Anton Webern

Anton Webern as a top famous people, the noted Austrian composer and conductor, remembered both for his atonal and serial works, was one of the key figures in the Second Viennese School. He started learning to play the piano from his mother, at the age of five. At fourteen, he began his formal training in music and wrote his first composition at the age of sixteen. After graduating from the gymnasium, he entered Musicological Institute at the University of Vienna. Concurrently, he also started studying composition with Arnold Schoenberg, beginning his experiments in music under his master’s guidance. At the age of 24, after four years of study with Schoenberg, he embarked on his career as a conductor and composer. Unfortunately, with the rise of Nazis, his music was banned and he spent the last decade of his life in financial constraint and musical isolation. He was not very prolific composer, publishing only 31 works during his lifetime. Although some other works were discovered later on they were not great in numbers. Yet, he left a great impression with his radical compositions, influencing both his contemporaries and younger generations of musicians.

• Anton Webern was born on 3 December 1883, in Vienna, Austria. Named Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern at birth, he never used his middle names and later gave up ‘von’ to comply with the 1919 reforms of the Austrian government.
• His father, Carl von Webern, was a mining engineer employed with the Habsburg government. He later reached the rank of chief of mining, the highest rank in his profession. His mother, Amelie (née Geer) Webern, was a competent pianist and accomplished singer.
• Anton was born fourth of his parents’ five children, having two surviving sisters, named Rosa and Maria. His other two siblings, a brother and a sister, died in infancy.
• Growing up in a musical environment, Anton began his education at Vienna, where the family lived until 1889. It was also at Vienna that he began his music lesson under his mother. at the age of five.
• In 1890, his father was transferred to Graz and another four years later to Klagenfurt. At Klagenfurt, Anton attended Klagenfurt Humanistisches Gymnasium, studying traditional courses in humanities. By then, his musical talent must have started blooming for the school records show that he got high grades in music.
• Sometime during his stay in Klagenfurt, he began studying the works of Peter Rosegger, which greatly influenced him. More important to him was the long retreats at their family estate, the Preglhof, a 500 acre property surrounded by soft and gentle mountains near Austria’s border with Slovenia.
• Until the age of 18, he spent most of his holidays at the Preglhof, enjoying nature in the company of his sisters and cousins. It soon became the centre of his ‘heimat’, giving him a sense of belonging, having great influence on his creativity.
• In 1897, while still residing at Klagenfurt, Anton began his formal education in music; learning cello, piano, counterpoint and rudimentary musical theory with Dr. Edwin Komauer, shortly inheriting his master’s enthusiasm for Wagner, Mahler and Wolf. This was also the time he began playing cello at the local orchestra.
• In 1899, he started composing music, writing two pieces for cello and piano. He also wrote several songs such as the ‘Vorfruhling’ during this period, noting them down in notebooks and then making copies of the same work, presumably one for the pianist and the other for the singer.
• In a notebook entry dated 1901, we find him listing four songs as opus 1. It is possible that he planned to publish these works; but that did not happen just then. These notebooks, nine in number, also reveal that by 1900, he had started attending concerts on regular basis.