Richard Taruskin addressed. J. Peter Burkholder noted early and new music audience overlap.

Felix Galimir of the Galimir Quartet told The New York Times (1981): "Berg asked for enormous correctness in the performance of his music. But the moment this was achieved, he asked for a very Romanticized treatment. Webern, you know, was also terribly Romantic—as a person, and when he conducted. Everything was almost over-sentimentalized. It was entirely different from what we have been led to believe today. His music should be played very freely, very emotionally."

Contemporaries

Artists

Many artists portrayed Webern (often from life) in their work. Kokoschka (1912), Schiele (1917 and 1918), B. F. Dolbin (1920 and 1924), and Rederer (1934) made drawings of him. Oppenheimer (1908), Kokoschka (1914), and Tom von Dreger (1934) painted him. Stumpp made two lithographs of him (1927). Humplik twice sculpted him (1927 and 1928). Jone variously portrayed him (1943 lithograph, several posthumous drawings, 1945 oil painting). Rederer made a large woodcut of him (1964).

Musicians

Schoenberg admired Webern's concision, writing in the foreword to Op. 9 upon its 1924 publication: "to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath—such concentration can only be present in proportion to the absence of self-indulgence". But Berg joked about Webern's brevity. Hendrik Andriessen found Webern's music "pitiful" in this regard. In their second (1925) Abbruch self-parody, Anbruch editors jested that "Webern's" (Mahler's) "extensive" Symphony of a Thousand had to be abbreviated.

Felix Khuner remembered Webern was "just as revolutionary" as Schoenberg. In 1927, Hans Mersmann wrote that "Webern's music shows the frontiers and ... limits of a development which tried to outgrow Schoenberg's work."

Identifying with Webern as a "solitary soul" amid 1940s wartime fascism, Luigi Dallapiccola independently and somewhat singularly found inspiration especially in Webern's lesser-known mid-period Lieder, blending its ethereal qualities and Viennese expressionism with bel canto. Stunned by Webern's Op. 24 at its 1935 ISCM festival world première under Jalowetz in Prague, Dallapiccola's impression was of unsurpassable "aesthetic and stylistic unity". He dedicated Sex carmina alcaei "with humility and devotion" to Webern, who he met in 1942 through Schlee, coming away surprised at Webern's emphasis on "our great Central European tradition." Dallapiccola's 1953 Goethe-lieder especially recall Webern's Op. 16 in style.

In 1947, Schoenberg remembered and stood firm with Berg and Webern despite rumors of the latter's having "fallen into the Nazi trap": "... [F]orget all that might have ... divided us. For there remains for our future what could only have begun to be realized posthumously: One will have to consider us three—Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern—as a unity, a oneness, because we believed in ideals ... with intensity and selfless devotion; nor would we ever have been deterred from them, even if those who tried might have succeeded in confounding us." For Krasner this put "'Vienna's Three Modern Classicists' into historical perspective". He summarized it as "what bound us together was our idealism."

1947–1950s: (Re)discovery and post-Webernism

Webern's death should be a day of mourning for any receptive musician. We must hail ... this great ... a real hero. Doomed to ... failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference he ... kept on cutting ... dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had ... perfect knowledge.

Stravinsky lauded Webern in die Reihe

After World War II, there was unprecedented engagement with Webern's music. It came to represent a universally or generally valid, systematic, and compellingly logical model of new composition, especially at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. René Leibowitz performed, promulgated, and published Schoenberg et son école; Adorno, Herbert Eimert, Scherchen, and others contributed. Composers and students listened in a quasi-religious trance to Peter Stadlen's 1948 Op. 27 performance.

Webern's gradual innovations in schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and melodic contour; his generalization of imitative techniques such as canon and fugue; and his inclination toward athematicism, abstraction, and lyricism variously informed and oriented European and Canadian, typically serial or avant-garde composers (e.g., Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Pousseur, Ligeti, Sylvano Bussotti, Bruno Maderna, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Barbara Pentland). Eimert and Stockhausen devoted a special issue of die Reihe to Webern's œuvre in 1955. UE published his lectures in 1960.

In the US, Babbitt and initially Rochberg found more in Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice. Elliott Carter's and Aaron Copland's critical ambivalence was marked by a certain enthusiasm and fascination nonetheless. Craft fruitfully reintroduced Stravinsky to Webern's music, without which Stravinsky's late works would have taken different shape. Stravinsky staked his contract with Columbia Records to see Webern's then known music first both recorded and widely distributed. Stravinsky lauded Webern's "not yet canonized art" in 1959.

Among the New York School, John Cage and Morton Feldman first met in Carnegie Hall's lobby, ecstatic after a performance of Op. 21 by Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic. They cited the effect of its sound on their music. They later sung the praises of Christian Wolff as "our Webern".

Gottfried Michael Koenig suggested some early interest in Webern's music may have been that its concision and apparent simplicity facilitated didactic musical analysis. Robert Beyer criticized serial approaches to Webern's music as reductive, narrowly focused more on Webern's procedures than his music while neglecting timbre in their typical selection of Opp. 27–28. Webern's music sounded like "a Mondrian canvas", "crude and unfinished", to Karel Goeyvaerts. Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski criticized some Darmstadt music as "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing" (Darmstädter Tagblatt, 1959); a Der Kurier article of his was headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at".

1950s onward: Beyond (late) Webern

[H]ermetic constructivism seems infused with intense emotion, ... diffused across the ... surface of the music. Gone is the mono-directional thrust of Classical and Romantic music; in its place a world of rotations and reflections, opening myriad paths for the listener to trace through textures of luminous clarity yet beguiling ambiguity.

George Benjamin described Webern's Op. 21. Many noted floating, spatial, static, or suspended qualities in some of Webern's music. Johnson noted spatial metaphors.

Through late 1950s onward, Webern's work reached musicians as far removed as Frank Zappa, yet many post-war European musicians and scholars had already begun to look beyond as much as back at Webern in his context. Nono advocated for a more humanistic understanding of Webern's music.

Adorno lectured that in the prevailing climate "artists like Berg or Webern would hardly be able to make it" ("The Aging of the New Music", 1954). Against the "static idea of music" and "total rationalization" of the "pointillist constructivists," he advocated for more subjectivity, citing Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1911), in which Wassily Kandinsky wrote: "Schoenberg's [expressionist] music leads us to where musical experience is a matter not of the ear, but of the soul—and from this point begins the music of the future."

In the 1960s, many began to describe Webern and his like as a "dead end". Rochberg felt "Webern's music leaves his followers no new, unexplored territory." Stravinsky judged Webern "too original ... too purely himself. ... [T]he entire world had to imitate him [and] fail; of course it will blame Webern"; he blamed post-Webernism: "[T]he music now being charged to his name can neither diminish his strength nor stale his perfection."

In Votre Faust (1960–1968), Pousseur quoted and his protagonist Henri analyzed Webern's Op. 31. Yet there were already several elements of late or postmodernism (e.g., eclecticism of historical styles, mobile form, polyvalent roles). This coincided with a wider rapprochement with Berg, whose example Pousseur cited, from whose music he also quoted, and whose writings he translated into French in the 1950s. Boulez was "thrilled" by Berg's "universe ... never completed, always in expansion—a world so ... inexhaustible," referring to the rigorously organized, only partly twelve-tone Chamber Concerto.

Engaging with Webern's atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism, both Ferneyhough and Lachenmann expanded upon and went further than Webern in attention to the smallest of details and the use of ever more radically extended techniques. Ferneyhough's 1967 Sonatas for string quartet included atonal sections much in the style of Webern's Op. 9, yet more intensely sustained. In a comparison to his own 1969 Air, Lachenmann wrote of "a melody made of a single note ... in the viola part" of Webern's Op. 10/iv (mm. 2–4) amid "the mere ruins of the traditional linguistic context," observing that "the pure tone, now living in tonal exile, has in this new context no aesthetic advantage over pure noise" ("Hearing [Hören] is Defenseless—without Listening [Hören]", 1985).

Eastern Europe

In Eastern Europe, the Second Viennese School's music represented a professionally dangerous but sometimes exciting or inspiring alternative to socialist realism. Their influence on composers behind the Iron Curtain was mediated by anti-fascist and -German sentiment as well as anti-formalist cultural policies and Cold War separation. Ligeti lamented the separation and left in 1956, noting that "after Bartók hardly any grass could grow".

Eastern Bloc

Webern's influence predominated after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, bearing on Pál Kadosa, Endre Szervánszky, and György Kurtág. Among Czechs, Pavel Blatný attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and wrote music with serial techniques in the late 1960s. He returned to tonality in Brno and was rewarded. Marek Kopelent discovered the Second Viennese as an editor and was particularly taken by Webern. Kopelent was blacklisted for his music and despaired, unable to attend international performances of his work.

Soviet Russia

Official Soviet Russian condemnation eased in the post-Stalinist Khrushchev Thaw with the rehabilitation of some affected by the Zhdanov Doctrine. Sheet music and recordings entered via journalists, friends, family (e.g., from Nicolas to Sergei Slonimsky), and especially composers and musicians (e.g., Igor Blazhkov, Gérard Frémy, Alexei Lubimov, Maria Yudina), who traveled more. Stationed in Zossen as a military band arranger (1955–1958), Yuri Kholopov risked arrest for obtaining scores in West Berlin and from the Leipzig office of Schott Music.

Philip Herschkowitz, poverty-stricken, taught privately in Moscow with cautious emphasis on Beethoven and the tradition from which Webern emerged. His pupil Nikolai Karetnikov taped Glenn Gould's 1957 Moscow Conservatory performance of Webern's Op. 27. In practice like that of Webern, Karetnikov derived the tone row of his Symphony No. 4 from motives as small as two notes related by semitone.

In Soviet Music, Marcel Rubin criticized "Webern and His Followers" (1959), by contrast to Berg and Schoenberg, for going too far. Alfred Schnittke complained in an open letter (1961) of composers' restricted education. Through Grigory Shneyerson's anti-formalist On Music Living and Dead (1960) and Johannes Paul Thilman's anti-modernist "On the Dodecaphonic Method of Composition" (1958), many (e.g., Eduard Artemyev, Victor Ekimovsky, Vladimir Martynov, Boris Tischenko) ironically learned more about what had been and even was still forbidden. Kruschchev warned, "dodecaphonic music, music of noises ... this cacophonic music we totally reject. Our people cannot include such trash".

Through Andrei Volkonsky, Lydia Davydova recalled, Schoenberg's and Webern's music came to Russia alongside Renaissance and early Baroque music. Tischenko remembered that in the 1960s, Volkonsky "was the first swallow of the avant-garde. [T]hose who came after him ... already followed in his tracks. I consider [him] the discoverer." Edison Denisov described the 1960s as his "second conservatory", crediting Volkonsky not only for introducing Webern, but also Gesualdo.

This tolerance did not survive the Brezhnev Stagnation. Volkonsky emigrated in 1973, Herschkowitz in 1987, and of Khrennikov's Seven (1979), Denisov, Elena Firsova, Sofia Gubaidulina, Dmitri Smirnov, and Viktor Suslin eventually emigrated.

Dance

Many choreographers set Webern's music to dance. Martha Graham and George Balanchine choreographed several works in Episodes I and II respectively (1959) as a New York City Ballet "novelty". John Cranko set Opus 1 (1965) to Webern's Passacaglia, Op. 1. Rudi van Dantzig choreographed Webern's music in Ogenblikken (1968) and Antwoord gevend (1980); Glen Tetley in Praeludium (1978) and Contredanses (1979); Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker alongside that of Beethoven and Schnittke in Erts (1992); and Trisha Brown in Twelve Ton Rose (1996). Jiří Kylián set only Webern's music in No More Play (1988) and Sweet Dreams (1990), more often pairing it with that of other composers in several ballets (1984–1995).

Since the 1980s: Reappraisals and historiography

Webern's legacy, bitterly contested in the "serial wars", remained subject to polemic vicissitudes. Musicologists quarreled amid the "Restoration of the 1980s", as Martin Kaltenecker termed a paradigm shift from structure to perception within musicological discourse. Charles Rosen scorned "historical criticism ... avoiding any serious engagement with a work or style ... one happens not to like". Andreas Holzer warned of "post-factual tendencies". Pamela M. Potter advised considering "the complexity of ... day-to-day existence" under Nazism, partly in considering the relevance of composers' politics to their canonic status. Meanwhile Allen Forte and Bailey Puffett formally analyzed Webern's atonal and twelve-tone œuvres respectively.

Tim Page noted less formalist readings of Webern's work at his 1983 birth centenary. The occasion "went almost unmarked", Glenn Watkins observed, "a fate hardly imaginable for Berg [on his] 1985 [centenary]". After Webern's mid-century "meteoric ascension and ultimate canonization", Watkins described "quick shifts of interest" tapering to neglect. Webern's music was established but infrequent in standard (repeating) orchestral repertoire. His œuvre was played at the Venice Festival of Contemporary Music (1983), Juilliard (1995), and the Vienna Festival (2004), echoing six international festivals in his name (1962–1978). In some obscurity (1941 or 1942), Webern had been quietly sure that "in the future even the postman will whistle my melodies!" But many did not acquire such an aesthetic taste. He remained polarizing and provocative.

Noting this aspect of his reception, Johnson described Webern's "almost unique position in the canon of Western composers". Christian Thorau argued Webern's innovations impeded his "exoterischen Kanonisierung". By contrast to the "concert canon", Shreffler considered Webern's better standing in a "separate canon" of technical and formal innovation. Burkholder argued that music of the "historicist tradition", including Webern's, was secure in "a musical museum", "for that is what the concert hall has become". Mark Berry described Webern, already among Boulez's "big five", as one of five "canonical pillars of classic historical early twentieth-century modernism". David H. Miller suggested Webern "achieved a certain kind of acceptance and canonization".

Taruskin prioritized audience reception, not "musical utopianism". He excoriated the Second Viennese School's "idiosyncratic view of the past", linking Webern and Adler to Eduard Hanslick and "neo-Hegelian" Franz Brendel; he criticized historical determinism, "the natural ally of totalitarian politics." Martin Scherzinger noted that Taruskin's criticisms sought "active complicity with undesirable politics". Noted for his polemicism and revisionism, Taruskin described his "dubious reputation" on Webern and New Music and was praised and criticized by many. For Franklin Cox, Taruskin was an unreliable historian who opposed the Second Viennese School's "progressivist historicist" emancipation of the dissonance with a "reactionary historicist" ideology of "tonal restoration".

Pascal Decroupet observed an unquestioned "canon of polarizations" in prior histories. Johnson noted the "co-existence and interaction of diverse stylistic practices" with "remarkable similarities", challenging "conservative and progressive" campism and decentering musicology's technical periodizations via the longue durée of global modernity. Thus he ventured continuity between the "broken homeland" of Webern's Opp. 12–18 and the "broken pastoral" of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony; between Webern's "evanescent images of musical fullness" and the brief, fragmentary nature of Chopin's Op. 28, which Schumann likened to "ruins". Building on Shreffler's and Felix Meyer's sketch studies as institutions acquired and made the Moldenhauers' estate accessible, Johnson worked toward a hermeneutics of Webern's (and Mahler's) music.

Recordings by Webern

• Webern Conducts: Berg – Violin Concerto. Continuum. 1991 [1936]. ASIN B000003XHN. OCLC 25348107. SBT 1004.
• The Complete Works of Anton Webern. CBS Records. 1978. ASIN B000002707. OCLC 612743015.
  • Webern conducts his arrangement of Schubert's German Dances

References

Bibliography

• Adlington, Robert. 2019. "Modernism: the people's music?". The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, eds. and intro. Björn Heile and Charles Wilson, 216–238. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-315-61329-1 (ebk). ISBN 978-1-4724-7040-9 (hbk).
• Allen-Russell, Ann van. 2023. "'Not like Pyrates': Borrowing, Copyright and Creativity in the Eighteenth Century". Music Borrowing and Copyright Law: A Genre-by-Genre Analysis, eds. and intro. Enrico Bonadio and Chen Zhu, fwd. Paul J. Heald, 191–208. Oxford: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-50994-940-3 (ePDF). ISBN 978-1-50994-939-7 (ePub). ISBN 978-1-50994-938-0 (hbk).
• Adamson, Walter L. 2003. "Modernism in art, literature and political theory". The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, eds. and intro. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy, 412–430. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56354-3.
• Adorno, Theodor. 1984. Musikalische Schriften, Vol. 5. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 18. Suhrkamp Verlag ISBN 978-3-518-57696-0.
• Adorno, Theodor. 1999. Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-3558-2.
• Adorno, Theodor. 2004. Aesthetic Theory. Impacts Series. A&C Black. ISBN 978-0-8264-7691-3.
• Adorno, Theodor W. and Alban Berg. 2005. Correspondence 1925–1935, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. ISBN 978-0-7456-2336-8. (Trans. of Briefwechsel 1925–1935. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997.)
• Ahrend, Thomas and Stefan Münnich. 2018. "Anton Webern." In Oxford Bibliographies Online in Music. 2018. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/obo/9780199757824-0238 (accessed 1 Oct. 2023).
• Alegant, Brian. 2010. The Twelve-tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola. Eastman Studies in Music, sen. ed. Ralph P. Locke. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-325-6 (hbk).
• Andriessen, Louis. 2002. "Lectures for Young Composers". The Music of Louis Andriessen, ed. and pref. Maja Trochimczyk, gen. intro. Joseph Auner, 131–160. Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture Series. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-76966-5.
• Andriessen, Louis and Maja Trochimczyk. 2002. "Dialog 1: Learning". The Music of Louis Andriessen, ed. and pref. Maja Trochimczyk, gen. intro. Joseph Auner, 3–30. Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture Series. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-76966-5.
• Antokoletz, Elliott. 2014. A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic–Analytical Context. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-88187-6 (hbk).
• Antokoletz, Elliott, and Paolo Susanni. 2011. Béla Bartók: A Research and Information Guide, 3rd ed. New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-88889-6.
• Arnold, Ben (ed.). 2002. The Liszt Companion. Jazz Companions Series. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-30689-1 (accessed 9 Aug. 2014).
• Arnold Schönberg Center. n.d. "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra Op. 36". Werk- und Quellendatenbank: Werke mit Opuszahlen (op. 26–50c). Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center (accessed 9 Aug. 2014).
• Auner, Joseph. 1999. "The Second Viennese School as a Historical Concept." In Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, 1–36. Westport and London: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-29604-8.
• Auner, Joseph. 2003. A Schoenberg Reader. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12712-6.
• Babbitt, Milton. 2003. "The Composer as Specialist." In The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles, with Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus, 48–54. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-15540-1.
• Bailey Puffett, Kathryn. 2001. "Webern, Anton." Grove Music Online (accessed 9 Oct. 2022).
• Bailey Puffett, Kathryn. 1998. The Life of Webern. Musical Lives. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-57336-8 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-521-57566-9 (pbk).
• Bailey Puffett, Kathryn. 1997. "Berg's aphoristic pieces". The Cambridge Companion to Berg, ed. Anthony Pople, 83–110. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-82807-9.
• Bailey Puffett, Kathryn. 1996. "Webern's Row Tables". Webern Studies, ed. and intro. Kathryn Bailey Puffett, 170–228. Cambridge Composer Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47526-6 (hbk).
• Bailey Puffett, Kathryn. 1991. The Twelve-Note Music of Anton Webern: Old Forms in a New Language. Music in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-39088-0 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-521-54796-3 (pbk).
• Bailey Puffett, Kathryn and Barbara Schingnitz. 2020. Three Men of Letters: Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, 1906-1921, pref. and trans. Kathryn Bailey Puffett and Barbara Schingnitz. Vienna: Hollitzer. ISBN 978-3-99012-777-3.
• Baragwanath, Nicholas. 1999. "Alban Berg, Richard Wagner, and Leitmotivs of Symmetry." 19th-century Music 23(1):62–83.
• Ballance, Joshua. "A Computational Corpus Study of Harmony in the Music of Anton Webern". PhD diss. Oxford: University of Oxford. 2023.
• Baranello, Micaela. 2021. The Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna. Oakland: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-97654-2 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-520-37912-1 (hbk).
• Barker, Paul. 2004. Composing for Voice: A Guide for Composers, Singers, and Teachers. New York: Routledge. Reprinted 2014. ISBN 978-1-136-72337-7.
• Barthel-Calvet, Anne-Sylvie and Christopher Brent Murray. 2023. "Revisiting the Old Stories of New Music". Introduction: Revisiting the Historiography of Postwar Avant-Garde Music, eds. Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet and Christopher Brent Murray, 1–12. Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-315-10816-2 (ebk). ISBN 978-1-138-09120-7 (hbk). ISBN 978-1-032-31004-6 (pbk). doi:10.4324/9781315108162-1.
• Batstone, Leah. 2023. Mahler's Nietzsche: Politics and Philosophy in the Wunderhorn Symphonies. Woodbridge: Boydell. ISBN 978-1-83765-001-9 (ePDF). ISBN 978-1-83765-001-9 (hbk).
• Beller, Steven. 2006. A Concise History of Austria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-98994-0.
• Berg, Alban. 1957. Écrits, ed. and trans. Henri Pousseur. Monaco: Editions du Rocher. Enlarged edition, ed. Dominique Jameaux et al., Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1985.
• Berg, Alban. 2014. Pro Mundo–Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg, trans., ed., and cmts. Bryan R. Simms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-976406-8. doi:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199764068.001.0001.
• Berger, Peter. 2003. "The League of Nations and Interwar Austria: Critical Assessment of a Partnership in Economic Reconstruction". The Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Era in Austria: A Reassessment, eds. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Alexander Lassner, 73–92. Vol. 11, Contemporary Austrian Studies. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7658-0970-4 (pbk).
• Berry, Mark. 2008. "Arnold Schoenberg's 'Biblical Way': From 'Die Jakobsleiter' to 'Moses und Aron'." Music & Letters 89(1):84–108.
• Berry, Mark. 2014. "Arnold Schoenberg's 'Biblical Way': Towards Moses und Aron". In After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from Parsifal to Nono, 64–98. Woodbridge: Boydell. ISBN 978-1-84383-968-2 (hbk). Revision of "Arnold Schoenberg's 'Biblical Way': From 'Die Jakobsleiter' to 'Moses und Aron'." Music & Letters 89(1):84–108.
• Berry, Mark. 2019. Arnold Schoenberg. Critical Lives Series. London: Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-78914-087-3 (pbk).
• Bolcom, William. 2004. "The End of the Mannerist Century." In The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, Part I. Reception & Politics, ed. Arved Mark Ashby, 46–53. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-143-6.
• Bolcom, William. 2016. "The End of the Mannerist Century, Appendix: Correspondence between Anthony Stadlen (nephew of Peter Stadlen) and William Bolcom, Feb. 2012". William Bolcom's blog (3 March 2016, accessed 18 Jan. 2023).
• Bols, Ingrid M. 2020. "Programming choices and national culture: the repertoires and canons of French and British Symphony Orchestras (1967–2019)". PhD diss. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. doi:10.5525/gla.thesis.82165.
• Born, Georgina. 1995. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-08507-7 (hbk).
• Boss, Jack. 2015. "'Away With Motivic Working?' Not So Fast: Motivic Processes in Schoenberg's Op. 11, No. 3". Music Theory Online 21(3).
• Botstein, Leon. 2010. "Alban Berg and the Memory of Modernism." In Alban Berg and His World, ed. Christopher Hailey, 299–344. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-14855-7 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-691-14856-4 (pbk).
• Bregegere, Andre. 2014. "L'harmonie revée: An Analysis of Henri Pousseur's Votre Faust and Les litanies d'Icare". PhD diss. New York: City University of New York.
• Bremser, Martha. 1999. Fifty Contemporary Choreographers, intro. Deborah Jowitt. London and New York: Routledge. First edition. ISBN 978-0-203-97797-2 (ebook). ISBN 978-0-415-10363-3 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-415-10364-0 (pbk).
• Brinkmann, Reinhold. 2000. "Schoenberg's Quartets and the Viennese Tradition." In Music of My Future: The Schoenberg Quartets and Trio, eds. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff, 9-12. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-9640317-1-5.
• Broué, Pierre. 1971. The German Revolution 1917–1923, trans. John Archer, eds. Ian Birchall and Brian Pearce, intro. Eric D. Weitz. Vol. 5, Historical Materialism Series. Reprinted, Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2006. ISBN 978-1-931859-32-5 (pbk).
• Brown, Julie. 2014. Schoenberg and Redemption. New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism Series, gen. eds. Jeffrey Kallberg, Anthony Newcomb, and Ruth Solie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-55035-2 (hbk).
• Brown, Julie. 2011. "Understanding Schoenberg as Christ". The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher, 117–162. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-199-35409-2.
• Brown, Julie. 1998. "[Review:] Anne C. Shreffler's Webern and the Lyric Impulse: Songs and Fragments on Poems of Georg Trakl and Kathryn Bailey's Webern Studies". Music and Letters 79(1):144–150. doi:10.1093/ml/79.1.144.
• Broyles, Michael. 2004. Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10045-7 (hbk).
• Bukey, Evan Burr. 2019. Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-350-13262-7 (ebk).
• Bukey, Evan Burr. 2000. Hitler's Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938–1945. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-2516-7 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-8078-5363-4 (pbk).
• Burkholder, J. Peter. 2006. "The Twentieth Century and the Orchestra as Museum". The Orchestra: A Collection of 23 Essays on Its Origins and Transformations, ed. and intro. Joan Peyser, 409–432. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation. Reprint from original in 1986 by Charles Scribners Sons. ISBN 978-1-423-41026-3.
• Burkholder, J. Peter. 1983. "Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years". The Journal of Musicology 2(2):115–134. doi:10.2307/763802.
• Busoni, Ferruccio. 1987. Ferruccio Busoni: Selected Letters, ed., trans., and intro. Antony Beaumont. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Clampitt, David. 2009. "Webern's Music for String Quartet." In Intimate Voices: The Twentieth-Century String Quartet, Vol. 1: From Debussy to Villa-Lobos, ed. Evan Jones, 195–220. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-229-7.
• Chen, Stephanie Hui-Shan. 2006. Webern's Reception in the Post-War Era. Self-published on author's web page (accessed 4 July 2018).
• Christensen, Jean Marie. 1979. "Arnold Schoenberg's Oratorio Die Jakobsleiter." PhD diss. Los Angeles: University of California Los Angeles.
• Clark, Duncan. 2001. "Anton Webern." In Classical Music: The Rough Guide, ed. Joe Staines, 572–575. Rough Guides. London: Rough Guides Ltd. ISBN 978-1-85828-721-8.
• Clements, Andrew. 2022. "The Complete Music of Anton Webern review – hugely influential recordings of jewel-like works". The Guardian.com (6 Jan., accessed 18 Sept. 2022).
• Cook, Nicholas and Anthony Pople, eds. 2004. "The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music". The Cambridge History of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52166-256-7.
• Cook, Nicholas. 2017. "Inventing Tradition: Webern's Piano Variations in Early Recordings". Music Analysis 36:163–215. doi:10.1111/musa.12094.
• Cox, Franklin. 2011. "Review: Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music, Part 1". SEARCH: Journal for New Music and Culture, 9 (Winter 2012)
• Crawford, Caroline and Felix Khuner. 1996. Felix Khuner: A Violinist's Journey from Vienna's Kolisch Quartet to the San Francisco Symphony and Opera Orchestras, intro. Tom Heimberg. Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library. Berkeley: University of California.
• Czerwińska-Schupp, Ewa. 2016. Otto Bauer (1881–1938): Thinker and Politician, trans. Maciej Żurowski. Vol. 121, Historical Materialism Book Series. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2016. ISBN 978-90-04-32583-8 (ebk). ISBN 978-90-04-31573-0 (hbk). Translation of Otto Bauer: Studien zur social-politischen Philosophie, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005.
• Dallapiccola, Luigi. 1972. "Meeting with Anton Webern (Pages from a Diary)," trans. John C. G. Waterhouse. Tempo 99:2–7. doi:10.1017/S0040298200056485.
• Decroupet, Pascal. 2023. "Continuity in the Creative Auto-Genealogies of Boulez, Stockhausen, Pousseur, and Nono", trans. Christopher Brent Murray. Revisiting the Historiography of Postwar Avant-Garde Music, eds. and intro. Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet and Christopher Brent Murray, 37–63. Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-315-10816-2 (ebk). ISBN 978-1-138-09120-7 (hbk). ISBN 978-1-032-31004-6 (pbk). doi:10.4324/9781315108162-3.
• Doctor, Jennifer. 1999. The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation's Tastes.
• Dolan, Emily and Alexander Rehding, eds. 2021. The Oxford Handbook of Timbre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-063725-5 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-19-063722-4 (hbk).
• Ehman, Caroline. 2013. "Reimagining Faust in Postmodern Opera". PhD diss. Rochester: Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.
• Eichner, Barbara. 2012. History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity, 1848–1914. Music in Society and Culture 1. Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-754-1.
• Elliott, Martha. 2007. Singing in Style: A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10932-0.
• Emmery, Laura. 2020. Compositional Process in Elliott Carter's String Quartets: A Study in Sketches. Ashgate Studies in Theory and Analysis of Music After 1900. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-367-15132-4 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-429-05525-6 (ebk).
• Erwin, Max Owen. 2019. "Ghosts in the Machine: The Making of European Serialism, 1945–1955". PhD thesis. Leeds: University of Leeds School of Music.
• Erwin, Max Owen. 2020. "Who is Buried in Webern's Tomb? Orientations in the Reception of Serial Music from Messiaen to Stockhausen." Perspectives of New Music 58(2):93–128.
• Erwin, Max Owen. 2021. "An Apprenticeship and Its Stocktakings: Leibowitz, Boulez, Messiaen, and the Discourse and Practice of New Music." Twentieth-Century Music 18(1):71–93.
• Ewell, Philip A. 2013. "Russian Pitch-Class Set Analysis and the Music of Webern." Gamut: Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, 6(1):219–276
• Feldman, Morton. 2000. Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. and intro. BH Friedman, afterword Frank O'Hara. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change. ISBN 978-1-878972-31-6.
• Fitch, Fabrice. 2000. [Review:] Webern Complete Edition. The Gramophone. Vol. 78: 74 (accessed 18 Sept. 2022).(subscription required)
• Fontana, Carlo. 2023. Sarà l'avventura: Una vita per il teatro. Milan: il Saggiatore. ISBN 979-1-259-81174-5 (ebk).
• Foreman, Lewis. 1991. "Webern, the BBC and the Berg Violin Concerto". Tempo 178:2–10. doi:10.1017/S0040298200013954.
• Forte, Allen. 1986. "Letter to the Editor in Reply to Richard Taruskin from Allen Forte: Making Stravinsky Soup and Other Epistemusicological Pursuits: A Hymenopteran Response". Music Analysis 5(2–3): 321–337.(subscription required)
• Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. 2007. Music Divided: Bartók's Legacy in Cold War Culture, Vol. 7. Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24965-3.
• Frandzel, Benjamin. 2002. "A Canon Across Time: György Kurtág's Officium Breve in memoriam Andreae Szervánszky, op. 28". Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 43(3–4):383–396.(subscription required)
• Fraser, [Catherine] Stacey. 2003. "Webern and Mozart. Two of a Kind?" [Lecture and Recital]. PhD thesis. San Diego: University of California, San Diego.
• Frigyesi, Judith. 1998. Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520924-58-1
• Fulbrook, Mary. 2011. A History of Germany 1918–2008: The Divided Nation, 3rd ed. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-5972-5
• Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-823541-5 (hbk).
• Goeyvaerts, Karel. 1994. "Paris: Darmstadt 1947–1956: Excerpt from the Autobiographical Portrait", trans. Patrick Daly, Peter Vosch, and Roger Janssens. Revue belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 48 (The Artistic Legacy of Karel Goeyvaerts. A Collection of Essays): 35–54.
• Grant, M. J. 2001. Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe. Music in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-61992-9.
• Greissle-Schönberg, Arnold. 2003a. "Chapter Four: Georg (Görgi) Schönberg: My Favorite Uncle". Arnold Schönberg's European Family website (accessed 2 Aug. 2014).
• Greissle-Schönberg, Arnold. 2003b. "Chapter Five: 1938: Austria Vanishes". Arnold Schönberg's European Family website (accessed 2 Aug. 2014).
• Hába, Alois. 1934. "Schönberg und die weiteren möglichkeiten der musikentwicklung." In Arnold Schönberg zum 60. Geburtstag, 13. September 1934, ed. Hildegard Jone, 15–17. Vienna: Universal Edition.
• Haimo, Ethan. 2006. Schoenberg's Transformation of Musical Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86542-5.
• Haimo, Ethan. 2010. "The Rise and Fall of Radical Athematicism". The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, eds. Joseph Auner and Jennifer Shaw, 94–107. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-82807-9.
• Hamao, Fusako. 2011. "Redating Schoenberg's Announcement of the Twelve-Tone Method: A Study of Recollections." Gamut: Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, 4(1):231–298
• Hayes, Aaron. 2021. Concepts of Time in Post-War European Music. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-20096-0 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-367-19192-4 (hbk).
• Hayes, Malcolm. 1995. Anton von Webern. London: Phaidon Press. ISBN 978-0-7148-3157-2.
• Hochman, Erin R. 2016. Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1-5017-0444-4.
• Ho, Allan B. and Dmitry Feofanov. 2011, rev 2014. The Shostakovich Wars.
• Hodin, J. P. 1966. Oskar Kokoschka, The Artist and His Time: A Biographical Study. London: Cory, Adams, & Mackay Ltd. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society.
• Holzer, Andreas. 2019. "Darmstadt and the 'Cold War': A Contribution to the Elucidation of the Spread of 'Postfactual' Tendencies in Musicology." In Anklaenge, Wiener Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, 2018: Die Musikgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts im universitären Unterricht, eds. Christian Glanz and Nikolaus Urbanek, 293–308. Vienna: Hollitzer. ISBN 978-3-99012-617-2. doi:10.21939/imi_anklaenge2018.
• Iddon, Martin. 2013. New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-03329-0.
• Inbal, Eliahu. 2022. Eliahu INBAL talks on Bruckner and Webern. Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. YouTube. (11 Dec. 2022, accessed 7 June 2023).
• Jackson, Roland John. 2005. Performance Practice: A Dictionary-guide for Musicians. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-94139-6
• Jarman, Douglas. 2017. "'Frisch, Fromm, Fröhlich, Frei': The Deutscher Turnerbund and the Berg Violin Concerto." Musicologica Austriaca: Journal for Austrian Music Studies (accessed 2 Nov. 2022).
• Jay, Martin. 1986. Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-06073-8
• Jensen, EF. 1989. "Webern and Giovanni Segantini's Trittico della natura." The Musical Times 130(1751), 11–15. doi:10.2307/966096.
• Johnson, Julian. 2017. "The Particularity of the Moment". Rethinking Mahler, trans. Jeremy Barham, 219–236. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-931609-0 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-19-931610-6 (pbk).
• Johnson, Julian. 2015. Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-023327-3. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190233273.001.0001.
• Johnson, Julian. 2006. "Berg's Operas and the Politics of Subjectivity". Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich, ed. Nikolaus Bacht, 211–236. Hants: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7546-5521-3 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-19-931610-6 (pbk).
• Johnson, Julian. 2006. "Anton Webern, the Social Democratic Kunstelle and Musical Modernism". Austrian Studies 14(1):197–213.
• Johnson, Julian. 1999. Webern and the Transformation of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-66149-2.
• Johnson, Julian. 1998. "The Nature of Abstraction: Analysis and the Webern Myth". Music Analysis 17(3):267–280. doi:10.2307/854416.
• Johnson, Julian. 1997. "Webern's 'Middle Period': Body of the Mother or Law of the Father?". repercussions. 6(1):61–108.
• Johnson, Victoria. 2015. "Notes from the Underground: Explorations of Dissent in the Music of Czech-born Composers Marek Kopelent and Petr Kotík". MA thesis. Phoenix: Arizona State University.
• Kaltenecker, Martin. 2023. "Recent Histories of Twentieth-Century Music and the Historiographical Tradition", trans. Christopher Brent Murray. Revisiting the Historiography of Postwar Avant-Garde Music, eds. and intro. Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet and Christopher Brent Murray, 13–36. Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-315-10816-2 (ebk). ISBN 978-1-138-09120-7 (hbk). ISBN 978-1-032-31004-6 (pbk). doi:10.4324/9781315108162-2.
• Kapp, Reinhard. 1999. "Weberns Politik". Anton Webern: Persönlichkeit zwischen Kunst und Politik (Symposium Report), eds. Stefan Jena, Brigitte Grünauer, and Hartmut Krones, intro. Hartmut Krones, 51–86. Wiener Schriften zur Stilkunde und Aufführungspraxis. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. ISBN 978-3-205-99072-7.
• Kater, Michael. 1999. Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509924-9.
• Kater, Michael. 1997. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509620-0.
• Kim, David Hyun-Su. 2012. "The Brahmsian Hairpin." 19th-century Music. 36(1):46–57. doi:10.1525/ncm.2012.36.1.046.
• Kirk, Tom. 2003. "Fascism and Austrofascism". The Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Era in Austria: A Reassessment, eds. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Alexander Lassner, 10–31. Vol. 11, Contemporary Austrian Studies. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7658-0970-4 (pbk).
• Kramer, Jonathan D. 2016. Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening, ed. Robert Carl. New York and London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-5013-0602-0 (hbk). ISBN 978-1-5013-0601-3 (pbk).
• Kolneder, Walter. 1968. Anton Webern: An Introduction to His Works. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Trans. Humphrey Searle. (Trans. of Anton Webern, Einführung in Werk und Stil. Rodenkirchen: P. J. Tonger, 1961.) ISBN 978-0-520-34715-1.
• Korstvedt, Benjamin M. 2004. "Bruckner editions: the revolution revisited". The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, ed. John Williamson, 121–137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-00878-5.
• Kosman, Joshua. 2014. "UC Music Historian Richard Taruskin Relishes Provocateur Role". SFGate webzine (31 May). San Francisco Chronicle website
• Kozbelt, Aaron. 2016. "Process, Self-evaluation and Lifespan Creativity Trajectories in Eminent Composers". The Act of Musical Composition: Studies in the Creative Process, ed. and pref. Dave Collins, 27–52. SEMPRE Studies in The Psychology of Music, eds. and series pref. Graham Welch, Adam Ockelford, and Ian Cross. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-4094-3425-2 (hbk). Reprint from original in 2012 by Asghate.
• Krasner, Louis, and Don C. Seibert. "Some Memories of Anton Webern, the Berg Concerto, and Vienna in the 1930s." Fanfare (Nov.–Dec. 1987): 335–347(subscription required)
• Krenek, Ernst. 1998. Im Atem der Zeit: Erinnerungen an die Moderne, trans. Friedrich Saathen and Sabine Schulte. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. ISBN 978-3-455-11170-5 (hbk).
• Krones, Hartmut. 1999. "Vorwort". Anton Webern: Persönlichkeit zwischen Kunst und Politik (Symposium Report), eds. Stefan Jena, Brigitte Grünauer, and Hartmut Krones, 7–8. Wiener Schriften zur Stilkunde und Aufführungspraxis. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. ISBN 978-3-205-99072-7.
• Krones, Hartmut, Helmut Loos and Klaus-Peter Koc, eds. 2017. Die Rezeption der Wiener Schule in Osteuropa. Musikgeschichte in Mittel- und Osteuropa: Mitteilungen der internationalen Arbeitsgemeinschaft an der Universität Leipzig 19. Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder Verlag. ISBN 978-3-926196-76-7.
• Lassner, Alexander. 2003. "The Foreign Policy of the Schuschnigg Government 1934–1938: The Quest for Security". The Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Era in Austria: A Reassessment, eds. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Alexander Lassner, 73–92. Vol. 11, Contemporary Austrian Studies. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7658-0970-4 (pbk).
• Lee, Gavin SK. 2023. "Global Musical Modernisms as Decolonial Method". Twentieth-Century Music 20:3(424–448). doi:10.1017/S1478572223000208.
• Leeuw, Ton de. 2005. Music of the Twentieth Century: A Study of Its Elements and Structure, trans. Stephen Taylor. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 978-90-5356-765-4. Trans. of Muziek van de twintigste eeuw: een onderzoek naar haar elementen en structuur. Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1964. 3rd impression, Utrecht: Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema, 1977. ISBN 978-90-313-0244-4.
• Leibowitz, René. 2018. René Leibowitz to Editions Dynamo: The 114 Letters of René Leibowitz to the Editions Dynamo of Pierre Aelberts Between 1947 and 1951, ed. Tobias Broeker. Stuttgart. Self-published on author's web site (accessed 9 Oct. 2022).
• Leinsdorf, Erich. 1997. Erich Leinsdorf on Music. Portland: Amadeus Press. ISBN 978-1-57467-028-8.
• Lister, Rodney. 2006. "[Review:] The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople, and The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin". Tempo. 60(235):50–57. Cambridge University Press.
• Littlewood, Julian. 2004. The Variations of Johannes Brahms. London: Plumbago Books. ISBN 978-0-9540123-4-2.
• London, Justin. 2013. "Building a Representative Corpus of Classical Music". Music Perception 31(1):68–90. doi:10.1525/mp.2013.31.1.68.
• MacDonald, Ian. n.d. "The Shostakovich Debate: The Question of Dissidence (5)". Music under Soviet Rule. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville website.
• Machabey, Armand. 1930. "Notes sur la Musique allemande contemporaine: V. = Webern". Le Ménestrel 92(46):477–479.
• Maconie, Robin. 2016. Other Planets: The Complete Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1950–2007. Updated edition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-44-227268-2 (electronic).
• Maes, Francis. 2002. A History of Russian Music From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar''. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Trans. of Geschiedenis van de Russische muziek: Van Kamarinskaja tot Babi Jar. Nijmegen: Uitgeverij SUN, 1996. ISBN 978-0-520-21815-4.
• Matter, Henri-Louis. 1981. Anton Webern: Essai. Lausanne: Éditions L'Âge d'Homme. ISBN 978-2-82513230-2.
• Mayer, Arno. 1988. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The "Final Solution" in History. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0-394-57154-6.
• Mei, Girolamo. 1998. "Letter to Vincenzo Galilei (1572)". Source Readings in Music History, ed. and fwd. Oliver Strunk, gen. ed. and fwd. Leo Treitler, 485–494. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-03752-4 (pbk).
• Merrick, Paul. 1987. Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-32627-8.
• Meyer, Felix and Anne C. Shreffler. 1996. "Performance and revision: the early history of Webern's Four Pieces for violin and piano, Op. 7". Webern Studies, ed. and intro. Kathryn Bailey Puffett, 135–169. Cambridge Composer Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47526-6 (hbk).
• Miller, David H. Spring 2022. "Singing Webern, Sounding Webern: Bethany Beardslee, Grace-Lynne Martin, and Marni Nixon, 1950–1957". Journal of the American Musicological Society. 75(1):81–127. University of California Press.
• Miller, David H. 2022. "Shadows, wraiths, and amoebas: the distinctive flops of Anton Webern in the United States". Transposition. 10. École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and the Cité de la musique-Philharmonie de Paris. (30 May, accessed 26 Oct. 2022)
• Miller, David H. 2020. "Anton Webern and Mainstream Music Culture in the United States, 1923–1987". PhD diss. Ithaca: Cornell University. doi:10.7298/ab9s-br21.
• Mitchinson, Paul. 2001. "Richard Taruskin Explores the Dark Side of Music". Lingua Franca 11(5):34–43.
• Moldenhauer, Hans. 1961. The Death of Anton Webern: A Drama in Documents. New York: Philosophical Library. OCLC 512111
• Moldenhauer, Hans, and Rosaleen Moldenhauer. 1978. Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. ISBN 978-0-394-47237-9.
• Morgan, Robert P. 1993. Modern Times: From World War I to the Present. Man & Music Series; Vol. 8. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-349-11291-3 (ebk). ISBN 978-1-349-11293-7 (hbk).
• Morris, Christopher. 2016. "Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema". Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera. Oxford and New York: Taylor & Francis. Reprint from original in 2012 by Ashgate. ISBN 978-0-75466-970-8 (hbk).
• Moskovitz, Marc. 2010. Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell. ISBN 978-1-84383-578-3.
• Musgrave, Michael. 1985. The Music of Brahms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-7100-9776-7.
• Muxeneder, Therese. 2019. "Arnold Schönbergs Konfrontationen mit Antisemitismus (III)". Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center 16, 164–254. Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center.
• Näf, Lukas. 2019. "Tempogestaltung in Weberns Sinfonie op. 21". In Rund um Beethoven: Interpretationsforschung heute, eds. Thomas Gartmann and Daniel Allenbach, 180–194. Musikforschung der Hochschule der Künste Bern, Vol. 14. Schliengen: Edition Argus. ISBN 978-3-931264-94-9. doi:10.26045/kp64-6178.
• Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 2004. "Boulez Structuralist". The Battle of Chronos and Orpheus: Essays in Applied Musical Semiology, trans. Jonathan Dunsby, 72–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-816610-8.
• Neubauer, John. 2001. "Organicism and Modernism / Music and Literature". Essays on the Song Cycle and on Defining the Field (Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), 3–24. Vol 2., Word and Music Studies, eds. Walter Bernhart, Werner Wolf, and David Mosley. Intro. Werner Wolf. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Reprinted, Amsterdam: Brill. 2022. ISBN 978-9-004488-74-8 (ebk).
• Neubauer, John. 2002. "Organicist Poetics as Romantic Heritage?". Romantic Poetry. Ed. Angela Esterhammer, 491–508. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 978-9-027297-76-1.
• Neubauer, John. 2009. "Organicism and Music Theory". New Paths: Aspects of Music Theory and Aesthetics in the Age of Romanticism, eds. Darla Crispin and Kathleen Snyers, 11–36. Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ISBN 978-9-058677-34-1.
• Notley, Margaret. 2010. "[1934, Alban Berg, and the Shadow of Politics: Documents of a Troubled Year]". Alban Berg and His World, ed. Christopher Hailey, 223–268. The Bard Music Festival. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-400836-47-5.
• Obinger, Herbert. 2018. "War Preparation, Warfare, and the Welfare State in Austria". Warfare and Welfare: Military Conflict and Welfare State Development in Western Countries, eds. and pref. Herbert Obinger, Klaus Petersen, and Peter Starke, 67–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-877959-9 (hbk).
• Pace, Ian. 2022. "Reflections on Richard Taruskin and Performance". Desiring Progress: The Blog of Ian Pace. (2 July 2022, accessed 19 Jan. 2023).
• Pace, Ian. 2022. "New Music: Performance Institutions and Practices." In The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance, Vol. 1, ed. Gary E. McPherson, 396-455. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-190056-31-5 (online). ISBN 978-0-190056-28-5 (print). doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190056285.013.19.
• Paddison, Max. 1998. Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-62608-8
• Peattie, Thomas. 2012. "Reviewed Work(s): Mahler's Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies by Julian Johnson". Music and Letters 93(3):422–425. doi:10.1093/ml/gcs029.
• Peperzak, Adriaan. 1994. "Ethics in Our Time". The Question of Hermeneutics: Essays in Honor of Joseph J. Kockelmans, "Section V. –– Hermeneutics, Art, and Ethics", ed. and intro. Timothy J. Stapleton, fwd. Pierre Kerszberg, 451–468. Vol. 17, Contributions to Phenomenology, eds. William R. McKenna et al. Dordrecht: Springer. Reprint from original in 1994 by Kluwers. ISBN 978-94-011-1160-7 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-7923-2964-0 (pbk). doi:10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7.
• Perle, George. 1980. The Operas of Alban Berg, Vol. I: Wozzeck. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-06617-5.
• Perle, George. 1985. The Operas of Alban Berg, Vol. II: Lulu. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-06616-8.
• Perle, George. 1990. The Right Notes: Twenty-Three Selected Essays by George Perle on Twentieth-Century Music. Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press. ISBN 978-0-945193-37-1.
• Perle, George. 1995. The Listening Composer. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20518-5.
• Peyser, Joan. 2008. To Boulez and Beyond. Revised ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-1-4616-9776-3.
• Potter, Pamela M. 2005. "What Is 'Nazi Music'?". The Musical Quarterly 88(3):428–455. doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdi019.
• Potter, Pamela M. 1998. Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society From the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-07228-0 (hbk).
• Pousseur, Henri. 2009. "Harmonie? Harmonies! (1995)". Série et harmonie généralisées: une théorie de la composition musicale. Ed. Pascal Decroupet, 225–242. Collection Musique-Musicologie. Wavre: Mardaga. ISBN 978-2-8047-0013-3.
• Powell, Larson. 2013. "Karl Amadeus Hartmann: The Politics of Musical Inner Emigration". SEARCH: Journal for New Music and Culture 10 (Spring 2013).
• Prausnitz, Frederik. 2002. Roger Sessions: How a "Difficult" Composer Got That Way. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-510892-7.
• Puffett, Derrick. 1996. "Gone with the Summer Wind; or, What Webern Lost: Nine Variations on a Ground". Webern Studies, ed. and intro. Kathryn Bailey Puffett, 32–73. Cambridge Composer Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47526-6 (hbk).
• Quick, Miriam Siân. 2010. "Performing modernism: Webern on record". PhD thesis. Revised 2011. London: King's College London.
• Rochberg, George. 2004. The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music. Revised, expanded, and reprinted from original in 1984. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-02511-4 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-472-03026-2 (pbk).
• Rode-Breymann, Susanne. 1996. "'... gathering the divine from the earthly ...': Ferdinand Avenarius and his significance for Anton Webern's early settings of lyric poetry". Webern Studies, ed. and intro. Kathryn Bailey Puffett, 1–31. Cambridge Composer Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47526-6 (hbk).
• Rosen, Charles. 2012. Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-04752-5
• Ross, Alex. 2007. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-24939-7.
• Russell, Nestar. 2019. Understanding Willing Participants, Vol. 2: Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust. Cham: Springer Nature. ISBN 978-3-319-97999-1 (ebk).
• Blair Sanderson. n.d. "Review: Bruckner Symphonies Nos. 0–9; Symphony in F minor". AllMusic. (n.d., accessed 7 June 2023).
• Scherzinger, Martin with Neville Hoad. 1997. "Anton Webern and the Concept of Symmetrical Inversion: A Reconsideration on the Terrain of Gender". repercussions. 6(2):63–147.
• Schoenberg, Arnold. 1950. Style and Idea, ed. Dika Newlin. New York: Philosophical Library, Inc.
• Schoenberg, Arnold. 2018. Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers, ed. and trans. Sabine Feisst. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-538357-7 (hbk).
• Schmelz, Peter John. 2015. "Serialism in the USSR". The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, ed. Martin Iddon, 253–265. Cambridge Companions to Music Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-49252-2 (hbk). ISBN 978-1-108-71686-4 (pbk). doi:10.1017/9781108592116.
• Schmelz, Peter John. 2009. Such Freedom, if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-986685-4 (ebk).
• Schmusch, Rainer. 1995. "Klangfarbenmelodie." In Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 221–234. Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. ISBN 978-3-515-06659-4.
• Schuijer, Michiel. 2008. "Analyzing Atonal Music: Pitch-class Set Theory and Its Contexts". Eastman Studies in Music, sen. ed. Ralph P. Locke. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-270-9 (hbk).
• Schroeder, David. 1994. "Alban Berg". Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, 185–250. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-29604-8.
• Schwartz, Peter J. 2017. "'Guckt euch selbst an!' Büchner's Woyzeck and the Pericope Adulterae." In Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Robert Gillett, 79–91. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-34163-0 (ebk). ISBN 978-90-04-33859-3 (hbk).
• Searle, Humphrey and Anton Webern. 1940. "Conversations with Webern." The Musical Times 81(1172), 405–406. doi:10.2307/921847.
• Service, Tom. 2013. "Symphony Guide: Webern's Op 21". Tom Service on Classical Blog. The Guardian.com (17 Dec., accessed 2 Aug. 2014).
• Shaftel, Matthew R. 2004. Preface. The Anton Webern Collection: Early Vocal Music, 1809–1909, ed. Matthew R. Shaftel. New York: Carl Fischer. ISBN 978-0-8258-5659-4.
• Shaftel, Matthew R. 2000. "Anton Webern's Early Songs: Motive, Harmony, and Influence". PhD diss. New Haven: Yale University. ISBN 978-0-599-98379-3.
• Shere, David Matthew. 2007. "A Survey of Webern's Life and Compositional Vocabulary". PhD diss. Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara. ISBN 978-0-549-26874-1.
• Shreffler, Anne C. 2013. "Musikalische Kanonisierung und Dekanonisierung im 20. Jahrhundert". Der Kanon der Musik, Theorie und Geschichte: Ein Handbuch, eds. and intro. Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, trans. Fabian Kolb, 606–625. Munich: edition text + kritik. ISBN 978-3-86916-981-1 (ebk). ISBN 978-3-86916-106-8 (pbk). Trans. from self-published English version.
• Shreffler, Anne C. 2002. "[Review:] Julian Johnson. Webern and the Transformation of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999". Music Theory Spectrum 24(2):294–299. doi:10.1093/mts/24.2.294.
• Shreffler, Anne C. 1999. "Anton Webern". Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, 251–314. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-29604-8.
• Shreffler, Anne C. 1994. Webern and the Lyric Impulse: Songs and Fragments on Poems of Georg Trakl, ed. and pref. Lewis Lockwood. Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-816224-7.
• Sills, Helen. 2022. Stravinsky, God, and Time. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-51853-7 (ebk). ISBN 978-90-04-51853-7 (hbk).
• Simms, Bryan R. 1999. "Arnold Schoenberg". Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, 129–184. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-29604-8.
• Simms, Bryan R. 2006. "Twentieth-Century Composers Return to the Small Ensemble". The Orchestra: A Collection of 23 Essays on Its Origins and Transformations, ed. and intro. Joan Peyser, 453–474. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation. Reprint from original in 1986 by Charles Scribners Sons. ISBN 978-1-423-41026-3.
• Simms, Bryan R. and Charlotte Erwin. 2021. Berg. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-093144-5 (hbk).
• Sitsky, Larry, ed. 2002. Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook, fwd. Jonathan D. Kramer. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-29689-5 (pbk).
• Smither, Howard E. 2001. A History of the Oratorio, Vol. 4: The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-807837-78-8.
• Slonimsky, Nicolas. 1994. Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time". 2nd ed. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Reprint from original in 1953 by Coleman-Ross. ISBN 978-0-295-78579-0.
• Stapleton, Timothy J. 1994. Introduction: The Question of Hermeneutics: Essays in Honor of Joseph J. Kockelmans, ed. Timothy J. Stapleton, fwd. Pierre Kerszberg, 1–16. Vol. 17, Contributions to Phenomenology, eds. William R. McKenna et al. Dordrecht: Springer. Reprint from original in 1994 by Kluwers. ISBN 978-94-011-1160-7 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-7923-2964-0 (pbk). doi:10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7.
• Stewart, John Lincoln. 1991. Ernst Krenek: The Man and His Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-07014-1 (hbk).
• Straus, Joseph N. 2001. Stravinsky's Late Music. Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-80220-8 (hbk).
• Straus, Joseph N. 1999. "The Myth of Serial 'Tyranny' in the 1950s and 1960s". The Musical Quarterly 83(3):301–343. doi:10.1093/mq/83.3.301.
• Straus, Joseph N. 1990. Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-43633-6 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-674-75990-9 (hbk). doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674436336.
• Stravinsky, Igor. 1959. "[Foreword]". Die Reihe 2 (2nd rev. English ed.) vii.
• Street, Alan. 1989. "Superior Myths, Dogmatic Allegories: The Resistance to Musical Unity". Music Analysis 8(77–123). doi:10.2307/854327.
• Street, Alan. 2005. "Expression and construction: the stage works of Schoenberg and Berg". The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, ed. Mervyn Cooke, 85–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-78009-4 (hbk).
• Street, Alan. 2013. "Identity Formation in Webern's Six Pieces for Large Orchestra, op. 6". Music and Narrative since 1900, eds. and pref. Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland, 381–400. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-00644-8 (pbk).
• Suchoff, Benjamin. 2004. Béla Bartók: A Celebration. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-4958-7 (hbk).
• Tarasti, Eero. 2002. Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics. Approaches to Applied Semiotics, Vol. 3. Berlin: de Gruyter. Reprinted 2012. ISBN 978-3-1108-9987-0 (ebk). doi:10.1515/9783110899870.
• Tarasti, Eero. 2015. Sein und Schein [Being and Appearance]: Explorations in Existential Semiotics. Berlin: de Gruyter. ISBN 978-1-5015-0116-6 (ebk). doi:10.1515/9781614516354.
• Taruskin, Richard. 2023. "Коле посвящается (for Kolya)". Musical Lives and Times Examined: Keynotes and Clippings, 2006–2019, 276–298. Oakland: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-39202-1 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-520-39200-7 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-520-39201-4 (pbk).
• Taruskin, Richard. 2023. "Envoi: All Was Foreseen; Nothing Was Foreseen". Musical Lives and Times Examined: Keynotes and Clippings, 2006–2019, 512–524. Oakland: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-39202-1 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-520-39200-7 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-520-39201-4 (pbk).
• Taruskin, Richard. 2011. "'Alte Musik' or 'Early Music'?". Twentieth-Century Music 8(1):3–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/S1478572211000260.
• Taruskin, Richard. 2009. Music in the Late Twentieth Century. The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 5. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-538485-7.
• Taruskin, Richard. 2009. Music in the Early Twentieth Century. The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 4. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-538484-0 (pbk).
• Taruskin, Richard. 2009. "Preface: Against Utopia". The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays, ix–xvi. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-94279-0 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-520-24977-6 (hbk).
• Taruskin, Richard. 2009. "How Talented Composers Become Useless". The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays, 86–93. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-94279-0 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-520-24977-6 (hbk).
• Taruskin, Richard. 2009. "Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology". The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays, 382–405. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-94279-0 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-520-24977-6 (hbk).
• Taruskin, Richard. 2009. "The Dark Side of the Moon". The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays, 202–216. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24977-6 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-520-24977-6 (hbk).
• Taruskin, Richard. 1996. Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Vol. II: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-07099-8.
• Taruskin, Richard. 1996. "How Talented Composers Become Useless". Classical View. The New York Times Archives (10 March 1996, web site accessed 30 Mar. 2024).
• Taruskin, Richard. 1994. "Does Nature Call the Tune?". Classical View. The New York Times Archives (18 Sept 1994, web site accessed 30 Mar. 2024).
• Thorau, Christian. 2013. "Werk, Wissen, und touristisches Hören: Popularisierende Kanonbildung in Programmheften und Konzertführern". Der Kanon der Musik, Theorie und Geschichte: Ein Handbuch, eds. and intro. Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, 535–561. Munich: edition text + kritik. ISBN 978-3-86916-981-1 (ebk). ISBN 978-3-86916-106-8 (pbk).
• Tonietti, Tito M. 2003. "Die Jakobsleiter, twelve-tone music, and Schönberg's Gods". In Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center, Report of the Symposium, 26. – 29. Juni 2002: Arnold Schönberg and his God, ed. and fwd. Christian Meyer, 213–237. Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center. ISBN 978-3-902012-05-0.
• Toorn, Pieter van den and John McGinness. 2012. Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-02100-6 (hbk).
• Tsenova, Valeria. 2014. Underground Music from the Former USSR, ed. Valeria Tsenova, trans. Romela Kohanovskaya. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association. ISBN 978-1-134-37165-5 (ebk).
• Turner Jr, Henry A. 1985. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-503492-9 (hbk).
• Tymoczko, Dmitri. 2011. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ed. Richard Cohn. ISBN 978-0-19-533667-2.
• Utz, Christian. Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization: New Perspectives on Music History in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. Wieland Hoban. [Trans. Laurence Sinclair Willis.] Rev. and expanded ed. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8376-5095-2.
• Wasserman, Janek. 2014. Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-5522-3 (ebk).
• Vandagriff, Rachel S. 2017. "Perspectives and the Patron: Paul Fromm, Benjamin Boretz and Perspectives of New Music". Journal of the Royal Musical Association 142(2):327–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1080/02690403.2017.1361175.
• Watkins, Glenn. 1994. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-74083-9.
• Watkins, Glenn. 1988. Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century. New York: Schirmer. ISBN 978-0-02-873290-9.
• Watkins, Holly. 2011. Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg. New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism Series, gen. eds. Jeffrey Kallberg, Anthony Newcomb, and Ruth Solie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-01091-8 (hbk).
• Webern, Anton. 1963. The Path to the New Music, ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania: Theodore Presser Co., in Association with Universal Edition. Reprinted London: Universal Edition, 1975. Trans. of Der Wege zur neuen Musik, Vienna: Universal Edition, 1960.
• Webern, Anton. 1967. "Letters to Hildegard Jone and Josef Humplik", ed. Josef Polnauer, trans. Cornelius Cardew and Élisabeth Bouillon. Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser; London, Vienna, and Zürich: Universal Edition.
• Webern, Anton. 2000. Sämtliche Werke/Complete Works/L'Œuvre complète/L'opera completa. Oelze · Pollet · Schneider · McCormick · Finley · Aimard · Cascioli · Maisenberg · Zimerman · Kremer · Hagen · BBC Singers · Emerson String Quartet · Ensemble Intercontemporain · Berliner Philharmoniker · Pierre Boulez. 6-CD set. Deutsche Grammophon 0289 457 6372 9 GX 6. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon.
• White, Harry. 2008. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-156316-4.
• Wedler, Sebastian. 2015. "Thus Spoke the Early Modernist: Zarathustra and Rotational Form in Webern's String Quartet (1905)." Twentieth-Century Music 12(2):225–251.
• Wistrich, Robert S. 2012. From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel. Studies in Antisemitism Series. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. ISBN 978-0-803240-83-4 (ebk).
• Wlodarski, Amy Lynn. 2019. George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity. Eastman Studies in Music Series, senior ed. Ralph P. Locke. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-947-0.
• Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart. The Discursive Construction of National Identity, abbrev. and trans. Angelika Hirsch, Richard Mitten, and J. W. Unger. Second edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, 2003, 2005, and 2009. (Originally published in German. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998.) ISBN 978-0-7486-3726-3 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-7486-3734-8 (pbk).
• Yang, Tsung-Hsien. 1987 "Webern Symphony: Beyond Palindromes and Canons". PhD diss. Waltham: Brandeis University.
• Zenck, Martin. 1989. "Tradition as authority and provocation: Anton Webern's confrontation with Johann Sebastian Bach". Bach Studies, ed. Don O. Franklin, pref. Don O. Franklin and Johannes Tall, 297–322. Cambridge Composer Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-34105-9 (hbk).

Further reading

• Ahrend, Thomas, and Matthias Schmidt (eds.). 2015. Der junge Webern. Texte und Kontexte. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 2b. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-083-6.
• Ahrend, Thomas, and Matthias Schmidt (eds.). 2016. Webern-Philologien. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 3. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-084-3.
• Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Modern European Philosophy Series, gen. ed. Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-35443-4 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-521-87734-3 (hbk).
• Cacciari, Massimo. 1996. Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, trans. Rodger Friedman. Crossing Aesthetics Series, eds. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-2709-9 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-8047-2710-5 (pbk). (Translation of Dallo Steinhof, 1980, Milano: Adelphi.)
• Cavallotti, Pietro, and Simon Obert, and Rainer Schmusch (eds.). 2019. Neue Perspektiven. Anton Webern und das Komponieren im 20. Jahrhundert. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 4. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-098-0.
• Cook, Nicholas. 2013. Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19935-743-7 (ebk).
• Distler, Jed. 2000. "Complete Webern". Classics Today, Music Reviews Digest (9 Sept. 2000, web site accessed 19 Jan. 2023).
• Ewen, David. 1971. "Anton Webern (1883–1945)". Composers of Tomorrow's Music, by David Ewen, 66–77. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. ISBN 978-0-396-06286-8.
• Forte, Allen. 1998. The Atonal Music of Anton Webern. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-07352-2
• Galliari, Alain. 2007. "Anton von Webern". Paris: Fayard. ISBN 978-2-213-63457-9.
• Griffiths, Paul (27 August 2000). "A Complete Webern, with 'New' Works". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 January 2023.
• Kennicott, Philip. 2000. "Webern's Atonal Recall: Boulez Sets Record Straight on Composer". 11 June 2000. The Washington Post (web site accessed 19 Jan. 2023).
• Kröpfl, Monika, and Simon Obert (eds.). 2015. Der junge Webern. Künstlerische Orientierungen in Wien nach 1900. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 2a. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-082-9.
• McClary, Susan. Spring 1989. "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition". Cultural Critique ("Discursive Strategies and the Economy of Prestige"). 12:57–81.
• Mead, Andrew. 1993. "Webern, Tradition, and 'Composing with Twelve Tones'". Music Theory Spectrum 15(2):173–204. doi:10.2307/745813
• Moldenhauer, Hans. 1966. Anton von Webern Perspectives. Ed. Demar Irvine, with an introductory interview with Igor Stravinsky. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
• Noller, Joachim. 1990. "Bedeutungsstrukturen: zu Anton Weberns 'alpinen' Programmen". Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 151(9):12–18.
• Obert, Simon (ed.). 2012. Wechselnde Erscheinung. Sechs Perspektiven auf Anton Weberns sechste Bagatelle. Webern-Studien. Beihefte der Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe 1. Wien: Lafite. ISBN 978-3-85151-080-5.
• Perle, George. 1991. Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Sixth ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Pousseur, Henri. 1964. "Music, Form and Practice (an Attempt to Reconcile Some Contradictions)". Trans. Margaret Shenfield. Die Reihe 6 (English ed. 1964, German ed. 1960):77–93. Reprint from original in Revue belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 13 (1959).
• Rockwell, John. 1983. All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Alfred Knopf. Reprinted New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-306-80750-3, ISBN 978-0-306-80750-3.
• Sutherland, Roger. 2000. "Boulez's Webern." Tempo 213:52–53. doi:10.1017/S0040298200007889.
• Tsang, Lee. 2002. "The Atonal Music of Anton Webern (1998) by Allen Forte". Music Analysis 21(3): 417–427.
• Taruskin, Richard. 2009. Music in the Nineteenth Century. The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 3. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-538483-3.
• Wildgans, Friedrich. 1966. Anton Webern. Trans. Edith Temple Roberts and Humphrey Searle. Intro. and notes by Humphrey Searle. New York: October House.

External links

• Anton Webern: Biography & list of works (in English and French)
• Free scores by Anton Webern at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Free scores by Anton Webern in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe (Complete Edition)