Anton Webern

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• (left) A brick barn in a field of wildflowers on the Preglhof estate{{sfn|Hayes|1995|loc=20}}
• (right) {{ill|Pfarrkirche Schwabegg|de}} and southern foothills across from a snowy field

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Webern was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a descendant of {{Interlanguage link|Webern (Adelsgeschlecht){{!}}minor nobility|de|3=Webern_(Adelsgeschlecht)}}, high-ranking civil servant, mining engineer,{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=30–31}} 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 Olomouc and back to Vienna.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=33}}

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 {{ill|Lendkanal|de}} to the Wörthersee. Edwin Komauer taught him cello, and the family played chamber music, including that of Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=35}} Webern learned to play Bach's cello suites{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=299|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=39}} and may have studied Bach's polyphony under Komauer.{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=299|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=37}}

The extended Webern family spent summers,{{efn|See {{ill|Sommerfrische|de}}.}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=35}} These experiences and reading Peter Rosegger's {{ill|Heimatkunst|de|}} shaped Webern's distinct and lasting sense of Heimat.{{sfnm|Hayes|1995|1loc=19|Johnson|1999|2loc=21, 83, 220|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=163}}

After a trip to Bayreuth,{{sfn|Jensen|1989|loc=11}} Webern studied musicology at the University of Vienna (1902–1906) with Guido Adler, a friend of Mahler, composition student of Bruckner,{{efn|Bruckner told students he was no longer guided by the rules he taught, broadening Adler's normative ideas about music.}} and devoted Wagnerian who had been in contact with both Wagner and Liszt.{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=20–21}}{{efn|Bruckner, Liszt, and Wagner all wrote of "music of the future".}} He quickly joined the Wagner Society, meeting popular conductors and musicians.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=27}} Egon Wellesz recalled he and Webern analyzed Beethoven's late quartets at the piano in Adler's seminars.{{efn|They also attended the opera and Mahler's symphonies together.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=74, 654}}}} Webern learned the historical development of musical styles and techniques, editing the second volume of Heinrich Isaac's Choralis Constantinus as his doctoral thesis.{{efn|In 1925, Guido Adler asked Webern to edit the third edition. Webern declined due to financial and time constraints, instead proposing lectures on instrumentation and "modern music (Strauss, Mahler, Reger, Schoenberg) in the manner of ... {{lang|de|Formenlehre}}, [or] formal principles (musical logic) and their connection with ... older masters".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=285–287}}}} 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":{{Blockquote|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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=84–85}}}}

Webern studied art history and philosophy under professors Max Dvořák, {{ill|Laurenz Müllner|de}}, and Franz Wickhoff,{{sfnm|Jensen|1989|1loc=11|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=80–82}} joining the Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft{{efn|Albrecht Dürer Society. He later served on its board.}} in 1903.{{sfn|Jensen|1989|loc=11}} His cousin {{ill|Ernst Diez (Kunsthistoriker)|lt=Ernst Diez|de|Ernst Diez (Kunsthistoriker)|display=1}}, 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.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=252}} Webern idolized Segantini's landscapes on a par with Beethoven's music, diarying in 1904:File:Giovanni segantini, pascoli di primavera, 1896, 01.jpg]]{{Blockquote|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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=76}}}}

Webern also studied nationalism and Catholic liturgy,{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=27}} shaped by his mostly provincial Catholic upbringing, which provided little exposure to the relatively cosmopolitan people of Vienna.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=17–18, 28, 38|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=33, 53}} At the time, antisemitism was resurgent in Austria, fueled by Catholic resentment after Jewish emancipation in the 1867 December Constitution.{{sfnm|Beller|2006|1loc=135–145, 155–156|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=33, 53}} Webern first viewed his Jewish peers as ostentatious and unfriendly, but his attitude shifted by 1902.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=27–28, 174|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=53, 57}} He quickly and durably made many close friends, most of them Jewish; Kathryn Bailey Puffett wrote that this likely shaped his views.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=27–28, 174|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=53}}

In 1904, Webern approached Hans Pfitzner for composition lessons but left angrily when Pfitzner criticized Mahler and Richard Strauss.{{sfn|Puffett|1996|loc=32}} Adler admired Schoenberg's work and may have{{efn|Webern may have seen newspaper ads for Schoenberg's Schwarzwald School courses in 1904. Karl Weigl, another Adler student, impressed Webern with the score of Schoenberg's Op. 5 in 1902. In 1903–1904, Webern attended performances of Schoenberg's Lieder and Op. 4.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=71–72}}}} sent Webern to him for composition lessons.{{sfn|Simms and Erwin|2021|loc=58}} 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 {{lang|de|Volksoper|italic=no}} in Vienna (1906–1909).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=103, 110}} Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern became devoted, lifelong friends with similar musical trajectories.{{sfn|Elliott|2007|loc=222}} Adler, Heinrich Jalowetz, and Webern played Schoenberg's quartets under the composer, accompanying Marie Gutheil-Schoder in rehearsals for Op. 10.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=654–655}}

Also through Schoenberg, who painted and had a 1910 solo exhibition at {{ill|Hugo Heller|de}}'s bookstore, Webern met Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer (with whom he corresponded on {{lang|de|ich–Du}} terms), Egon Schiele, and Emil Stumpp.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=10, 109-110, 557}} In 1920, Webern wrote Berg about the "indescribable impression" Klimt's work made on him, "that of a luminous, tender, heavenly realm".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=234}}{{efn|Webern and others gave Schoenberg Klimt prints for his 1921 birthday.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=239}}}} He also met Karl Kraus, whose lyrics he later set, but only to completion in Op. 13/i.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=109, 265–265, 276–277}}

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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=115–116, 138–139}}

They met in 1902,{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=48}} 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":

{{Blockquote|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.{{efn|Here Webern quoted Detlev von Liliencron's {{lang|de|"Heimgang in der Frühe"|italics=no}}, which he set to music in 1903.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=63–64, 77–79, 277, 654n6}}}}}}

File:Anton webern.jpg

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.{{sfn|Baranello|2021|loc=2}} Much of this music was regarded as low-{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=73, 141}} or middlebrow; Kraus, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Krenek found it "uppity" in its pretensions.{{sfn|Baranello|2021|loc=2–6, 10, 25}}{{efn|Still later, for Carl Dahlhaus, it was "trivial".{{sfn|Baranello|2021|loc=3, 178}}}} In 1924 Ernst Décsey recalled he once found operetta, with its "old laziness and unbearable musical blandness", beneath him.{{sfn|Baranello|2021|loc=22, 183}} J. P. Hodin contextualized the opposition of the "youthful intelligentsia" to operetta with a quote from Hermann Bahr's 1907 essay Wien:{{sfn|Hodin|1966|loc=76–77, 223n35; cf. H. Bahr's [https://web.archive.org/web/20220619071226/https://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno-buch?apm=0&aid=68 Wien]}}{{blockquote|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 Diez in 1908.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=103}} 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."{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=162}} A summer 1908 engagement with Bad Ischl's {{ill|Kurkonzert|lt=Kurorchester|de|Kurkonzert|display=1}} was "hell".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=103}} Webern walked out on an engagement in Innsbruck (1909), writing in distress to Schoenberg:{{blockquote|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?{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=106}}{{efn|In 1926, he counseled his pupil Ludwig Zenk, then in an analogous situation, not to resign ("Do not allow yourself to be angered"), citing the examples of Mahler's conflicts with Felix von Kraus over tempi and "How Mahler had to suffer under [Bernhard] Pollini for so many years!"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=106–107}}}}}} Webern wrote Zemlinsky seeking work at the Berlin or Vienna Volksoper instead.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=106, 110}}{{efn|Most references to a Volksoper in the Moldenhauers' Chronicle are to the famous one in Vienna, but Webern's father referred to one in Berlin.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=110}}}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=111–113, 130–131}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=111–112}} There were only 22 musicians in the orchestra, too few to perform Puccini's operas, he noted.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=111–112}}

Webern then summered at the Preglhof, composing his Op. 7 and planning an opera.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=130–132}} In September, he attended the Munich premiere of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand and visited with his idol,{{efn|Webern was "effusive and ecstatic" in his veneration of Mahler.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=150–151}}}} who gave Webern a sketch of "{{lang|de|Lob der Kritik|italic=no}}".{{efn|This "Praise of Criticism" was an early version of "{{lang|de|Lob des hohen Verstandes|italic=no}}" ("Praise of Lofty Intellect") from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=135–136, 144, 188, 657n1, 657n3}}}} Webern then worked with Jalowetz as assistant conductor in Danzig (1910–1911), where he first saw the "almost frightening" ocean.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=135–136}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=135–136, 141}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=141}}

Webern soon expressed homesickness to Berg; he could not bear the separation from Schoenberg and their world in Vienna.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=135–137}} He returned after resigning in spring 1911, and the three were pallbearers at Mahler's funeral in May 1911.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=142–144}} 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 {{lang|de|Starnbergersee|italics=no}}.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=146–147, 149}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=146–147}}{{efn|Other prominent signatories included Peter Altenberg, Julius Bittner, Artur Bodanzky, Engelbert Humperdinck, Wilhelm Kienzl, Julius Korngold, Adolf Loos, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Schreker, and Bruno Walter.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=147}}}} But Schoenberg was resolved to move to Berlin, and not for the first or last time, convinced of Vienna's fundamental hostility.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=73, 145, 147, 153}}

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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=149–154}} He gradually became tired, unhappy, and homesick.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=149–154}} 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 {{lang|de|Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst|italics=no}} due to his prior experiences in Vienna.{{sfnm|Auner|1999|1loc=8 first "as a {{lang|de|Privatdozent|italics=no}}", 23–24 quoting Schoenberg, cf. Erwin Stein's Arnold Schoenberg Letters (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987)|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=104, 114, 149–154}} At the same time, Webern began a cycle of repeatedly quitting and being taken back by Zemlinsky at the {{lang|de|Deutsches Landestheater Prague|italics=no}} (1911–1918).{{sfn|Moskovitz|2010|loc=136–140}}

He had a short-lived conducting post in Stettin (1912–1913), which, as all the others, kept him from composing and alienated him.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=99–100}} On the verge of a breakdown, he wrote Berg shortly after arriving (Jul. 1912):{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=99–100, quoting his own translation of Hanspeter Krellmann's Anton Webern in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1975; p. 29)|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=156–173}}{{blockquote|I find myself under the dregs of mankind ... with ... absurd music; I'm ... seriously ill. My nerves torture me ... . I want to be far away ... . In the mountains. There everything is clear, the water, the air, the earth. Here everything is dismal. I'm poisoned by drinking the water.}}

Webern's father sold the Preglhof in 1912, and Webern mourned it as a "lost paradise".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=157–158, quoting Webern in a 1912 letter to Schoenberg}} 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.{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=22, 38, 74–75, 79, 86, 94, 128|Street|2013|2loc=383–384}} In July 1912, he confided in Schoenberg: {{multiple image

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• (left) {{lang|de|Schloss Preglhof|italics=no}}, Webern's childhood home, in Oberdorf
• (right) Webern family grave at the cemetery in Schwabegg, on a meander spur of the Drava

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}}{{blockquote|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.{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=82, 108|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=204}}}}

Shortly after the anniversary of his mother's death, he wrote Schoenberg in September 1912:{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=82, 108|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=204}}{{blockquote|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.{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=82, 108|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=204}}}}

For Christmas in 1912, Webern gifted Schoenberg Rosegger's {{ill|Waldheimat|de|display=1|preserve=1}} (Forest Homeland{{sfn|Miller|2020|loc=66}}), from which Julian Johnson highlighted:{{blockquote|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.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=80–81}}}} 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.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=85}} 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.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=85}} 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)".{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=84}}{{efn|By then Webern had written several early works for string quartet.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=Appendix I}} He did not specify which ones he meant.}}

Johnson contended that Webern understood his cultural origins with a maternal view of nature and {{lang|de|Heimat}}, which became central themes in his music and thought.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=20–23, 79–86}} He 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.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=82}} 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.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=4–11, 264 cf. V. Kofi Agawu's Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) and Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)}} In this he claimed to echo Craft, Jalowetz, Krenek, the Moldenhauers, and Webern himself.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=4–11}}

File:1908 Mürzzuschlag.png, 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".{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=20–23, 57, 80, 99, 102|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=17, 77–78, 107, 126–127, 175, 200–203, 231, 234, 255, 265, 283, 285, 294, 302, 348, 365–366, 399, 423, 431, 438, 467–468, 472, 546–547}}

He collected and organized "mysterious" alpine herbs and cemetery flowers in pressed albums, and he tended gardens at his father's home in Klagenfurt and later at his own homes in the Mödling District (first in Mödling, then in Maria Enzersdorf).{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=20–23, 57, 80, 99, 102|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=17, 77–78, 107, 126–127, 200–203, 231, 234, 255, 265, 283, 285, 302, 348, 365–366, 399, 423, 431, 438, 467–468, 472, 546–547}} Karl Amadeus Hartmann remembered that Webern gardened "as a devotion" to Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants, and Johnson drew a parallel between Webern's gardening and composing, emphasizing his connection to nature and his structured, methodical approach in both pursuits.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=36–37, citing Dieter Rexroth's Opus Anton Webern (Berlin: Quadriga Verlag, 1983)}} Johnson noted that gardens and cemeteries are alike in being cultivated, closed spaces of rebirth and quiet reflection.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=36–37}}

These habits and preoccupations endured in Webern's life and {{lang|fr|œuvre}}.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=20–23, 79–86}} 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'?"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=399}} 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".{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=84–85}}

In 1912–1913, Webern had a breakdown and saw Alfred Adler, who noted his idealism and perfectionism.{{sfnm|Johnson|2006b|1loc=212|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=178–182}} There were many factors involved.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=100}} Webern had little time (mostly summers) to compose.{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=100|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=112, 162–163, 165}} There were conflicts at work (e.g., he emphasized that a director called him a "little man").{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=112, 162–163, 165}} His ambivalence toward sales-oriented popular music theater contributed ("I ... stir the sauce", he wrote).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=112, 162–163, 165}} "It appears ... improbable that I should remain with the theatre. It is ... terrible. ... I can hardly ... adjust to being away from home", he had written Schoenberg in 1910.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=110–111}} Miserably ill and alienated, he first had sought medical advice and taken rest at a sanatorium in {{ill|Kurhaus Semmering|lt=Semmering|de}}.{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=100|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=135–174}} Adler later evaluated his symptoms as psychogenic responses to unmet expectations.{{sfnm|Johnson|2006b|1loc=212|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=178–182}} Webern wrote Schoenberg that Adler's psychoanalysis was helpful and insightful.{{sfnm|Johnson|2006b|1loc=212|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=178–182}}

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."{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=209|Shreffler|1999|2loc=276}} Yielding in his distrust of Protestant Germany, he compared Catholic France to "cannibals" and expressed pan-German patriotism amid wartime propaganda.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=209|Shreffler|1999|2loc=276–277}} He cited his "faith in the German spirit" as having "created, almost exclusively, the culture of mankind".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=209}} 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.{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=277}}

Webern served intermittently for nearly two years.{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=273}} The war cost him professional opportunities, much of his social life, and the necessary leisure time to compose (he completed only nine {{lang|de|Lieder}}).{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=273}} Moving frequently and tiring,{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=209–222}} 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".{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=218|Shreffler|1999|2loc=276–279}} Webern was discharged in December 1916 for myopia, which had disqualified him from frontline service.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=217–218}}

His 1917 {{lang|de|Lieder}} show that he reflected on his patriotism and processed his sorrow.{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=278–279}} He treated the loss of life and, with the 1916 death of Franz Joseph I of Austria, the end of an era.{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=277–278}} In "Fahr hin, o Seel'", he selected a lament sung at a funeral in a Rosegger novel.{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=277–278}} In "Wiese im Park", he selected a text from Kraus recognizing that the day was "dead", {{lang|de|"und alles ... so alt"}}{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=277–278}} ("and everything ... so old"). Webern also set several disturbing poems of Georg Trakl, not all of which he could finish.{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=278}} 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".{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=278–279}}

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.{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=279}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=221–226}} (In the end, he lost all that remained of his family's wealth to hyperinflation by 1924.){{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=279}} He proposed to Schoenberg that they might be smallholders together.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=221–226}}

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.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=90–91|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=221–226|Moskovitz|2010|3loc=139–140}} But Webern's finances were so poor that he soon explored a "voluntary exile" to Prague again.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=221–226}} Nonetheless, he continued to raise funds, including his own, for Schoenberg,{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=221–226}} with whom he spent every day.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=91}}

Yet soon after he arrived, Webern broke his friendship with Schoenberg.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=221–226|Muxeneder|2019|2loc=169–170, quoting Berg|Shreffler|1999|3loc=279–280}}{{efn|Berg himself experienced breaks in his friendship with Schoenberg,{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=224}} who could be overbearing.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=37}} When Webern broke his friendship with Berg (1915–1916), he cited Schoenberg's influence in the matter.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=219, quoting Webern}}}} The break was multifactorial{{sfn|Muxeneder|2019|loc=169–170, quoting Berg}} but involved Webern's dissatisfaction with his career{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=279–280}} and financial turmoil.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=224–225}} Berg learned of the Weberns' ill temperaments and "latent antisemitism" from Schoenberg,{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=94|Muxeneder|2019|2loc=169–170, quoting Berg}}{{efn|Schoenberg's son-in-law {{ill|Felix Greissle|de}} also recalled Webern's labile antisemitism, contextualizing it as part of Webern's vacillating resentment and respect toward Schoenberg{{sfn|Muxeneder|2019|loc=169–170, quoting Greissle}} while also noting that Schoenberg had internalized some antisemitism ("mildly" antisemitic jokes were common in Schoenberg's home, Greissle's son George recalled, which Julie Brown contextualized as "unexceptional").{{sfn|Brown|2014|loc=42, 56–90, 174, 186–187, 209n34}} Schoenberg was self-conscious of his Jewish and class background, having confronted antisemitism in reading Otto Weininger.{{sfn|Brown|2014|loc=42, 56–90, 104–105, 174, 186–187, 209n34}} He repeatedly engaged with controversies surrounding Richard Wagner, who he also read and whose possible Jewish lineage interested him.{{sfn|Brown|2014|loc=42, 56–90, 104–105, 174, 186–187, 209n34}} He contended with Wagnerian charges as to Jewish artists' creative inabilities.{{sfn|Brown|2014|loc=42, 56–90, 104–105, 174, 186–187, 209n34}} While working on Die Jakobsleiter on family holiday at Mattsee in summer 1921, Schoenberg was given notice that all Jews should leave the town, angering him and sparking his return from Protestantism to Judaism.{{sfnm|Brown|2014|1loc=42, 56–90, 174, 186–187, 209n34|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=238–239}} In response, Wassily Kandinsky wrote to him from the Bauhaus in 1923, "I reject you as a Jew. ... Better to be a human being".{{sfn|Brown|2014|loc=42, 56–90, 174, 186–187, 209n34}} Schoenberg responded, "what is anti-Semitism to lead to if not to acts of violence?"{{sfn|Brown|2014|loc=42, 56–90, 174, 186–187, 209n34}}}} and noted that Schoenberg "wouldn't explain" further than "'Webern wants to go to Prague again'".{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=91}} Bailey Puffett argued that Webern's actions in and after the 1930s suggested that he was not antisemitic, at least in his maturity.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=28, 173–174}} She noted that Webern later wrote Schoenberg that he felt "a sense of the most vehement aversion" against German-speaking people who were.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=153}}

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 angrily called Webern "secretive and deceitful" upon learning that Webern was instead considering Prague again.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=92|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=221–226}} They reconciled in October 1918, not long before Webern's father died in 1919.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=225|Muxeneder|2019|2loc=169–170|Shreffler|1999|3loc=279–280}} Webern was changed by these events; he slowly began to grow more independent of Schoenberg, who was like a father to him.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=163, 225, 343|Shreffler|1999|2loc=279–280}} For his part, Schoenberg was not infrequently dubious of Webern, who he still considered his closest friend.{{sfn|Brown|2014|loc=104–106}}{{efn|In and after the 1930s, Schoenberg worried that adherents to Aryanism would deny his standing as the originator of twelve-tone technique, writing that Webern might "someday use his chance ... of the Aryan against the Jew" and that "[Josef Matthias] Hauer ... does the same".{{sfn|Brown|2014|loc=104–106}}}}

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,{{efn|Debussy, who died in 1918, once wished for a "'Society of Musical Esotericism'".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=241}}}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=229}} There was perhaps some shared influence among Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern at this time.{{sfnm|Shreffler|1994|1loc=68–69|Simms|2006|2loc=463–464, 467}} The Society dissolved amid hyperinflation in 1921, having boasted some 320 members and sponsored more than a hundred concerts.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=37}}

File:Anton Webern (1883–1945) 1927 © Georg Fayer (1891–1950) OeNB 10450290.png]]

Webern obtained work as music director of the {{lang|de|Wiener Schubertbund|italic=no}} 1921, having made an excellent impression as the vocal coach Schoenberg recommended for their 1920 performance of Gurre-Lieder.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=242–243}} They nearly abandoned this project before Webern stepped in.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=242–243}} He led them in performances of Brahms, Mahler, Reger, and Schumann, among others.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=242–243}} But low salary, mandatory touring, and challenges to Webern's thorough rehearsals prompted him to resign in 1922.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=242–243}} He was also chorusmaster of the Mödling {{lang|de|Männergesangverein|italic=no}}{{efn|Men's Singing Society}} (1922–1926) until he resigned in controversy over hiring a Jewish soprano, Greta Wilheim, as a stand-in soloist for Schubert's Mirjams Siegesgesang.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=121|Krones|2007|2loc=Biographie, 1914–1933|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=292, 450}}

From 1922, Webern led the mixed-voice amateur {{lang|de|Singverein der Sozialdemokratischen Kunstelle|italic=no}}{{efn|Singing Society of the Social Democratic Arts Council}} and {{lang|de|Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte|italic=no}}{{efn|Workers' Symphony Concerts}} through David Josef Bach, Director of the {{lang|de|Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle|italic=no}}.{{sfnm|Johnson|2006b|1loc=197|Krenek|1998|2loc=787–788|Krones|2007|3loc=Biographie, 1914–1933}}{{efn|Social Democratic Arts Council}} Webern won DJ Bach's confidence with a 1922 performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 3 that established his reputation, prompting Berg to praise him as "the greatest conductor since Mahler himself".{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=112|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=245–249}}{{efn|Berthold Goldschmidt cautioned that the Second Viennese School were a "mutual admiration society".{{sfn|Foreman|1991|loc=8}}}} Webern's Mahler interpretations continued to be widely celebrated.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=front flap}}{{efn|Since 1902, Webern idolized Mahler as a leading musician, studying his conducting and viewing him as a "serious" and "introspective" if sometimes sentimental composer—perhaps his favorite alongside Beethoven and Schoenberg.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=9, 14–15, 26, 30, 32, 36, 44–45|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=39–41, 56–57, 71, 74–76, 136, 144, 150–156, 168, 175, 465}} Mahler's music resonated with Webern as confiding "inner experiences", from an early "worship of nature" to a more abstract spirituality later.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=114}} In 1911, Webern aimed to convince his father of his conducting aspirations by taking him to back-to-back performances of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=156}} In 1912, he wrote Berg that he "must conduct ... must perform Schoenberg and Mahler and everything that is sacred".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=155}}}} From 1927, RAVAG aired twenty-two of Webern's performances.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=122}}

He premiered Berg's Chamber Concerto with soloists Rudolf Kolisch and Eduard Steuermann in 1927{{sfn|Hayes|1995|loc=161}} and led Stravinsky's Les Noces with Erich Leinsdorf among the pianists in 1933.{{sfnm|Antokoletz|2014|1loc=75, 225|Moldenhauer|1961|2loc=327}}{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/12/obituaries/erich-leinsdorf-81-a-conductor-of-intelligence-and-utility-is-dead.html |title=Erich Leinsdorf, 81, a Conductor of Intelligence and Utility, Is Dead |newspaper=The New York Times |date=12 September 1993 |last1=Holland |first1=Bernard |archive-date=21 October 2022 |access-date=21 October 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221021062234/https://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/12/obituaries/erich-leinsdorf-81-a-conductor-of-intelligence-and-utility-is-dead.html |url-status=live }}{{efn|Leinsdorf considered the experience of "utmost value to my musical and critical development".{{sfnm|Leinsdorf|1997|1loc=13|Stewart|1991|2loc=187}} The popevki-like 3-7A cell and 4–10 variant{{sfnm|Peyser|2008|1loc=80–81|Sills|2022|2loc=48–49, 84, 119–123|Toorn and McGinness|2012|3loc=43–52, 67–75, 124–126}} of Les Noces are not altogether unlike the rhythmized trichords of Webern's later Op. 24{{sfnm|Leeuw|2005|1loc=56–58|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=431–439|Puffett|1996|3loc=63}} or the tetrachords of Op. 30{{sfn|Leeuw|2005|loc=161}} (which Stravinsky later admired),{{sfn|Sills|2022|loc=48–49, 119–126, 284–285}} apart from Stravinsky's tendency to anhemitony{{sfnm|Maes|2002|1loc=284–285|Taruskin|1996b|2loc=383–413}} in marked contrast to Webern's hemitonicism.{{sfnm|Ewell|2013|1loc=219–223, 242|Hába|1934|2loc=15–17}}}} Armand Machabey noted Webern's regional reputation as a conductor of {{lang|fr|"haute valeur"}}{{efn|"high value"}} for his meticulous approach to then contemporary music, comparing him to Willem Mengelberg in Le Ménestrel (1930).{{sfn|Machabey|1930|loc=477}} Some on the left, notably {{ill|Oscar Pollak|de}} in Der Kampf (1929), criticized Webern's programming as more ambitious and bourgeois than popular and proletarian.{{sfn|Johnson|2006a|loc=217}} And Webern seemed uneasy in his dependence on the Social Democrats for conducting work, perhaps on religious grounds, Krenek speculated.{{sfn|Krenek|1998|loc=787–788}} But Walter Kolneder wrote that "Artistic work for and with workers was [from] a ... Christian standpoint which Webern took very seriously".{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=183, citing Roberto Gerhard and Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt}}

Webern's finances were often precarious, even in his years of relative success. Relief came from family, friends, patrons, and prizes.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=110, 120, 150, 157, 182, 211, 221, 223, 247, 257–285, 285–286, 301, 304–305, 319–320, 348, 361, 363–364, 373, 441, 446, 448, 488, 525, 533, 544, 564, 592, 675n2}} He twice received the {{ill|Preis der Stadt Wien für Musik|de}}.{{efn|The first 1924 prize, juried by Julius Bittner, Joseph Marx, and Richard Strauss, was shared by several, including Berg, {{ill|Carl Prohaska|de}}, Franz Schmidt, Max Springer, and Karl Weigl; the note was signed by Karl Seitz, who asked Webern at a concert two weeks prior, "Are you a professional musician?"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=258}} Berg and Webern later served as jurists.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=301, 347}} Only Webern received the prize in 1931.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=361, 365}}}} To compose more, he sought income while trying not to overcommit himself as a conductor.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=295, 301, 363–364, 415}} He contracted with Universal Edition only after 1919, reaching better terms in 1927,{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=120, 295}} but he was not very ambitious or astute in business.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=234, 365, 416, 440–441, 682}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=285–287}}

Social Democrat–Christian Social relations polarized and radicalized amid the {{ill|Schattendorfer Urteil|de}}.{{sfnm|Simms and Erwin|2021|1loc=375–377|Wasserman|2014|2loc=1–2}} Webern and others{{efn|Among these were Alfred Adler, Karl Bühler, {{ill|Leo Delitz|de}}, Josef Dobrowsky, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Lichtblau, {{ill|Fannina Borisovna Halle|lt=Fanina Halle|lt|Fannina Borisovna Halle|display=1}}, Hans Kelsen, Alma Mahler, suffragist Daisy Minor, Robert Musil, Egon Wellesz, and Franz Werfel.{{sfn|Wasserman|2014|loc=47}}}} signed an "Announcement of Intellectual Vienna"{{efn|"Die Kundgebung des geistigen Wien," April 20, 1927; it read in part, with emphasis in original: "The essence of Spirit [Geist] is above all Freedom, which is now endangered and we feel obligated to protect it. The struggle for a higher humanity and the battle against indolence [{{lang|de|Trägheit}}] and sclerosis [{{lang|de|Verödung}}] will always find us ready. Today, it also finds us prepared for battle."{{sfn|Wasserman|2014|loc=47}}}} published on the front page of the Social Democrats' daily Arbeiter-Zeitung{{efn|Workers' Times}} days before the 1927 Austrian legislative election.{{sfn|Wasserman|2014|loc=47}} On Election Day in {{ill|Reichspost (Zeitung)|lt=Die Reichspost|de|Reichspost (Zeitung)|display=1}}, Ignaz Seipel of the {{ill|Einheitsliste (Österreich)|lt=Einheitsliste|de|Einheitsliste (Österreich)|display=1}} officially applied the term "Red Vienna" pejoratively, attacking Vienna's educational and cultural institutions.{{sfn|Wasserman|2014|loc=1–2}} Social unrest escalated to the July Revolt of 1927 and beyond.{{sfn|Wasserman|2014|loc=1–2}} Webern's nostalgia for social order intensified with increasing civil disorder.{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=337–338}} In 1928 friends fundraised for him, partly to fund a rest cure at the {{lang|de|Kurhaus Semmering|italic=no}} for his exhaustion and (possibly psychosomatic) gastrointestinal complaints.{{efn|Supporters included DJ Bach, Ruzena Herlinger, Werner Reinhart, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Paul Stefan, and the {{ill|IGNM-Sektion Österreich|de}}.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=302–305}}}}

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".{{sfn|Berg|2014|loc=214–215, 288–290}} But they were soon marginalized and ostracized in Central Europe with few exceptions,{{sfnm|Adamson|2003|1loc=412|Morgan|1993|2loc=75}}{{efn|Before his suicide in 1942, Stefan Zweig wrote, "the short decade between 1924 and 1933, from the end of German inflation to Hitler's seizure of power, represents—in spite of all—an intermission in the catastrophic sequence of events whose witnesses and victims our generation has been since 1914."{{sfn|Perle|1980|loc=201}}}} and in 1929 Webern wrote Schoenberg that "it is getting worse and worse here".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=333}} He declined a RAVAG executive role, citing time constraints and fearing further affiliation with the Social Democrats.{{sfnm|Krones|2007|1loc=Biographie, 1914–1933|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=333}}{{efn|In 1920, Webern warned his cousin Heinrich Diez (Ernst's brother) not to accept a Hofburg apartment because the Habsburg monarchy would be restored.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=282}}}}

Webern's music was performed and publicized more widely starting in the latter half of the 1920s.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=293–295, 346–347, 362–365, 445}} Yet he found no great success as Berg enjoyed with Wozzeck{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=365}} nor as Schoenberg did, to a lesser extent, with Pierrot lunaire or in time with Verklärte Nacht. His Symphony, Op. 21, was performed as a chamber piece in New York by the League of Composers (1929) and separately in London at the 1931 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival. Louis Krasner sensed some resentment, noting that Webern had "very little".{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=340–341}} Krenek's impression was that Webern resented his financial hardships and lack of wider recognition.{{sfn|Krenek|1998|loc=787–788}}

Financial crises, complex social and political movements, pervasive antisemitism, culture wars, and renewed military conflicts{{efn|These conflicts arose within the ideological and political context of Germany–Soviet Union relations, 1918–1941.}} continued to shape Webern's world, profoundly circumscribing his life.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=161|Beller|2006|2loc=212–217|Kapp|1999|3loc=121–128|Simms and Erwin|2021|4loc=375–377}} Shortly after Webern conducted the Brecht–Eisler Solidaritätslied in 1933, Engelbert Dollfuss saw the {{ill|Kriegswirtschaftliches Ermächtigungsgesetz|de}} passed, and choir singers' homes were raided.{{sfn|Krones|2007|loc=Biographie, 1933–1939}} In the 1934 Austrian Civil War, Austrofascists{{efn|The clericofascist Vaterländische Front appealed to Austria's religious and national identity, and its imperial history, to attempt independence of Nazi Germany in alliance with Fascist Italy.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=407–408, 475–476, 680n26|Simms and Erwin|2021|2loc=375–376|Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, and Liebhart|2009|3loc=50–52}}}} executed, exiled, and imprisoned Social Democrats, outlawed their party, and abolished cultural institutions.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=407–408|Simms and Erwin|2021|2loc=375–377|Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, and Liebhart|2009|3loc=51–52}}

Stigmatized by his decade-long association with Social Democrats, Webern lost a promising domestic conducting career, which might have been better recorded.{{sfnm|Kolneder|1968|1loc=183|Krones|1999|2loc=7–8|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=408, 419, 466}} He eventually abandoned efforts with what remained of the workers' choir in the form of the much constrained {{lang|de|Freie Typographia|italics=no}} in 1935,{{sfn|Krones|2007|loc=Biographie, 1914–1933 and 1933–1939}} instead working as a UE editor and {{ill|IGNM-Sektion Österreich|de}} board member and president (1933–1938, 1945).{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=161|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=304}}

Amid wars and crises, antisemitism had grown to epidemic proportions by the late 1920s.{{sfn|Beller|2006|loc=212–217}} Vienna's modern and popular culture, including the music of Webern, Schoenberg, and Berg, was of a typically Jewish milieu.{{sfn|Beller|2006|loc=212–217}} It was derided as Jewish in a pejorative sense, marking it as foreign by contrast to the conservatism and traditionalism of the Austrian countryside.{{sfn|Beller|2006|loc=212–217}} Webern's admission to the Prussian Academy of Arts was withdrawn as Adolf Hitler rose in Germany,{{sfn|Krones|2007|loc=Biographie, 1933–1939}} and an Austrian {{lang|de|Gauleiter}} named Berg and Webern as Jewish composers on {{lang|de|Bayerischer Rundfunk|italics=no}} in 1933.{{sfn|Notley|2010}}{{efn|Berg wrote Adorno of prior instances,{{sfn|Adorno and Berg|2005|loc=85, 89}} and the {{lang|de|Reichskulturkammer|italics=no}} referred to Berg as an "émigré musical Jew" in Die Musik following Erich Kleiber's 1935 Berlin premiere of Berg's Lulu Suite.{{sfn|Morgan|1993|loc=75}} Conversely, when Berg wrote in 1933 seeking an academic position for Adorno to immigrate to England, Edward Dent declined on the basis of protectionism and underfunding,{{sfn|Adorno and Berg|2005|loc=248}} dubbing Berg "Hitlerian": "You [note in Berg's hand: '(The Jews?)'] are indeed Hitlerians, as you consider Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia, Czechoslovakia and perhaps even England as belonging to 'Germany'!!!"{{sfn|Adorno and Berg|2005|loc=249–250}}}} In the late 1930s, they were exhibited for their {{lang|de|"Entartete Musik"|italic=no}} in Nazi Germany{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=161, 165|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=473–475, 478, 491, 498–499|Taruskin|2009f|3loc=211–212}}{{efn|As part of the {{lang|de|Reichsmusiktage|italic=no}}, Webern's photograph was exhibited with the note, "this 'master student' of Arnold Schoenberg outdoes his training even in the length of his nose."{{sfn|Potter|1998|loc=17–18}}}} and then at the Vienna Künstlerhaus in Nazi Austria.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=165|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=498–499}}

Webern delivered an eight-lecture series {{lang|de|Der Weg zur Neuen Musik}}{{efn|The transcript of The Path to the New Music went unpublished until 1960 to avoid "expos[ing] Webern to serious consequences".{{sfn|Webern|1963|loc=7, 19–20}}}} at {{ill|Rita Kurzmann-Leuchter|de}}'s and her physician husband Rudolf Kurzman's home (Feb.–Apr. 1933).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=395}} 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)"{{efn|From 1928 onward, Webern grew closer to Krenek, alongside whom he lectured, whose music (taking a twelve-tone turn) he conducted, and with whom he, Berg, and Adorno shared concerns about the future.{{sfnm|Berg|2014|1loc=214–215, 288–290|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=451|Stewart|1991|3loc=182–196}}}} and warned, "Imagine what will be destroyed, wiped out, by this hate of culture!"{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=451|Webern|1963|2loc=7, 19–20}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=418–421, 472}}

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";{{efn|He was responding to Krenek's essay "Freiheit und Verantwortung" ("Freedom and Responsibility") in {{ill|Willi Reich|de}}'s 23 – Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift (1934). Elsewhere Krenek advocated for "a Catholic Austrian avante garde", opposing "the Austrian provincialism that National Socialism wants to force on us."{{sfn|Stewart|1991|loc=184–188}} {{Wikisourcelang-inline|de|23 – Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift}}.}} 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!"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=479}} The Vienna Philharmonic nearly refused to play Berg's Violin Concerto (1936).{{efn|Only guest conductor Otto Klemperer's status sufficed to overcome their refusal, and even then, the entire orchestra abruptly walked off stage afterward, leaving Krasner, Klemperer, and Arnold Rosé to stand alone. Rosé, retired, had returned to pay his respects to the late Berg as honorary concertmaster.{{sfnm|Krasner and Seibert|1987|1loc=341|Morgan|1993|2loc=75}}}} Peter Stadlen's 1937 Op. 27 premieres were the last Viennese Webern performances until after World War II.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=152|Morgan|1993|2loc=75}} 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.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=177–178|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=503, 684n14}}

Webern's milieu comprised increasingly vast differences.{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=338}} Like most Austrians, he and his family were Catholic, though not church regulars; Webern was perhaps devout if unorthodox.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett and Schingnitz|2020|1loc=18|Brown|2014|2loc=36, 41|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=33, 139, 199, 214, 355}} They became politically divided.{{efn|Webern's only son Peter was an avid Austrian National Socialist. His eldest daughter Amalie married businessman Gunter Waller, who joined the Nazi Party as a business formality. His youngest daughter Christine married {{lang|de|Kreisleiter|italic=no}} and {{lang|de|Schutzstaffel|italic=no}} member Benno Mattl, "little liked by the family", in Jun. 1938.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=497}} His middle daughter Maria Halbich almost emigrated with a man "of Jewish origin". She and Webern's wife Wilhelmine "Minna" Mörtl were wary of Hitler and the Nazis. Webern avoided politics at home.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=86, 166-172|Krones|2007|2loc=Biographie, 1933–1939|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=13, 497-498, 522}}}} His friends (e.g., then Zionist Schoenberg,{{efn|Webern told Krasner, "Schoenberg, had he not been a Jew, would have been quite different!"{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=338}} For Bailey Puffett, this likely referred to Schoenberg's politics,{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=171}} which were vaguely conservative and German nationalist before becoming Zionist. See also "My Attitude towards Politics" in Schoenberg's Style and Idea.}} left-leaning Berg{{efn|Adorno wrote that "Berg was little concerned with politics, although he saw himself implicitly a socialist."{{sfn|Simms and Erwin|2021|loc=375}} Following the 1918 Jännerstreik and 1919 Spartacist uprising, Berg wrote to Erwin Schulhoff, who was sympathetic, "What names does the Entente have (outside of Russia) that ring of idealism as [Rosa] Luxemburg and [Karl] Liebknecht do?"{{sfn|Perle|1980|loc=19–24}} In weary opposition to World War I, Berg had been adapting Junges Deutschland playwright Georg Büchner's proto-Naturalist Woyzeck, with its Vormärz theme of alienation,{{sfnm|Botstein|2010|1loc=330|Schwartz|2017|2loc=85–91}} in his opera Wozzeck. Büchner's revolutionary 1834 call in The Hessian Courier for "Peace to the huts! War on the palaces!" (Friede den Hütten! Krieg den Palästen!){{sfn|Perle|1980|loc=19–24}} had endured. It was paraphrased by August Bebel (1871, during the Paris Commune){{sfn|Broué|1971|loc=13–14}} and Vladimir Lenin (1916, "Peace Without Annexations and the Independence of Poland as Slogans of the Day in Russia", and 1917, "Appeal to the Soldiers of All the Belligerent Countries", both amid the revolutions of 1917–1923 ending World War I, of which the February Revolution was first).}}) were of a mostly Jewish milieu from late Imperial to "red" (Social Democratic) Vienna.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=174|Johnson|2006b|2loc=199|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=530|Simms and Erwin|2021|4loc=375}} Alma Mahler, Krenek, {{ill|Willi Reich|de}}, and Stein preferred or supported the "lesser evil"{{efn|This was Stein's phrase about "what we have [in Vienna]" in a 1934 letter to Schoenberg.{{sfn|Simms and Erwin|2021|loc=376}}}} of the Austrofascists (or aligned Italian fascists) {{lang|fr|vis-à-vis}} the Nazis.{{sfn|Simms and Erwin|2021|loc=375–377}} Presuming power would moderate Hitler, Webern mediated among friends with an optimistic or self-soothing complacency, exasperating those who were at risk.{{sfnm|Kapp|1999|1loc=128|Krones|2007|2loc=Biographie, 1933–1939|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=473–474, 530–532, 680n28}}

Webern found himself surrounded mostly by one side as Schoenberg immigrated to the US (1933), Rudolf Ploderer died by suicide (1933),{{efn|The Moldenhauers described Ploderer as "a victim of ... despair ... because of ... political developments."{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=400, 435}}}} Berg died (1935), and DJ Bach, among others (e.g., Greissle, Jalowetz, Krenek, Reich, Steuermann, Wellesz), fled or worse.{{sfnm|Kapp|1999|1loc=121–128|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=495–496, 517–518}} Webern immediately considered following Schoenberg to the US, which Schoenberg discouraged despite seeking opportunities there for Webern.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=408–413, 499–500}} Schoenberg knew that Webern was deeply attached to home, and he told Webern that conditions in the US were poor, mentioning the ongoing Great Depression.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=412–413, 499–500}}

Webern's views of National Socialism have been variously described.{{efn|Nazism itself was variously outlined, often emphasizing mutually reinforcing anticommunism, expansionist nationalism (Lebensraum), and racialized antisemitism (Judeo-Bolshevism); but historians also noted multipartisan syncretic appeals of a nostalgic, populist nature, with some anti-modernism and irrationalism, socially exclusive communitarianism (Volksgemeinschaft), and criticism of capitalism.{{sfnm|Fulbrook|2011|1loc=45–47|Mayer|1988|2loc=xiii, 90–109}}}} His published items{{efn|Composers' correspondence was conducted with some regard to the possibility of later publication, especially after the nineteenth century. Accounts were often self-admittedly perspectival.}} reflected his audience or context.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=166–174|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=529–530}} Secondary literature reflected limited evidence or ideological orientations{{efn|Tito M. Tonietti observed of Schoenberg's reception history: "The many aspects of his complex life and artistic personality have ... been drastically simplified and isolated from their context. There has been a tendency to prefer only one, the most in line with the thesis that the writer wished to demonstrate. ... Schönberg has unfortunately not been understood ... [but] used ... for ... controversy ..., for ... purpose ... ."{{sfn|Tonietti|2003|loc=236–237}}}} and admitted uncertainty.{{sfnm|Kapp|1999|1loc=121|Powell|2013|2loc=3}} Julie Brown noted hesitancy to approach the topic and echoed the Moldenhauers, considering the issue "vexed" and Webern a "political enigma".{{sfnm|Brown|1998|1loc=149–150|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=530}} Bailey Puffett considered Webern's politics "somewhat vague" and his situation "complex", noting that he seemed to avoid definitive political association as a practical strategy.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=166–174}} Webern's apparent sympathies with some of the Nazis' program later became a sensation in his reception, but the matter was often oversimplified or decontextualized and rested on limited evidence (mostly letters), Johnson wrote, sometimes with the larger aim of politicizing Webern's music and his musical language.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=219–220 {{lang|lt|et passim}} 221–225}}

Krasner and the Moldenhauers surmised Webern's cognitive dissonance, finding him "idealistic and rather naive".{{sfnm|Krasner and Seibert|1987|1loc=337–338|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=532}} 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".{{efn|List ventured that "[n]ationalist ideas may have saved [Webern] from the concentration camp".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=554–555}} Dissent was punishable under the Heimtückegesetz.{{sfnm|Bukey|2019|1loc=70–72|Russell|2019|2loc=45–46}}}} Johnson described him as "personally shy, a man of private feeling and essentially apolitical",{{sfn|Johnson|2006b|loc=197}} and as "prone to identify with Nazi politics as ... other ... Austrians".{{sfn|Johnson|2006b|loc=219–225}} Webern may have believed that the Nazis shared his own ideals, Johnson wrote, explaining that "it is possible that ... naiveté, ... ignorance and ... adherence to his own beliefs allowed Webern to see in Nazi ideology only ... elements ... he wanted to find".{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=220}}

Webern conducted nine concerts as a BBC Symphony visiting conductor (1929–1936). A talkie on his first London visit inspired him to ask Steuermann about writing film music, and Steuermann wrote his relatives in the film industry, Salka Viertel and Berthold Viertel, for their suggestions.{{sfn|Hayes|1995|loc=168–169}} For the BBC, Webern selected then little-known Mahler (including both nocturnes from the Symphony No. 7 in 1934).{{sfn|Foreman|1991|loc=4–10}} He insisted on rehearsing at the piano with vocalists and was criticized for coaching musical phrasing.{{sfn|Foreman|1991|loc=4–10}}

In Barcelona, he withdrew from the 1936 world premiere of Berg's Violin Concerto, grief-stricken after Berg's death and overwhelmed by difficulties.{{sfnm|Foreman|1991|1loc=4–10|Krasner and Seibert|1987|2loc=338–343}} There Krasner recalled, {{Blockquote|[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. Kenneth Anthony Wright noted Webern's "funny little explanations of the varying dynamics and flexibility of tempo", but "every syllable and every gesture of Webern was understood and lovingly heeded", Krasner recalled. 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.{{sfnm|Foreman|1991|1loc=4–10|Krasner and Seibert|1987|2loc=338–343}}{{efn|Goldschmidt reported that Webern was called "{{lang|de|Kapellmeister|italics=no}} Zig-Zag", perhaps at the Berlin Philharmonic.{{sfn|Foreman|1991|loc=8}}}}

Krasner's last visit with Webern was interrupted by Kurt Schuschnigg's broadcast speech that the Anschluss was imminent.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=164–165|Krasner and Seibert|1987|2loc=343|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=476}} Krasner had been playing some of Schoenberg's Violin Concerto for Webern and trying to convince him to write a sonata for solo violin.{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=338–343}} When Webern turned on the radio and heard this speech, he urged Krasner to flee.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=164|Krasner and Seibert|1987|2loc=343|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=476}} Because Webern's family included Nazis, Krasner wondered whether Webern had already known that the Anschluss was planned for that day.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=164–165|Krasner and Seibert|1987|2loc=343}} 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.{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=343}}

Much of Austria did celebrate.{{sfnm|Greissle-Schönberg|2003b|Hochman|2016|2loc=237–238|Krasner and Seibert|1987|3loc=343|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|4loc=476–477, 495|Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, and Liebhart|2009|5loc=52}} But Webern made only a terse note of the Anschluss in his notebook without registering any clear emotion.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=476–477}} 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.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=164–165|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=476–477|Shreffler|1999|3loc=299}} Thus, Bailey Puffett suggested that Webern may have received Krasner's visit as a distraction.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=154–155, 158–160, 164–165, 171, 174, 189–190}}

By now, Hartmut Krones wrote, Webern likely realized his error in anticipating the Nazis' self-moderation.{{sfn|Krones|2007|loc=Biographie, 1933–1939}} Bailey Puffett proposed 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 after 1936.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=154–155, 158–160, 164–165, 171, 174, 189–190}} 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.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=154–155, 158–160, 164–165|Krasner and Seibert|1987|2loc=337–338}}

Support for the Anschluss rested on antisemitism, economic prospects,{{efn|Austrofascists enacted unpopular economic measures amid 1930s mass unemployment; the Nazis waged economic warfare (e.g., the thousand-mark ban).{{sfn|Obinger|2018|loc=86}}}} and the idea of a Greater Germany.{{sfn|Bukey|2000|loc=151–152}}{{efn|Austrian pan-Germans, {{lang|de|Grossdeutschen}}, or {{lang|de|Deutschnationalisten}} hoped for stable prosperity via some form of Greater German nation-state like the Reich.{{sfnm|Berger|2003|1loc=74|Czerwińska-Schupp|2016|2loc=1, 20–21 (quoting {{ill|Josef Redlich|de}})|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=497|Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, and Liebhart|2009|rloc=52, 55–56}} This hope was shared by some Social Democrats and was not alien to Social Christians.{{sfn|Czerwińska-Schupp|2016|loc=23}} The Greater German People's Party received a maximum of 17% of the vote during 1919–1933 elections, mostly from students, teachers, and civil servants.{{sfn|Bukey|2000|loc=9}} They were most popular in Styria and Carinthia.{{sfn|Kirk|2003|loc=15}} First they governed with the Social Christians.{{sfn|Berger|2003|loc=78, 86}} Austrian Nazis won their parliamentary seats by 1933.{{sfnm|Berger|2003|1loc=86–87|Kirk|2003|2loc=18}} That year they joined forces with the Social Democrats.{{sfn|Kirk|2003|loc=20}} They had Nazi affinity, though not identity, as of 1934.{{sfn|Lassner|2003|loc=167}} Schuschnigg described Hitler's plans for Austria as "pan-German" in 1936.{{sfn|Lassner|2003|loc=172–173}}}} Under some duress, Theodor Innitzer ushered in Catholic support.{{sfnm|Bukey|2000|1loc=32, 35–36|Krasner and Seibert|1987|2loc=342–343}} The Austrian Nazis and Social Democrats, both outlawed, were linked in opposition to the Austrofascists.{{sfn|Krones|2007|loc=Biographie, 1939–1945}} Karl Renner supported unification as a matter of self-determination before the years (1933–1938) of {{lang|de|Gleichschaltung}} and Nazi soft power,{{efn|Deteriorating German-Austrian relations and Austrian weakening were marked by the July Putsch, assassinations (including Engelbert Dollfuss's), and terror (including bombings "almost daily" in Austria).{{sfnm|Berger|2003|1loc=87–89|Lassner|2003|2loc=164–169, 180n4|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=680n26}}}} and he and others now supported (or accepted as inevitable) the 1938 Anschluss.{{sfnm|Bukey|2000|1loc=11–12, 36–38, 76–79, 227–228|Hochman|2016|2loc=7–9, 22–23, 34–36, 46–47, 191–193, 231–242}} 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.{{sfn|Czerwińska-Schupp|2016|loc=1, 22–24, 39–44, 162–167, 192–194, 210–211, 217–218, 339–350}} Webern had long shared in common pan-German sentiments, especially during wartime.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=209–210, 496–500, 525–532, 555}} 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.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=161}} According to what Josef Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian, told the Moldenhauers, Webern's optimism was not dispelled until 1941.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=499, 683n8: "According to Polnauer, Webern only very gradually came to realize what was happening ... It took ... three years [after 1938] until his childlike faith ... was definitely shaken"; cf. 458, 474, 529, 538, 588: "optimism"}}

Krasner emphasized Webern's "naiveté" but acknowledged that he himself had been "foolhardy" as to the danger of antisemitism, recalling "read[ing] in the papers ... denials" and "want[ing] to see for myself" in 1938.{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=337–338, 343–345}}{{efn|Krasner further recalled that only his US passport saved him from locals and police when revisiting Vienna in 1941 to help friends (e.g., Schoenberg's daughter Gertrude, her husband Felix Greissle) emigrate.{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=343–345}}}} 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".{{sfn|Wistrich|2012|loc=18–19}} The Frankfurt School first treated it within the rubric of class conflict (Adorno began to consider it otherwise in his 1939 "Fragments on Wagner"),{{sfn|Jay|1986|loc=90–93}} 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).{{sfn|Wistrich|2012|loc=18–19}}

{{lang|de|Kristallnacht|italic=no}} shocked Webern,{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=516–519, 530–531}} who thought that reports of Nazi atrocities were politicized, unreliable propaganda.{{sfnm|Krasner and Seibert|1987|1loc=337|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=473–474}} He visited and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach, {{ill|Otto Jokl|de}}, Polnauer, and Hugo Winter.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=516–519, 530–531}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=517}} Polnauer, whose emigration Mark Brunswick, Schoenberg, and Webern were unable to secure,{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=531|Schoenberg|2018|2loc=209}} 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.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=86, 105, 173|Webern|1967}} Webern moved Humplik's 1929 gift of a Mahler bust to his bedroom,{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=165|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=340, 385, 530}} having told {{ill|Felix Greissle|de}} in 1936 or 1937 that Mahler's time would come within a German {{lang|de|Kulturnation}}{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=150|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=473–474}} and DJ Bach that "not all Germans are Nazis".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=473, 680n29}}

With "almost all his friends and old pupils ... gone",{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=500–505}} Webern found himself increasingly alone,{{sfn|Kapp|1999|loc=121–128}} and his financial situation was poor. He talked to Polnauer about emigrating but was reluctant to leave home and family.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=408–409, 499–500}} He entered a period of "inward emigration" and focused on composition,{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=174|Kapp|1999|2loc=121–128|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=499–500}} writing to artist Franz Rederer in 1939, "We live completely withdrawn. I work a lot."{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=517}} He corresponded extensively to maintain relationships, imploring his student George Robert to play Schoenberg in New York{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=503–504, 519–520, 685}} and expressing his loneliness and isolation to Schoenberg.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=521}} Then war limited postal service,{{sfnm|Kapp|1999|1loc=121–128|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=503–504, 517, 531, 549}} disrupting their direct correspondence completely by 1941.

Webern's mature music was performed mostly outside the {{lang|de|Reich}}, where only his tonal music and arrangements were allowed as works not in the style of a {{lang|de|"Judenknecht"}}. His arrangement of two of Schubert's German Dances was performed in Leipzig and broadcast in the {{lang|de|Reich}} and Fascist Italy (1941).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=537–538}} His Passacaglia was considered for a Viennese contemporary music festival in 1942, Karl Böhm or Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting, but this did not happen.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=537–538}} Hans Rosbaud likely performed it in occupied Strasbourg that year, and Luigi Dallapiccola sought to have it performed in Venice in 1943.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=537–538}} Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt planned Webern's arrangement of the six-voice ricercar from Bach's Musical Offering at the {{lang|de|Deutsche Oper Berlin|italics=no}} in 1943, but war intervened.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=537–538}}

Supported by IGNM-Sektion Basel, the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur, and Werner Reinhart, Webern attended three Swiss concerts, his last trips outside the {{lang|de|Reich}}.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=523–525, 548–552, 579–580}} 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 {{ill|Stadthaus (Winterthur)|lt=Winterthur Stadthaus|de|Stadthaus (Winterthur)|display=1}}. Webern intimated to Willi Reich that he might immigrate there, joking (Oct. 1939) "Anything of the sort did seem quite out of the question for me!"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=499–500, 523}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=525, 591–592}}

In the Reich, he met with former Society violist Othmar Steinbauer about a formal teaching role in Vienna in early 1940, but nothing materialized.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=237, 538}} He lectured at the homes of Erwin Ratz and {{ill|Carl Prohaska|de}}'s widow Margaret (1940–1942).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=539}} Many private pupils came to him between 1940 and 1943, even from afar, among them briefly Hartmann.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=538–540}} Hartmann, who opposed the Nazis, remembered that Webern counseled him to respect authority, at least publicly, for the sake of order.{{sfn|Krones|2007|loc=Biographie, 1939–1945}}

Sharing in wartime public sentiment at the height of Hitler's popularity (spring 1940), Webern expressed high hopes, crediting him as "unique" and "singular"{{efn|Webern emphasized.}} 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.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=86, 166–175|Johnson|1999|2loc=219–222|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=XI, 18, 283, 292, 333, 337, 339, 345, 356, 370, 372, 416–417, 448, 467, 517, 525–533, 538–539, 544–548, 550, 552, 555, 569, 573–575, 578, 591, 641–643|Ross|2007|4loc=352}} Indeed, Hueber had just sent Webern Mein Kampf.{{efn|Webern's immediate reply (March 1940) was: "I ... with reference ... to my ... experiences ... wondered how such opposites could have become possible next to each other."{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=526}}}}

Unaware of Stefan George's aversion to the Nazis, Webern reread {{ill|Das neue Reich (George)|lt=Das neue Reich|de|Das neue Reich (George)|display=1}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=527–530}} For Johnson, "Webern's own image of a {{lang|de|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."{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=221}}

By Aug. 1940, Webern depended financially on his children.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=86, 166|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=522–523}} He sought wartime emergency relief funds from {{lang|de|Künstlerhilfe Wien|italic=no}} and the {{lang|de|Reichsmusikkammer|italic=no}} {{ill|Künstlerdank|de}} (1940–1944), which he received despite indicating non-membership in the Nazi Party on an application.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=168-172|Kater|1997|2loc=74|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=544–545}} Whether Webern ever joined the party was unknown.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=166-172}}{{efn|In the tradition of parties seeking a dues-paying mass membership, formal NSDAP affiliation could oblige one to pay registration fees or dues, or even to labor.{{sfn|Turner|1985|loc=59–60, 113–124, 157, 292–293, 347, 403}} Nazis dissuaded some prospective members from formal affiliation as a strategic matter.{{sfn|Turner|1985|loc=143–144, 347–349}}}} This represented his only income after 1942.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=544–545}} He nearly exhausted his savings by 1944.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=544–545}}

His 1943–1945 letters were strewn with references to bombings, death, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order, but several grandchildren were born.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=183}} 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.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=183}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=553–554}} For Schoenberg's 70th birthday (1944), Webern asked Reich to convey "my most heartfelt remembrances, ... longing! ... hopes for a happy future!"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=592}} In Feb. 1945, Webern's only son Peter, intermittently conscripted since 1940,{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=526, 552}} was killed in an air attack; airstrike sirens interrupted the family's mourning at the funeral.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=600–603}}

File:Mittersill Webern-Grab 1.png]]

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.{{efn|Schoenberg was unable to secure Görgi's emigration despite many attempts. Between the Russian–German language barrier and Nazi munitions and propaganda in the apartment's storeroom, Görgi was held and nearly executed as a Nazi spy but was able to convince a German-speaking Jewish officer otherwise. Görgi and his family remained there until 1969.{{sfnm|Greissle-Schönberg|2003a|Krasner and Seibert|1987|2loc=345-346|Schoenberg|2018|3loc=209}}}} Görgi later told Krasner that Webern "felt he'd betrayed his best friends."{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=346}} 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".{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1998|loc=183–184}}

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.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=185–191|Krasner and Seibert|1987|2loc=346|Moldenhauer|1961|3loc=85, 102, 1141–16|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|4loc=632}} He had been following Thomas Mann's work, which the Nazis had burned, noting in 1944 that Mann had finished Joseph and His Brothers.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=620, 680n27}} In his last notebook entry, Webern quoted Rainer Maria Rilke: "Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything."{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1998|1loc=164|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=619–620}}{{efn|Webern had not set Rilke's work since Op. 8.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=113–115, 132–134, 138, 190, 204}} Schoenberg dedicated a 1915 setting of Rilke's "{{lang|de|Alle, welche dich suchen|italic=no}}", Op. 22/ii, to Webern.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=212}}}}

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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=638–643}} With the abolition of {{lang|de|Entartete Kunst|italic=no}} policies, {{ill|Alfred Schlee|de}} solicited her for hidden manuscripts; thus Opp. 17, 24–25, and 29–31 were published.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=638–643}} She worked to get Webern's 1907 Piano Quintet published via Kurt List.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=638–643}}

In 1947 she wrote Diez, now in the US, that by 1945 Webern was "firmly resolved to go to England".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=638–643}} 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."{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=638–643}} Minna died in 1949.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=638–643}}

{{further|List of compositions by Anton Webern}}

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| salign = right|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.

| source = Webern wrote to Schoenberg (June 1910).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=113}} 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".{{sfnm|Adorno|1984|1loc=448|Adorno|2004|2loc=418}}

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Webern's music was generally concise, organic, and parsimonious,{{efn|Webern repeatedly emphasized {{lang|de|Zusammenhang}}, translated as unity, coherence, or connection. Jonathan Kramer wrote that Webern's definition of unity was "utmost relatedness" and that he sought "to develop everything else from one principal idea!"{{sfnm|Kramer|2016|loc=53, 53n22, 84, quoting Webern in The Path to the New Music 35}} Kramer noted that most prior music and theory shared Webern's emphasis.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=84}} But Webern's zeal and rigor fit more with twentieth-century modernism, and his approach added complexity, Kramer argued.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=84–85}} Sibelius was also noted for his organicism and natural topics. British concert programs posed him as an alternative to the Second Viennese School.{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=112–113}} Adorno and Leibowitz criticized him.{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=124–125}}}} with very small motifs, palindromes, and parameterization on both the micro- and macro-scale.{{sfnm|Burkholder|1983|1loc=125|Frigyesi|1998|2loc=23, 25–26, 30–33, 36–41, 90–93, 105–108|Neubauer|2001|3loc=11–15|Neubauer|2002|4loc=501–502|Neubauer|2009|5loc=21–22, 29–31|Rochberg|2004|6loc=17–18}} His idiosyncratic approach reflected affinities with Schoenberg, Mahler,{{efn|Taruskin noted Webern's "descent from Mahler".{{sfn|Taruskin|2023a|loc=294}} Keith Fitch glossed Webern as "crystallized Mahler". The opening of Webern's Op. 21 echoed that of Mahler's Ninth.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=205}}}} Guido Adler and early music; interest in esotericism and {{lang|de|Naturphilosophie}}; and thorough perfectionism.{{efn|This was noted in his performances.{{sfn|Johnson|2006b|loc=205–206}}}} He engaged with the work of Goethe, Bach,{{efn|Webern engaged with Bach in two phases, first as a student.{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=299|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=37, 39}} Later, he conducted Bach's music ten times (1927–1935), finding inspiration in it while writing his twelve-tone music.{{sfn|Zenck|1989|loc=299, 309}} He made some connections between his and Bach's music to make his own more easily understandable and to emphasize his place in established tradition.{{sfn|Zenck|1989|loc=299}} Webern cited the two-movement (overture–dance suite) form of Bach's orchestral suites as one model for the two-movement form of his Op. 21 (writing to Schoenberg),{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=299|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=319, 325–326}} the instrumentation of the Brandenburg Concertos as inspiration for that of his Op. 24 (writing to Hertzka),{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=299–300|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=422}} and Bach's B-minor badinerie as the model for the Op. 27/ii scherzo (in coaching Peter Stadlen).{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=300|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=483, 681n6}} Writing to Stein, Webern confirmed (as Polnauer had already noticed) that the BACH motif was the motivic basis of his Op. 28, but "secretly ... never ... in this ostentatious transposition!!!"{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=300|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=492–493, 756}} He asked Stein not to publicize this in Tempo.{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=300|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=492}} In the same letter, Webern also outlined a complex synthesis of musical forms in Op. 28/iii, specifically identifying Bach's influence in the fugal element.{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=299–300|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=492–493, 753–756}}}} and the Franco-Flemish School in addition to that of Wolf, Brahms,{{efn|Webern's Op. 1 was openly modeled on that of Brahms's Fourth.{{sfn|Littlewood|2004|loc=33}} Webern's Op. 27/i was perhaps modeled on Brahms's Op. 116/v.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=483|Musgrave|1985|2loc=259–260}}}} Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Beethoven, Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), and Mozart.{{sfnm|Burkholder|1983|1loc=119–128|Burkholder|2006|2loc=425|Cook and Pople|2004|3loc=672|Kolneder|1968|4loc=20–21|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|5loc=37, 39, 49–69, 74–78, 84–88, 99, 124–125, 265, 274, 276, 300, 318–321, 325–328, 334–339, 366–369, 373–374, 378–380, 414, 419, 424–427, 482, 506–508, 570–572, 575–576, 689, 715, 738–739|Morris|2016|6loc=172–173|Street|1989|7loc=71–91|Tarasti|2002|8loc=44–46, 99–104|Tarasti|2015|9loc=292–293}}{{efn|Webern often referred to the Franco-Flemish School as "the Netherlanders." In Feb. 1905 Webern recorded in his diary, "Mahler pointed out ... Rameau ... Bach, Brahms, and Wagner as ... contrapuntalists ... . '... Just as in nature the entire universe has developed from the primeval cell ... beyond to God ... so also in music should a large structure develop [entirely] from a single motive ... .' Variation is ... most important ... . A theme [must] be ... beautiful ... to make its unaltered return ... . ... [M]usicians [should] combine ... contrapuntal skill ... with ... melodiousness".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=75–76}} In Jan. 1931, Schoenberg responded to Webern's plan for lectures: "... show the logical development towards twelve-tone composition. ... [T]he Netherlands School, Bach for counterpoint, Mozart for phrase formation [and] motivic treatment, Beethoven [and] Bach for development, Brahms, and ... Mahler for varied and highly complex treatment. ... [T]itle ... : 'The path to twelve-tone composition.'"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=374}} J. Peter Burkholder generalized his claim that "the use of existing music as a basis for new music is pervasive in all periods";{{sfn|Allen-Russell|2023|loc=192}} he had focused on "the historicist mainstream" within the proximal eighteenth and especially nineteenth and twentieth centuries.{{sfn|Burkholder|1983|loc=115, 124–125, 129, 132}} Adriaan Peperzak, writing about the taste of "most intellectuals" at the end of the 20th century as "a plurality of cultural homes" (or about "the 'modern museum of cultures'"),{{sfnm|Stapleton|1994|1loc=12–13|Peperzak|1994|2loc=461}} stressed a general connection between new and old represented also in music (i.e., both "after" and before tonality or common practice), observing that "whereas certain works of Bartók and Stravinsky already are experienced as difficult," "Josquin des Prez, Gesualdo, Webern and Boulez seem to be reserved to a small elite, and we continue to refer to traditional art in learning how to compose new works and how to listen to the extraordinary works made according to non-traditional codes."{{sfn|Peperzak|1994|loc=466}}}} Stylistic shifts were not neatly coterminous with gradually developed technical devices, particularly in the case of his mid-period {{lang|de|Lieder}}.{{efn|For example, his first use of twelve-tone technique in Op. 17, Nos. 2 and 3, was more technical than stylistic, and Adorno felt that Op. 14 sounded twelve-tone.{{sfnm|Adorno|1999|1loc=100|Antokoletz|2014|2loc=44|Bailey Puffett|1991|3loc=14, 31–35, 94, 107–109, 125, 418|Ballance|2023|4loc=Abstract, 95, 232–234|Johnson|1999|5loc=165}}}}

His music was also characteristically linear and song-like.{{sfnm|Rochberg|2004|1loc=15|Shreffler|1994|2loc=18|Shreffler|1999|3loc=253–255}} Much of it (and Berg's{{sfn|Schroeder|1999|loc=218–219}} and Schoenberg's){{sfnm|Berry|2019|1loc=74|Simms|1999|2loc=161–162}} was for singing.{{sfn|Elliott|2007|loc=222}}{{efn|Their instrumental music has been related to vocal idioms: the "concealed vocality" and "latent opera" of Berg's Lyric Suite{{sfn|Schroeder|1999|loc=233–234}} and the Bach chorale and folk melody of his Violin Concerto; the "recitative" of Schoenberg's Op. 16/v and the accented musical prose of his twelve-tone music. Unlike Berg and Schoenberg, Webern did not use {{lang|de|Hauptstimmen}} and {{lang|de|Nebenstimmen}}, but he endorsed textures of accompanied melody in his music's polyphony. He could not stop writing songs, he told Berg (1921) and Hertzka (1927), noting his work's "almost exclusively lyrical nature" and apologizing to Hertzka for the consequently inauspicious commercial implications.{{sfn|Shaftel|2000|loc=iv}}}} Johnson described the song-like gestures of Op. 11/i.{{sfn|Johnson|1998|loc=275–279}} In Webern's mid-period {{lang|de|Lieder}}, some heard instrumentalizing of the voice{{sfnm|Kolneder|1968|1loc=86|Shreffler|1994|2loc=149}} (often in relation to the clarinet){{sfn|Adorno|1999|loc=100}} representing yet some continuity with {{lang|it|bel canto}}.{{sfnm|Barker|2004|1loc=24–26|Fraser|2003|2loc=9–25|Matter|1981|3loc=57|Shreffler|1999|4loc=276}}{{efn|Berg endorsed an innovative, pluralist approach emphasizing some {{lang|it|bel canto}} and like Webern, expressed faith in singers to execute challenging lines.{{sfnm|Berg|2014|1loc=218–219, 222, 261|Elliott|2007|2loc=229–230|Hayes|1995|3loc=138|Perle|1985|4loc=29}}}} Lukas Näf described one of Webern's signature hairpins (on the Op. 21/i mm. 8–9 bass clarinet {{lang|it|tenuto}} note) as a messa di voce requiring some rubato to execute faithfully.{{sfn|Näf|2019|loc=190}}{{efn|Hairpins were arguably read as {{lang|it|tenuto}}-like agogic accents.{{sfn|Kim|2012|loc=46–48, 51}}}} Adventurous textures and timbres, and melodies of wide leaps and sometimes extreme ranges and registers were typical.{{sfnm|Clark|2001|1loc=573|Hayes|2021|2loc=9}}

For Johnson, Webern's rubato compressed Mahler's "'surging and ebbing'" tempi; this and Webern's dynamics indicated a "vestigial lyrical subjectivity."{{sfn|Johnson|2017|loc=228}} Webern often set carefully chosen lyric poetry.{{sfn|Rode-Breymann|1996|loc=1}} 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 plant aromatics and morphology.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=1–8, 20–37, 42–44, 50, 73–78, 100–109, 145–154, 162, 172, 182, 186, 193, 199–218, 230–232, 248, 259}} He was compared to Mahler in his orchestration and semantic preoccupations (e.g., memory, landscapes, nature, loss, often Catholic mysticism).{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=258}} In Jone, who he met with her husband Humplik via the {{lang|de|Hagenbund|italic=no}}, Webern found a lyricist who shared his esoteric, natural, and spiritual interests. She provided texts for his late vocal works.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=340–342}}

Webern's and Schoenberg's music distinctively prioritized minor seconds, major sevenths, and minor ninths{{efn|Some exceptions included Webern's Op. 23.}} as noted in 1934 by microtonalist Alois Hába.{{sfn|Hába|1934|loc=15–17}} 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.{{sfn|Ewell|2013|loc=220–223, 242}} Webern's consistent use of ic1 in cells and sets, often expressed as a wide interval musically,{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1991|1loc=47|Hayes|2021|2loc=9|Taruskin|2023a|3loc=294}}{{efn|Webern found Bartók's String Quartet No. 4 "cacophonous" for its clusters of semitones.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=465}}}} was well noted.{{efn|Philip Ewell cited Erhard Karkoschka, Kolneder, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Henri Pousseur, and Karlheinz Stockhausen on this point.{{sfn|Ewell|2013|loc=219–221}}}} Symmetric pitch-interval practices varied in rigor and use by others (e.g., Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók, Debussy, Stravinsky; more nascently Mahler, Brahms, Bruckner,{{efn|Eliahu Inbal, whose work with the {{lang|de|hr-Sinfonieorchester|italic=no}} in the 1980s was part of a Bruckner reappraisal,{{sfnm|Korstvedt|2004|1loc=121|Sanderson|n.d.}} found additional connections between Bruckner and Webern and Romantics and modernists more generally,{{sfn|Inbal|2022}} echoing Dika Newlin and Mahler himself.}} 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).{{sfnm|Antokoletz|2014|1loc=44–47|Baragwanath|1999|loc=262–83}}

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,{{sfn|Shaftel|2004|loc=iv}} obscuring formative facets of his musical identity.{{sfnm|Chen|2006|Puffett|1996|2loc=38|Yang|1987|3loc=vi}} Thus when Boulez first oversaw a project to record Webern's music, the results fit on three CDs and the second time, six.{{sfnm|Fitch|2000|Webern|2000}}{{efn|Performers also relaxed their tempi.{{sfn|Quick|2010|loc=103–104, 112–118, 248}}}} A historical edition of his music has remained in progress.

Webern published little juvenilia; like Brahms, he was meticulous and self-conscious, revising extensively.{{sfnm|Meyer and Shreffler|1996|1loc=136|Shere|2007|2loc=7}} His earliest works were mostly Lieder on works of Richard Dehmel, Gustav Falke, and Theodor Storm.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=211–236}} He set seven Ferdinand Avenarius poems on the "changing moods" of life and nature (1899–1904).{{sfn|Rode-Breymann|1996|loc=2}} 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.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=42–45}} He never abandoned its lyricism, intimacy, and wistful or nostalgic topics, though his music became more abstract, idealized, and introverted.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=211–236}}

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 Preglhof in summer 1905, Webern wrote his tripartite, single-movement string quartet in a highly modified sonata form, likely responding to Schoenberg's Op. 7.{{sfn|Wedler|2015|loc=225–226, 229}} He quoted Jakob Böhme in the preface{{sfn|Jensen|1989|loc=12–14}} and mentioned the panels{{efn|{{lang|it|La vita}}, {{lang|it|La natura}}, and {{lang|it|La morte}}; or Life, Nature, and Death}} of Segantini's {{lang|it|Trittico della natura}}{{efn|Alpine Triptych (1898–1899)}} as "{{lang|de|Werden–Sein–Vergehen}}"{{efn|"Becoming–Being–Bygone"}} in sketches.{{sfnm|Jensen|1989|1loc=11–15|Johnson|1999|2loc=72–77|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=86}} 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.{{sfn|Wedler|2015|loc=229–243}} In its opening harmonies, Allen Forte and Heinz-Klaus Metzger noted Webern's anticipation of Schoenberg's atonality in Op. 10.{{sfn|Wedler|2015|loc=226–227}}

File:Danzig - Friedrich-Wilhelm-Schutzenhaus - Saal. 1906 (70940322).jpg's Friedrich-Wilhelm-{{ill|Schützenhaus|de}} in a 1906 postcard photograph]]

In 1906, Schoenberg assigned Webern Bach chorales to harmonize and figure; Webern completed eighteen in a highly chromatic idiom.{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=299, 301–308|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=82, 87–88}} 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.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1996|1loc=195|Meyer and Shreffler|1996|2loc=147, 150|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=93–97}} Conducting the 1911 Danzig premiere of Op. 1 at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-{{ill|Schützenhaus|de}}, 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 {{lang|de|Moderner Abend}}{{efn|Modern Evening}} concert. The {{ill|Danziger Zeitung|de}} critic derided Op. 1 as an "insane experiment".{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett and Schingnitz|2020|1loc=193|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=140–141}}

In 1908 Webern also began an opera on Maeterlinck's {{ill|Alladine et Palomides|fr}}, of which only unfinished sketches remained,{{sfnm|Kolneder|1968|1loc=225|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=116–117, 736–737}} 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 {{ill|Les Sept Princesses|fr}}.{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc="one scene" as on 84, quoting his own translation of Webern's July 1912 letter from Rexroth's Opus Anton Webern|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=113, 132, "several scenes" as on 190, 736–737}} He had been an opera enthusiast from his student days.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=57}} Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande enraptured him twice in Dec. 1908 Berlin and again in 1911 Vienna.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=104}} As a vocal coach and opera conductor, he knew the repertoire "perfectly ... every cut, ... unmarked cadenza, and in the comic operas every theatrical joke".{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=184}} 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.{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=128, 184}}

{{Listen|type=music|image=none|help=no|filename=Excerpt of Fünf Sätze für Streichquartett, Op. 5, I. Heftig bewegt; Anton Webern, composer, Schloss Preglhof, spring 1909; Emerson String Quartet, State University of New York at Purchase, 19 October 1992.ogg|title=Fünf Sätze for string quartet, Op. 5, I. Heftig bewegt (Schloss Preglhof, spring 1909) – Emerson String Quartet|description=Spending summer 1909 with Webern (et al.) and seeing his Op. 5 manuscript reinvigorated Schoenberg's music, inspiring him to write Busoni: "... away with 'motivic working out.' Away with harmony as cement or bricks of a building. Harmony is expression and nothing else. ... Away with Pathos [and] protracted ten-ton scores ... . My music must be brief. Concise! In two notes: not built, but expressed!! ... no stylized and sterile protracted emotion. People are not like that" (Schoenberg's emphases).{{sfnm|Busoni|1987|1loc=388–9|Haimo|2010|2loc=100–104|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=123–125, 706–707}}}}

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.{{sfn|Street|2005|loc=86}} Schoenberg and Webern were so mutually influential, the former later joked, "I haven't the slightest idea who I am".{{sfn|Schoenberg|1950|loc=484}} 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".{{sfn|Brinkmann|2000|loc=9–12}}{{efn|"I feel the air of other planets"}}

The first of Webern's innovative and increasingly extremely aphoristic Opp. 5–11 (1909–1914) radically influenced Schoenberg's Opp. 11/iii{{efn|Op. 11/iii (mid-1909) so differed from Op. 11/i–ii (Feb. 1909) that when Bartók performed Op. 11 (23 Apr. 1921 Budapest, 4 Apr. 1922 Paris), he omitted it.{{sfn|Krones|2017|loc=125}}}} and 16–17 (and Berg's Opp. 4–5).{{sfnm|Adorno|1984|1loc=448|Bailey Puffett|1997|2loc=83–86|Haimo|2010|3loc=100–104|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|4loc=64, 93–97, 117–134, 190–208, 263, 279, 656}} Here, {{ill|Martin Zenck|de}} considered, Webern did not seek "the new ... in [music of] the past but in the future".{{sfn|Zenck|1989|loc=301}} 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."{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=194}} "[H]aving freed music from the shackles of tonality," Schoenberg wrote, he and his pupils believed "music could renounce motivic features".{{sfn|Haimo|2006|loc=318–352}} This "intuitive aesthetic" arguably proved to be aspirational insofar as motives persisted in their music.{{sfn|Boss|2015|loc=2, 5, 10–12, 46, n8}}

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, {{lang|de|Heimat}} (e.g., the Preglhof, the Eastern Alps).{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=121}} Webern explored these ideas explicitly in his stage play Tot (Dead, Oct. 1913), which comprises six tableaux vivants set in the Alps, over the course of which a mother and father reflect on and come to terms with the loss of their son.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=33–34, 75, 101–108, 132–134}}{{efn|Webern was likely inspired by the sudden death of his nephew, Theo Clementschitsch, who died on holiday in Italy.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=101}} Webern had to negotiate the return of his body to Austria.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=101}}}} He drew so heavily from Swedenborg's theological doctrine of correspondences, quoting from Vera Christiana Religio at length, that Schoenberg considered the play unoriginal.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=107–108, 132–134}}

It is known that Webern sublimated these concerns into his music, particularly in the case of his Op. 6.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=107–108, 132–134}} Confiding in Berg and Schoenberg, Webern told the latter some about the programmatic narrative for that music in Jan. 1913, as Schoenberg prepared to premiere it at what would become the {{lang|de|Skandalkonzert|italic=no}} that March:{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=103–104 {{lang|lt|et passim}} 40, 85, 99–127|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=126}}{{blockquote|The first piece is to express my frame of mind ... already sensing the disaster, yet ... maintaining the hope that I would find my mother still alive. It was a beautiful day—for a minute I believed ... nothing had happened. Only during the train ride to Carinthia ... did I learn the truth. The third piece conveys ... the fragrance of the {{lang|lt|Erica}}, which I gathered ... in the forest ... and ... laid on the bier.{{efn|Webern wrote Berg that August, "the heather from the middle of August is my favourite flower. It's most beautiful in a forest clearing, where the sun can reach, that wonderful sun, where it is against the grass, and the bees and bumble-bees are upon it, and that scent. I've indulged in orgies there, standing motionless, my eyes closed, that's my favourite. Have I already told you, that the 3rd piece of my orchestral pieces was born from such an impression. Directly. The scent of heather. But of course, that is the scent of heather which I laid on my mother's coffin."{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=104 {{lang|lt|et passim}} 40, 85, 99–127, quoting his own translation of Webern's Aug 1913 letter from Rexroth's Opus Anton Webern (77)}}}} The fourth piece I later entitled {{lang|it|marcia funebre}}. Even today I do not understand my feelings as I walked behind the coffin to the cemetery. ... The evening ... was miraculous. With my wife I went ... again to the cemetery ... . I had the feeling of my mother's ... presence.}}

As Webern's music took on the character of such static dramaticovisual scenes, his pieces frequently culminated 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.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=105–108}} 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".{{efn|"Ecstasy was [Webern's] natural state of mind", Stein recalled.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=205}}}} Oliver Korte traced Webern's {{lang|de|Klangfelder}}{{efn|"fields of sound", sound-fields}} to Mahler's "suspensions".{{efn|For Adorno, these were an "essential" Mahlerian formal "genre", often episodic as in a section of music marked {{lang|it|senza tempo}}. Korte compared Webern's Op. 10/iii to the passage before Mahler's "Chorus mysticus".}}

Expanding on Mahler's orchestration, Webern linked colorful, novel, fragile, and intimate sounds, often nearly silent at {{serif|ppp}}, to lyrical topics: solo violin to female voice; closed or open voicings, sometimes {{lang|it|sul ponticello}}, to dark or light respectively; compressed range to absence, emptiness, or loneliness; registral expansion to fulfillment, (spiritual) presence, or transcendence;{{efn|Beethoven's similar use of registral expansion was noted (e.g., Op. 111, No. 2, Var. 5 when the theme re-emerges in a strange harmonic context after a long section of trills).}} celesta, harp, and glockenspiel to the celestial or ethereal; and trumpet, harp, and string harmonics to angels or heaven.{{sfnm|Dolan and Rehding|2021|1loc=135, 144, 157–159, 183, 514, 527–529, 534|Johnson|1999|2loc=57, 94, 110–112, 121, 125, 141, 201}}{{efn|Examples included the circling ostinati of Op. 6/v and the end of Op. 15/v.}}

With elements of {{lang|de|Kabarett|italic=no}},{{efn|See {{lang|de|Sprechgesang|italic=no}}. Schoenberg briefly directed and wrote for the Überbrettl, for example, in the 1901 Brettl-Lieder.}} neoclassicism,{{efn|Examples included passacaglia in "Nacht", fugue in "Der Mondfleck", and canon in both.}} and ironic Romanticism{{efn|Examples included the virtuoso solo and waltz in "Serenade" and triadic harmony in "O alter Duft".}} in Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21 (1912), Schoenberg began{{efn|"Galgenlied" was still quite short.}} to distance himself from Webern's and latterly Berg's aphoristic expressionism, which provoked the {{lang|de|Skandalkonzert|italic=no}}. 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".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=660n9, quoting a 1915 note from Alma Mahler published in her Mein Leben (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1960): 77}}

{{Listen|type=music|image=none|help=no|filename=Excerpt of Fünf geistliche Lieder für Sopran und fünf Instrumente, Op. 15, V. Fahr hin, o Seel, zu deinem Gott; Anton Webern, composer, 1917; Peter Rosegger, poet, 1900; and Halina Lukomska, soprano and Pierre Boulez, conductor, 1969.ogg|title="Fahr hin, o Seel', zu deinem Gott", double canon in motu contrario (Klagenfurt, 20 July 1917) – soprano Halina Lukomska and conductor Pierre Boulez|description=In this excerpt (mm. 20–29) is Webern's lyric setting of the text "{{lang|de|[Gott ... nehme dich] barmherzig auf in jenes bess're Leben|italic=no}}".{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=89–90}}{{efn|"[God ... lifts you] mercifully into that better life"}} Julian Johnson noted Webern's use of first short, then long note values and phrases to impart a sense of calm rest before the final high harp harmonic, a tone painting of heaven.{{sfnm|Johnson|1997|1loc=76–78|Johnson|1999|2loc=156–157}}}}

During and after World War I (1914–1926) Webern worked on some fifty-six songs.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=129}} He finished thirty-two, ordered into sets (in ways that do not always align with their chronology) as Opp. 12–19.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=129}} Schoenberg's recent vocal music had been motivated by the idea that "absolute purity" in composition couldn't be sustained,{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=83–85, quoting Theodor W. Adorno}} 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.{{sfn|Johnson|1997|loc=71–74, 89–101}} The first of these mid-period {{lang|de|Lieder}} was an unfinished setting of a passage ("In einer lichten Rose ...") from Dante's Paradiso, Canto XXXI.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=274–275}}

By comparison to melodic "atomization" in Op. 11, Walter Kolneder noted relatively "long arcs" melodic writing in Op. 12{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=83}} and polyphonic part writing to "control the ... expression" in Opp. 12–16 more generally.{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=90}} "How much I owe to your Pierrot", Webern told Schoenberg after setting Trakl's "Abendland III" (Op. 14/iv),{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=149–150}} 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.{{sfnm|Johnson|1999|1loc=149–150|Shreffler|1994|2loc=131–132}}

Schoenberg "yearn[ed] for a style for large forms ... to give personal things an objective, general form."{{efn|In Apr. 1914, after Op. 22/i, "Seraphita," so wrote Schoenberg to Alma Mahler.{{sfn|Auner|2003|loc=123–124}}}} 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){{efn|Scholarship varied as to the genesis of Jakobsleiter.{{sfnm|Auner|2003|1loc=123–125|Berry|2008|2loc=86|Berry|2014|3loc=66|Smither|2001|4loc=678|Watkins|2011|5loc=215, 295n83}} Two scholars noted work from 1914.{{sfnm|Auner|2003|1loc=123–125|Watkins|2011|2loc=215}} Winfried Zillig finished it after Schoenberg's death.{{sfn|Watkins|2011|loc=295n83}} Schoenberg told Berg about setting Strindberg's Jacob lutte in spring 1911. Webern introduced Schoenberg to Balzac's Louis Lambert and Séraphîta in Mar. 1911.{{sfn|Brown|2011|loc=120}}}} 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",{{efn|"Ob rechts, ob links, vorwärts oder rückwärts, bergauf oder bergab – man hat weiterzugehen, ohne zu fragen, was vor oder hinter einem liegt."{{sfn|Christensen|1979|loc=Volume II: Appendices, Appendix B: Annotated Edition of the Libretto (DICH[tung]14), 6}}}} which Webern interpreted as a conceptual metaphor for (twelve-tone) pitch space.{{sfn|Watkins|2011|loc=215–216, 226–227}} Schoenberg later reflected on "how enthusiastic we were about this."{{efn|In 1941 Schoenberg lectured: "the ... law of the unity of musical space demands an absolute and unitary perception. In this space, as in Swedenborg's heaven (described in Balzac's Séraphîta) there is no absolute down, no right or left, forward or backward." Schoenberg then considered Jakobsleiter a "real twelve-tone composition" for its opening hexachordal ostinato and "Scherzo ... of all the twelve tones".{{sfn|Schoenberg|1950|loc=113}}}}

On the journey to composition with twelve tones, Webern revised many of his mid-period {{lang|de|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{{sfn|Shreffler|1999|loc=283}} 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.{{sfnm|Straus|1990|1loc=8–9, 21–41|Shere|2007|2loc=10}} Webern had written music preoccupied with the idea of dodecaphony since at least the total chromaticism of his Op. 9 bagatelles (1911){{sfnm|Ballance|2023|1loc=42, 95, 114|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=194, 309–310}} and Op. 11 cello pieces (1914).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=206}}{{efn|Schoenberg hinted at the idea in Harmonielehre (1911).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=308}}}}

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.{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=89}} 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)".{{sfn|Hamao|2011|loc=239–240, 287–288, quoting Webern with Webern's emphases}} It was "almost everything that has occupied me for about ten years", Webern continued.{{sfn|Hamao|2011|loc=239–240, 250–251}} He regarded Schoenberg's transformation of twelve-tone rows as the "solution" to their compositional concerns.{{sfn|Hamao|2011|loc=235, 250–251, quoting Greissle and Schoenberg}} 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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=309–310}} He systematically used twelve-tone technique for the first time in Op. 16/iv–v (1924).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=310}}

{{Listen|type=music|image=none|help=no|filename=Webern - Sehr langsam.ogg|title=String Trio, Op. 20, I. Sehr langsam (1926–1927) – LaSalle String Quartet members|description=An excerpt (mm. 49–59) from the first movement of Webern's String Trio, Op. 20. At 0:07–0:18 in this excerpt (mm. 51–56), there are repeated figures in fixed (or "frozen") register, comprising the first B section of this movement's seven-part ABACABA rondo.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1991|loc=41–42, 238–242}} Kathryn Bailey Puffett likened them to bell ringers' technique in ringing changes.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1991|loc=41–42}}}}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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=259, 285–287, 322}} 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 {{lang|de|Lieder}} since a 1914 cello sonata.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=278–279, 285}}{{efn|Among six non-vocal drafts and sketches were an abandoned string quartet (1917–1918); seventeen measures of music scored for clarinet, trumpet, and violin (1920); and four twelve-tone fragments.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=278–279, 311–320|Perle|1995|2loc=125}}}} 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:{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=321–322}}{{blockquote|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,{{sfn|Straus|1990|loc=169–170, 180–184}} 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 {{ill|Urpflanze|de}} and in Goethean science more generally.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1996|1loc=171|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=75–76, 318–319, 327, 513–514, 575, 689n9}}{{efn|Webern wrote, "What you see here (retrograde, canon, etc.—it is always the same) is not to be thought of as "Kunststückerln" [artistic tricks]—that would be ridiculous!"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=194, 327–328}}}}

File:Webern Variations op. 30 tone row.pngThe 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.{{sfn|Leeuw|2005|loc=161}}]]Webern's large-scale, non-vocal music in more traditional genres,{{efn|viz. the String Trio, Op. 20; Symphony, Op. 21; Quartet, Op. 22; Concerto, Op. 24; Variations for Piano, Op. 27; String Quartet, Op. 28; and Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=184}}}} written from 1926 to 1940, has been celebrated as his most rigorous and abstract music.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=184}} 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.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1996|1loc=170–173|Johnson|1999|2loc=4–11, 184–185|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|3loc=190, 308–309, 315–316, 342}}{{efn|Webern understood his own (and Mahler's) work as crystallizations of personal experience.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=113–114, 190}} He wrote Berg in 1912 that an experience would occupy him until it became music "that quite decidedly had to do with the experience—often down to the details".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=190}} He wrote Schoenberg in 1910 that "[Mahler's symphonies] must be most closely connected with his inner experiences. I also see a development: from the most intense worship of nature to an ever more spiritual, more detached content. ... This ... abstraction ... is more important for me ... than ... techni[que]."{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=113–114}}}} 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,{{efn|The Anninger to which Webern referred was a hill in the Vienna Woods above Mödling that he enjoyed hiking and wrote about in his diary, including while working on Op. 22.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=348, 423, 670n4}}}} first flora, primroses, anemones, pasqueflowers)", for example.{{sfnm|Bailey Puffett|1996|1loc=171|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=423}} Studying his compositional materials and sketches, Bailey Puffett wrote,{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|1996|loc=171}}{{blockquote|... [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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=431–434}} He concluded his {{lang|de|Weg zur Neuen Musik}} with this magic square.

In Webern's late cantatas and songs,{{efn|viz. the Drei Gesänge, Op. 23; Drei Lieder, Op. 25; Das Augenlicht, Op. 26; Cantata No. 1, Op. 29; and Cantata No. 2, Op. 31{{sfn|Rochberg|2004|loc=15}}}} George Rochberg observed, "the principles of 'the structural spatial dimension' ... join[ed] forces with lyrico-dramatic demands".{{sfn|Rochberg|2004|loc=15}} 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.{{sfn|Bailey Puffett|2001}} 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.{{sfnm|Zenck|1989|1loc=301|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|2loc=571, 576–578}} His textures became somewhat denser yet more homophonic at the surface through nonetheless contrapuntal polyphonic means.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=576–578}} In Op. 31/i he alternated lines and points, culminating twice{{efn|First by hexachordal aggregation in its center; second in a registrally expansive, open voicing at the end.}} in twelve-note simultaneities.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=182}}

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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=742}}

In his youth (1903), Webern orchestrated five or more Schubert {{lang|de|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".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=67, 746}}

After attending Hugo Wolf's funeral and memorial concert (1903), he arranged three {{lang|de|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.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=67}}

For Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1921, Webern arranged, among other music,{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=237}} 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){{sfn|Merrick|1987|loc=31}} for bass solo, mixed chorus, and large orchestra; thus Liszt's work was finally premièred{{efn|Initially inspired by his revolutionary countrymen, Liszt left it in manuscript at {{ill|Carl Haslinger|de|Carl Haslinger (Verleger)}}'s discretion.{{sfnm|Arnold|2002|1loc=386–387|Merrick|1987|2loc=31}}}} 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").{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=282}} 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 Musical Offering, Webern timbrally defined the internal organization (or latent subsets) of the Bach's subject.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=416, 440–445|Straus|1990|2loc=70-73}} Joseph N. Straus argued that Webern (and other modernists) effectively recomposed earlier music, "projecting motivic density" onto tradition.{{sfn|Straus|1990|loc=5–9, 73}} After more conservatively orchestrating two of Schubert's 1824 Six German Dances on UE commission in 1931, he wrote Schoenberg:

{{Blockquote|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.{{efn|Webern emphasized our.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=440|Straus|1990|2loc=67, 72, 197}}}}}}

Webern's music was generally considered difficult by performers and inaccessible by listeners alike.{{sfnm|Auner|1999|1loc=14|Clampitt|2009|2loc=195|Doctor|1999|3loc=200|Johnson|1999|4loc=128|Paddison|1998|5loc=51|Perle|1990|6loc=45|Prausnitz|2002|7loc=261}} "To the limited extent that it was regarded", Milton Babbitt observed, it represented "the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition".{{sfn|Babbitt|2003|loc=54}}

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.{{sfn|Maconie|2016|loc=36–41, 45–50}} 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.{{efn|In 2013, the Moldenhauers' dogged investigation into Webern's death and the experiences and testimony of those involved were portrayed in a one-act opera, The Death of Webern, which, though written in the eclectic style of its composer Michael Dellaira, paraphrases and quotes from Webern's music (e.g., the Passacaglia, Op. 1 in the third and final scenes, {{lang|de|Klangfarbenmelodie}} in the sixth scene).}}

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.{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=292, 450, 516–517|Morgan|1993|2loc=79|Ross|2007|3loc=267}} For many, like Stravinsky, Webern never compromised his artistic identity and values, but for others the matter was less simple.{{efn|For example, Op. 28's BACH motif (1938) and Op. 29/i, "Zündender Lichtblitz", (1938–1939, orch. 1944) troubled some commentators.}}

{{Quote box|bgcolor=#FFFFF0|width=25%|quoted=true|salign=right|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!"'|source=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".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=470–471, 679–680}}}}

Webern notated articulations, dynamics, {{lang|it|tempo rubato}}, and other musical expressions, coaching performers to adhere to these instructions but urging them to maximize expressivity through musical phrasing.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=470–471, 679–680}}{{efn|See {{ill|Werktreue|de}}.{{sfn|Pace|2022b|loc=406–407}}}} 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".{{sfn|Pace|2022b|loc=436, 439}}{{efn|Stadlen published a specially marked score.{{sfn|Jackson|2005|loc=465}}}}

This aspect of Webern's work was often overlooked in his immediate post-war reception,{{sfnm|Bolcom|2004|1loc=50|Bolcom|2016|Cook|2017|3loc=163, 201}} 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.{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=108}} 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.{{sfn|Burkholder|1983|loc=128–134}}

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."{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/11/arts/felix-galimir-recalls-berg-and-webern-in-vienna.html |title=Felix Galimir Recalls Berg and Webern in Vienna |newspaper=The New York Times |date=11 Jan 1981 |last1=Horowitz |first1=Joseph}}

Many artists portrayed Webern (often from life) in their work. Kokoschka (1912), Schiele (1917 and 1918), {{ill|B. F. Dolbin|de}} (1920 and 1924), and Rederer (1934) made drawings of him. Oppenheimer (1908), Kokoschka (1914), and {{ill|Tom von Dreger|de}} (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).{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=10, 109-110, 557, 688}}

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".{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=193}} But Berg joked about Webern's brevity. Hendrik Andriessen found Webern's music "pitiful" in this regard.{{sfn|Andriessen and Trochimczyk|2002|loc=6}} In their second (1925) Abbruch{{efn|Cancellation}} self-parody, {{ill|Musikblätter des Anbruch|lt=Anbruch|de|Musikblätter des Anbruch|display=1}}{{efn|Dawn}} editors jested that "Webern's" (Mahler's) "extensive" Symphony of a Thousand had to be abbreviated.{{efn|{{Wikisourcelang-inline|de|Musikblätter des Anbruch}}.}}

Felix Khuner remembered Webern was "just as revolutionary" as Schoenberg.{{sfn|Crawford and Khuner|1996|loc=10}} In 1927, Hans Mersmann wrote that "Webern's music shows the frontiers and ... limits of a development which tried to outgrow Schoenberg's work."{{sfn|Kolneder|1968|loc=12}}

Identifying with Webern as a "solitary soul" amid 1940s wartime fascism,{{sfn|Dallapiccola|1972|loc=6}} Dallapiccola independently and somewhat singularly{{efn|Goffredo Petrassi and his student Aldo Clementi were later influenced by Webern, as was Schoenberg pupil {{ill|Alfredo Sangiorgi|it}}. Riccardo Malipiero organized composers, including Camillo Togni, around twelve-tone music in 1949 Milan.}} found inspiration especially in Webern's lesser-known mid-period Lieder, blending its ethereal qualities and Viennese expressionism with {{lang|it|bel canto}}.{{sfn|Alegant|2010|loc=14}} 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".{{sfn|Dallapiccola|1972|loc=2}} He dedicated Sex carmina alcaei{{efn|Dallapiccola's 1943 Sex carmina alcaei, on some of the {{ill|Lirici greci (Quasimodo)|lt=Lirici greci|it}} of Salvatore Quasimodo after Alcaeus of Mytilene, were one of three groups of Lieder from his Liriche greche set (1942–1945).{{sfn|Alegant|2010|loc=14}}}} "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."{{sfn|Dallapiccola|1972|loc=5–6}} Dallapiccola's 1953 Goethe-lieder especially recall Webern's Op. 16 in style.{{sfn|Alegant|2010|loc=38–46, 103–105, 292}}

In 1947, Schoenberg remembered and stood firm with Berg and Webern despite rumors of the latter's having "fallen into the Nazi trap":{{efn|This is Krasner's phrase, by which he interpreted Schoenberg's "those who tried might have succeeded in confounding us" as referring to Webern.{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=346–47}} But Douglas Jarman noted Schoenberg's discomfort with and Stein's (and later Cerha's and Perle's) defense of Berg after the Jewish banker scene in Act III of Lulu.{{sfnm|Jarman|2017|Perle|1985|2loc=283–284}} When Schoenberg asked Webern about his feelings toward the Nazis, Webern replied, "Who dares to come between you and me?" When Steuermann asked Krasner on behalf of Schoenberg, Krasner soothed Schoenberg with a self-described lie. Schoenberg's 1934 (or 1935)–1936 Violin Concerto kept its dedication to Webern, though worded very simply ("to Anton von Webern"), whether due to Schoenberg's suspicions or to protect Webern from danger or Nazi suspicion. Schoenberg and Webern continued to correspond at least through 1939.{{sfnm|Arnold Schönberg Center|n.d.|Kater|1999|2loc=clv|Krasner and Seibert|1987|3loc=345}}}} "... [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."{{efn|Schoenberg prepared his statement for publication as a handwritten inscription by facsimile reproduction in Leibowitz's 1948 didactic score of Webern's then unpublished Op. 24,{{sfn|Leibowitz|2018|loc=2, 5, 7, 11, 13, 81, 83, 86}} which Webern dedicated to Schoenberg in 1934 for his sixtieth birthday.}} For Krasner this put "'Vienna's Three Modern Classicists' into historical perspective". He summarized it as "what bound us together was our idealism."{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=346–47}}

{{Quote box|bgcolor=#FFFFF0|width=25%|quoted=true|salign=right|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.|source=Stravinsky lauded Webern in die Reihe{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=693|Stravinsky|1959}}{{efn|Or possibly Craft, who often ghostwrote for Stravinsky.}}}}

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 {{lang|de|Darmstädter Ferienkurse|italic=no}}.{{sfnm|Andriessen|2002|1loc=131|Fosler-Lussier|2007|2loc=38|Grant|2001|3loc=103|Ross|2007|4loc=267}} René Leibowitz performed, promulgated, and published Schoenberg et son école;{{sfn|Taruskin|2009a|loc=15–18}} Adorno,{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=125–126}} Herbert Eimert, Scherchen,{{sfn|Fosler-Lussier|2007|loc=40}} and others contributed. Composers and students{{efn|See Darmstadt School.}} listened in a quasi-religious trance to Peter Stadlen's 1948 Op. 27 performance.{{sfn|Ross|2007|loc=267}}

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).{{sfn|Erwin|2020|loc=93–94}} Eimert and Stockhausen devoted a special issue of die Reihe to Webern's {{lang|fr|œuvre}} in 1955. UE published his lectures in 1960.{{sfn|Grant|2001|loc=103}}

In the US, Babbitt{{sfn|Vandagriff|2017|loc=332}} and initially Rochberg{{sfnm|Rochberg|2004|1loc=47–48|Wlodarski|2019|2loc=59}} 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.{{sfn|Emmery|2020|loc=72–82}} 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.{{sfnm|Clements|2022|Miller|2022a|2loc=99}} Stravinsky lauded Webern's "not yet canonized art" in 1959.{{sfn|Straus|2001|loc=22}}

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.{{sfn|Feldman|2000|loc=114–115}} 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. {{Interlanguage link|Robert Beyer (composer){{!}}Robert Beyer|de|3=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.{{sfn|Grant|2001|loc=104}} Webern's music sounded like "a Mondrian canvas", "crude and unfinished", to Karel Goeyvaerts.{{sfnm|Goeyvaerts|1994|1loc=39|Grant|2001|2loc=104-105}} Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski criticized some Darmstadt music as "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing" ({{ill|Darmstädter Tagblatt|de}}, 1959); a Der Kurier article of his was headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at".{{sfn|Iddon|2013|loc=250}}

{{Quote box|bgcolor=#FFFFF0|width=25%|quoted=true|salign=right|[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.|source=George Benjamin described Webern's Op. 21.{{sfn|Service|2013}} Many{{efn|Among these were Feldman, Pousseur,{{efn|See Scambi, 1957.}} Rochberg,{{sfnm|Rochberg|2004|1loc=9–11, 20–22|Wlodarski|2019|2loc=62, 179}} Stravinsky,{{sfn|Sills|2022|loc=286–287}} and La Monte Young.}} noted floating, spatial, static, or suspended qualities in some of Webern's music. Johnson noted spatial metaphors.{{sfn|Johnson|1999|loc=28, 48, 54–55, 65–66, 69, 88, 110, 217, 231}}}}

Through late 1950s onward, Webern's work reached musicians as far removed as Frank Zappa,{{sfn|Broyles|2004|loc=229}} yet many post-war European musicians and scholars had already begun to look beyond{{sfn|Erwin|2020|loc=93}} as much as back at Webern in his context. Nono advocated for a more humanistic understanding of Webern's music.{{sfn|Iddon|2013|loc=90–98, 115–116, 142–143, 258}}

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".{{sfn|Straus|1999|loc=330–332}}{{efn|Olin Downes described Op. 28 as "Dead End music" in 1941.{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=667}} Another critic wrote in 1929: "If modernism depended for progress upon the Weberns, it would get nowhere."{{sfn|Slonimsky|1994|loc=251}}}} Rochberg felt "Webern's music leaves his followers no new, unexplored territory."{{sfn|Wlodarski|2019|loc=59}} 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."{{sfn|Watkins|1988|loc=390–391}}

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).{{sfn|Ehman|2013|loc=178}} This coincided with a wider rapprochement with Berg,{{sfnm|Street|2005|1loc=101–103|Watkins|1988|2loc=651}} whose example Pousseur cited,{{sfnm|Bregegere|2014|1loc=147|Pousseur|2009|2loc=227}} from whose music he also quoted, and whose writings he translated into French in the 1950s.{{sfnm|Berg|1957|Berg|2014|2loc=ix}} 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.{{efn|Adorno advocated for the completion of Lulu, writing that it "reveals the extent of its quality the longer and more deeply one immerses oneself in it". Boulez conducted the 1979 première after Cerha's orchestration.}}

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).

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{{sfn|Krones|2017|loc=56}} as well as anti-formalist cultural policies{{sfn|Krones|2017|loc=123–124}} and Cold War separation.{{efn|By contrast, the Kolisch Quartet's 1927 performance of Berg's Lyric Suite at the Baden-Baden ISCM festival (where Bartók performed his own Piano Sonata) inspired Bartók in his subsequent third and fourth string quartets{{sfn|Antokoletz and Susanni|2011|loc=xxix}} and Concerto for Orchestra.{{sfn|Suchoff|2004|loc=22}}}} Ligeti lamented the separation and left in 1956, noting that "after Bartók hardly any grass could grow".{{sfn|Fosler-Lussier|2007|loc=49}}

Webern's influence predominated after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, bearing on Pál Kadosa, Endre Szervánszky, and György Kurtág.{{sfnm|Frandzel|2002|Krones|2017|2loc=122–124}} Among Czechs, {{ill|Pavel Blatný|de}} attended the {{lang|de|Darmstädter Ferienkurse|italic=no}} and wrote music with serial techniques in the late 1960s. He returned to tonality in Brno and was rewarded.{{sfn|Johnson, V|2015|loc=34}} Marek Kopelent discovered the Second Viennese as an editor and was particularly taken by Webern.{{sfn|Johnson, V|2015|loc=53–54}} Kopelent was blacklisted for his music and despaired, unable to attend international performances of his work.{{sfn|Johnson, V|2015|loc=59–65}}

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., {{ill|Блажков, Игорь Иванович|lt=Igor Blazhkov|ru}}, Gérard Frémy, Alexei Lubimov, Maria Yudina), who traveled more.{{sfn|Schmelz|2009|loc=26–27, 45–50, 72, 84, 200, 275–276}} 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.{{sfn|Schmelz|2009|loc=45}}

Philip Herschkowitz, poverty-stricken, taught privately in Moscow with cautious emphasis on Beethoven and the tradition from which Webern emerged.{{sfnm|Schmelz|2009|1loc=52–54|Taruskin|2023a|wloc=276}} His pupil Nikolai Karetnikov taped Glenn Gould's 1957 Moscow Conservatory performance of Webern's Op. 27.{{sfn|Taruskin|2023a|loc=285}} 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.{{sfn|Taruskin|2023a|loc=294}}

In Soviet Music, Marcel Rubin criticized "Webern and His Followers" (1959), by contrast to Berg and Schoenberg, for going too far.{{sfn|Schmelz|2009|loc=44}} Alfred Schnittke complained in an open letter (1961) of composers' restricted education.{{sfn|Schmelz|2009|loc=40}} 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{{efn|Tischenko's anti-Stalinist Requiem is a noted example of Soviet post-Webernism.{{sfn|Tsenova|2014|loc=53–54}}}}) ironically learned more about what had been and even was still forbidden.{{sfn|Schmelz|2009|loc=40–45, 65}} Kruschchev warned, "dodecaphonic music, music of noises ... this cacophonic music we totally reject. Our people cannot include such trash".{{sfn|Schmelz|2015|loc=253}}

Through Andrei Volkonsky, Lydia Davydova recalled, Schoenberg's and Webern's music came to Russia alongside Renaissance and early Baroque music.{{sfn|Schmelz|2009|loc=70}} 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."{{sfn|Schmelz|2009|loc=70}} Edison Denisov described the 1960s as his "second conservatory", crediting Volkonsky not only for introducing Webern, but also Gesualdo.{{sfn|Schmelz|2009|loc=40, 70–71}}

This tolerance did not survive the Brezhnev Stagnation.{{sfn|Schmelz|2009|loc=21–24, 179, 216, 221, 267, 275, 298}} 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.{{sfn|Sitsky|2002|loc=183–185}}

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".{{sfn|Bremser|1999|loc=2}} John Cranko set Opus 1 (1965) to Webern's Passacaglia, Op. 1. Rudi van Dantzig choreographed Webern's music in Ogenblikken{{efn|Moments}} (1968) and Antwoord gevend{{efn|Giving Answer}} (1980); Glen Tetley in Praeludium (1978) and Contredanses (1979);{{sfn|Bremser|1999|loc=281–287}} Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker alongside that of Beethoven and Schnittke in Erts (1992);{{sfn|Bremser|1999|loc=108–113}} and Trisha Brown in Twelve Ton Rose (1996).{{sfn|Bremser|1999|loc=46–52}} 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).{{sfn|Bremser|1999|loc=175–180}}

Webern's legacy, bitterly contested in the "serial wars",{{efn|This was Michael Broyles' term.{{sfn|Broyles|2004|loc=153–175}}}} remained subject to polemic vicissitudes. Musicologists quarreled{{sfn|Adamson|2003|loc=415}}{{efn|Robert Fink described a "general disciplinary crisis". In new musicology and postmodernism, canons were questioned, and pluralism was promoted. Lawrence Kramer and Susan McClary emphasized musical meaning. Taruskin criticized the canon's Eurocentrism, Germanism (especially in Schoenberg's, Webern's, and Dahlhaus's work), and colonialism.}} amid the "Restoration of the 1980s", as Martin Kaltenecker termed a paradigm shift from structure to perception within musicological discourse.{{efn|Johnson also described several shifts.}} Charles Rosen scorned "historical criticism ... avoiding any serious engagement with a work or style ... one happens not to like".{{sfn|Rosen|2012|loc=246}} Andreas Holzer warned of "post-factual tendencies".{{sfn|Holzer|2019|loc=293–308}}{{efn|In relation to post-Webernism more generally, Holzer slammed attempts "to place Darmstadt in a fascistoid corner or even identifying it as a US propaganda institution amid the Cold War" ({{lang|de|"Darmstadt in ein 'faschistoides' Eck zu stellen oder es gar als Propagandainstitution der USA im Kalten Krieg auszuweisen"}}) via "unbelievable distortions, exaggerations, reductions and propagation of clichés" ({{lang|de|"unglaublichen Verdrehungen, Übertreibungen, Verkürzungen und Propagierungen von Klischeebildern"}}).{{sfn|Holzer|2019|loc=294}}}} 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.{{sfn|Potter|2005|loc=446}} Meanwhile Allen Forte and Bailey Puffett formally analyzed Webern's atonal and twelve-tone {{lang|fr|œuvres}} respectively.

Tim Page noted less formalist readings of Webern's work at his 1983 birth centenary.{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/30/arts/critic-s-notebook-re-evaluations-of-webern-s-music.html |title=Critic's Notebook; Re-evaluations of Webern's music |newspaper=The New York Times |date=30 Jun 1983 |last1=Page |first1=Tim |archive-date=3 March 2024 |access-date=3 March 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240303055146/https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/30/arts/critic-s-notebook-re-evaluations-of-webern-s-music.html |url-status=live }} 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",{{sfn|Watkins|1988|loc=390–391, 528–529}} Watkins described "quick shifts of interest" tapering to neglect.{{sfn|Watkins|1994|loc=465}} Webern's music was established but infrequent in standard (repeating) orchestral repertoire.{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=205}}{{efn|In a survey of five prestigious British and French orchestras, his music was played 121 times{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=265}} and Beethoven's 1,198 times between 1967 and 2017.{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=250}} In a US orchestra survey of the "top 100 composers in terms of works performed", his music was played 175 times and Mozart's 7,103 times between 2000 and 2009.{{sfn|London|2013|loc=85}}}} His {{lang|fr|œuvre}} was played at the Venice Festival of Contemporary Music (1983),{{sfn|Fontana|2023|loc={{lang|it|"Non è triste Venezia"}}}} Juilliard (1995), and the Vienna Festival (2004), echoing six international festivals in his name (1962–1978).{{efn|Surveying institutions and performers, Ian Pace described New Music and its performance institutions as subcultural within classical music.{{sfn|Pace|2022b|loc=396–397}}}} In some obscurity (1941 or 1942), Webern had been quietly sure that "in the future even the postman will whistle my melodies!"{{sfn|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|loc=540–543}} But many did not acquire such an aesthetic taste.{{sfnm|Bols|2020|1loc=207–208|Kramer|2016|2loc=38, 41, 55–57}}{{efn|"[A]tonal music is [like] random notes" in its macroharmony, Dmitri Tymoczko suggested as one reason.{{sfn|Tymoczko|2011|loc=181–186}} Building on Tymoczko's work, Joshua Ballance described Webern's Opp. 1–31 partly in its macroharmonies, emphasizing the already totally chromatic macroharmonies of the pre-dodecaphonic mid-period {{lang|de|Lieder}}.{{sfn|Ballance|2023|loc=Abstract, 39–42, 69–74, 103–104, 107–108, 232–234}} J. Kramer believed such music as Webern's required the listener to learn more about it in order to understand it and noted that only some listeners did.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=41, 43, 47–48, 53}} In this sense, he wrote, it is elitist music.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=41}} While he asserted that Schoenberg and Stravinsky were "generally understood to be well within the cultural mainstream" by contrast to avant-garde radicals like Satie, Henry Cowell, or Luigi Russolo,{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=43}} he considered that Ives and Webern straddled radical and progressive sensibilities.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=38, 47–48}} He also noted that modernism fared better in Europe than in the US, which he ascribed to differences in education and also to the commercialization of increasingly unsubsidized art music particularly in the US.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=56–57, 201–204}}}} He remained polarizing and provocative.{{sfnm|Ahrend and Münnich|2018|Clampitt|2009|2loc=195|Erwin|2020|3loc=93–94|Kramer|2016|4loc=38, 47–48, 55–57|Miller|2022b}}{{efn|J. Kramer noted that audiences gradually became less shocked and more indifferent, at least in the US.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=47–48}}}}

Noting this aspect of his reception, Johnson described Webern's "almost unique position in the canon of Western composers".{{sfn|Johnson|1997|loc=61}} Christian Thorau argued Webern's innovations impeded his "{{lang|de|exoterischen Kanonisierung|italics=no}}".{{sfn|Thorau|2013|loc=549}}{{efn|"exoteric canonization"}} By contrast to the "concert canon", Shreffler considered Webern's better standing in a "separate canon" of technical and formal innovation.{{sfn|Shreffler|2013|loc=617 (German), 11 (English)}}{{efn|"Don't write music entirely by ear", Webern told Searle: "Your ears will always guide you ... but you must know why" (emphasis in original).{{sfnm|Kozbelt|2016|1loc=46|Searle and Webern|1940|2loc=405}} Webern's music was associated with "intellectual order".{{sfn|Johnson|1997|loc=61}} He innovated musically and conceptually, challenging audiences.{{sfn|Kozbelt|2016|loc=32–35, 44–47}} Julian Johnson argued that criticisms of composers' innovations were a "constant of musical modernity for four hundred years", from {{lang|it|il nuove musiche}} to {{lang|de|die neue Musik}}. He quoted Girolamo Mei writing to Vincenzo Galilei in 1572: "[N]ot to appear ... inferior ... these musicians precipitated themselves at breakneck speed ... to discover always new styles and new forms of song [which] were not understood [or] felt".{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=32–33, 57–58, 320}} Mei wrote Galilei that in these innovations composers followed their ears, not their intellects.{{sfn|Mei|1998|loc=494–495}}}} Burkholder argued that music of the "historicist tradition",{{efn|For J. Peter Burkholder, musical historicism as a mainstream intellectual tradition proper began in Brahms's generation's l'art pour l'art and more introverted musical experience. It intensified in Schoenberg's generation with increasing engagement with stylistic history as impetus to compositional innovation. Distantly and obliquely echoing Charles Burney's work, it flowered amid Hegelianism and theories of biological and social evolution or progress. Burkholder distinguished between more progressive historicism (Schoenberg's Erwartung), more emulative cases (Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos), and mixed examples (Berg's Wozzeck). He noted the assimilation of peripheral national music traditions for novelty but emphasized that innovation occurred even within those contexts.{{sfn|Burkholder|1983|loc=118–124}}}} including Webern's, was secure in "a musical museum", "for that is what the concert hall has become".{{sfn|Burkholder|1983|loc=116–118, 127–134}}{{efn|Burkholder and Lydia Goehr, among others, traced the history of orchestras' (and other institutions') museum-like function in producing and presenting "civilized", "elite", or "important" (if sometimes "difficult", "serious", or "unpopular") music as artwork, not without regard to audiences.{{sfnm|Burkholder|1983|1loc=116–118, 120, 125–131, 133–134|Goehr|1992|2loc=7–8, 13, 55–56, 60-61, 117–119, 120–122, 172–175, 178, 190–216, 232–257, 264, 273–286}}}} Mark Berry described Webern, already among Boulez's "big five", as one of five "canonical pillars of classic historical early twentieth-century modernism".{{efn|The others, in both cases, were Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.{{sfnm|Berry|2019|1loc=43|Nattiez|2004|2loc=74–75}} In Joseph N. Straus's account of how modernists recast tradition,{{sfn|Straus|1990|loc=16–17}} they were "the exemplars" on whom he focused.{{sfn|Straus|1990|loc=vii}} Ensemble intercontemporain played them often at Boulez's IRCAM as "classics" in the 1980s, which Georgina Born argued contributed to their canonization.{{sfn|Born|1995|loc=172–175}} In considering the US context, J. Kramer wrote that Bartók, Stravinsky, and especially Schoenberg and Webern were not often played or widely understood but nonetheless backed as central to canon of 20th-century classical music in terms of theory and analysis by academics with a shared perspective (who constituted a significant plurality of composers).{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=38–40, 199–200}} He considered Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern "quintessential modernists of the early twentieth century".{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=47–48}}}} David H. Miller suggested Webern "achieved a certain kind of acceptance and canonization".{{sfn|Miller|2022b|loc="Epilogue; or, it matters how you flop"}}

Taruskin prioritized audience reception, not "musical utopianism".{{sfn|Taruskin|2009c|loc=xiii–xiv}}{{efn|For Taruskin, pitch sets did not "conform to the physics of sound", and "optimism about human adaptability ... is the same ... that drives all utopian thinking."{{sfnm|Taruskin|1994|1loc=¶7–8|Scherzinger with Hoad|1997|2loc=127–128}}}} He excoriated the Second Viennese School's "idiosyncratic view of the past", linking Webern and Adler to Eduard Hanslick and "neo-Hegelian" Franz Brendel;{{sfn|Taruskin|2011|loc=3–4}}{{efn|J. Kramer characterized early modernists (e.g., Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern) and even the early modernist avant-garde (e.g., Satie, Cowell, Russolo, Edgar Varèse) as "trapped" in continuous historical development.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=14–15}} Seeing themselves as innovators entailed both conceiving of history as linear progress and rejecting prior concepts of music, he explained.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=14–15}} Modernists engaged and competed with the dominant music of the past, which they reinvented.{{sfn|Kramer|2016|loc=15}}}} he criticized historical determinism, "the natural ally of totalitarian politics."{{sfnm|Taruskin|2023b|1loc=518–519|Taruskin|2009a|2loc=413}} Martin Scherzinger noted that Taruskin's criticisms sought "active complicity with undesirable politics".{{sfn|Scherzinger with Hoad|1997|loc=63–65, 147}}{{efn|For Taruskin, "the legacy of fascism is an inseparable ... facet of the lofty legacy of modernism".{{sfnm|Adlington|2019|1loc=217, 231n9|Taruskin|2009f|2loc=212}} Krasner told Fanfare Webern "packed me off quickly" upon the Anschluss "for my safety but perhaps ... to avoid ... embarrassment ... had his family arrived, or friends celebrating ... Nazi entry".{{sfn|Krasner and Seibert|1987|loc=343}} Taruskin cited Krasner to claim Webern joyfully welcomed the Nazis upon the Anschluss.{{sfn|Taruskin|2009f|loc=211–212}} In his "How Talented Composers Become Useless" postscript, Taruskin wrote, "The Nazis had every right to criticize Schoenberg ... . It is not for their criticism that we all revile them."{{sfnm|Taruskin|1996b|Taruskin|2009d|2loc=92}} He compared Leibowitz to Goebbels, found "Nazi resonances" in Eimert's "only composers who follow Webern are worthy of the name," and likened Boulez's "[s]ince the Viennese discoveries, any musician who has not experienced ... the necessity of dodecaphonic language is USELESS" to the Zhdanov Doctrine.{{sfnm|Holzer|2019|1loc=305|Taruskin|2009a|2loc=18–19}}}} Noted for his polemicism and revisionism,{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/arts/music/richard-taruskin-dead.html |title=Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77 |newspaper=The New York Times |date=1 July 2022 |last1=Robin |first1=William |archive-date=2 July 2022 |access-date=24 September 2022 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20220702000313/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/arts/music/richard-taruskin-dead.html |url-status=live }}; {{harvnb|Bolcom|2004|loc=52}}; {{harvnb|Bolcom|2016}}; {{harvnb|Forte|1986|loc=321}}; {{harvnb|Ho|2011|loc=200}}; {{harvnb|Kosman|2014}}; {{harvnb|MacDonald|n.d.}}; {{harvnb|Mitchinson|2001|loc=34}}; {{harvnb|Pace|2022a}}; {{harvnb|Schuijer|2008|loc=23}}{{efn|"Of all in the volumes in this series," Taruskin referred to his Oxford History, "this one, covering the first half of the twentieth century, surely differs the most radically from previous accounts".{{sfn|Taruskin|2009b|loc=xiv, xx}}}} Taruskin described his "dubious reputation" on Webern and New Music{{sfnm|Eichner|2012|1loc=28|Taruskin|2009e|2loc=397|Taruskin|2011|3loc=3–4|White|2008|4loc=203}} and was praised and criticized{{efn|Rosen charged Taruskin's "hostile presentation ... does not result in historical objectivity".{{sfn|Rosen|2012|loc=246}} Max Erwin considered Taruskin's work on the Darmstädter Ferienkurse "passionately negative"{{sfn|Erwin|2021|loc=71}} and "thoroughly discredited",{{sfn|Erwin|2020|loc=119}} particularly that "Adorno or Leibowitz officiated with near-dictatorial power".{{sfn|Erwin|2019|loc=45}} Rodney Lister wrote, "Taruskin's purpose ... is to bury Webern, not to praise him", noting "the increasing importance of 'motivization' over the course of the 19th century and of the 'collapse' of (traditional) tonality [is] something which Taruskin flatly states never took place."{{sfnm|Lister|2006|1loc=52|Taruskin|2011|2loc=3}} Larson Powell found "Taruskin's ... references to Webern's politics ... to discredit the music."{{sfn|Powell|2013|loc=3}} {{ill|Christian Utz|de}} agreed with {{ill|Martin Zenck|de}} that Taruskin's claims were "simplifying and distorting", granting "authoritarian rhetoric ... in ... the 1950s and 60s" and the nonexistence of "'apolitical music'".{{sfn|Utz|2021|loc=114}} Holzer also sympathized with but found Taruskin inappropriate and simplistic.{{sfn|Holzer|2019|loc=305}}}} 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".{{sfn|Cox|2011|loc=1, 36–38, 53}}

Pascal Decroupet observed an unquestioned "canon of polarizations" in prior histories.{{sfnm|Barthel-Calvet and Murray|2023|1loc=6|Decroupet|2023|2loc=37}}{{efn|In a case study, Martin Kaltenecker noted Taruskin's taking aim at avant-garde prestige in opposition to {{ill|Célestin Deliège|fr}}'s {{lang|fr|Cinquante ans de modernité musicale: De Darmstadt à l'IRCAM}}.{{sfn|Barthel-Calvet and Murray|2023|loc=5–6}} He contrasted their polarized nomothetic "plots" with more idiographic approaches' "juxtapositions" and thick description. He considered how to move beyond this nomothetic–idiographic historiographical dichotomy.{{sfnm|Barthel-Calvet and Murray|2023|1loc=3–10, 12|Kaltenecker|2023|2loc=13–14, 21–31, 34}}}} Johnson noted the "co-existence and interaction of diverse stylistic practices" with "remarkable similarities", challenging "conservative and progressive" campism{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=7, 85, 120–122}} and decentering musicology's technical periodizations{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=1–4, 117–119, 124–129, 184–185}} via the {{lang|fr|longue durée}} of global modernity.{{sfnm|Johnson, J|2015|1loc=3–10|Lee|2023|2loc=434–436}}{{efn|Johnson described music in modernity as "broken off from the past", "broken in itself", and "of individual subjectivity". It no longer "elaborate[s] ... divine unity", by contrast to medieval music, but "rema[d]e it", he argued, "as Wagner's Siegfried ... from ... his father's sword, or as Webern piece[d] together ... atomized ... interval[s]."{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=33–34}}}} Thus he ventured continuity{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=4–8, 33–34}} between the "broken homeland" of Webern's Opp. 12–18 and the "broken pastoral" of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony;{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=15, 28–29, 40–41, 64–66}}{{efn|For Johnson, modernism foregrounded the "brokenness that always lay at the heart of the pastoral".{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=28}} Thomas Peattie wrote about brokenness in Mahler's pastoral music.{{sfn|Batstone|2023|loc=113–114}}}} between Webern's "evanescent images of musical fullness"{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=28}} and the brief, fragmentary nature of Chopin's Op. 28, which Schumann likened to "ruins".{{sfn|Johnson, J|2015|loc=25–28}} Building on Shreffler's and Felix Meyer's sketch studies as institutions like the {{ill|Paul-Sacher-Stiftung|de}} acquired and made the Moldenhauers' estate accessible,{{sfn|Krones|2007|loc=Nachlaß}}{{efn|Julie Brown described a "greening" of Webern literature in the 1990s.{{sfn|Miller|2022a}}}} Johnson worked toward a hermeneutics of Webern's (and Mahler's) music.{{sfnm|Miller|2020|1loc=xiv–xix, 67–68, 133–134, 149, 178–179, 190–192|Peattie|2012|2loc=424|Shreffler|2002|3loc=294–299}}

• {{Cite AV media |year=1991 |orig-year=1936 |title=Webern Conducts: Berg – Violin Concerto |publisher=Continuum |id=SBT 1004 |oclc=25348107 |asin=B000003XHN }}
• {{Cite AV media |year=1978 |title=The Complete Works of Anton Webern |publisher=CBS Records |id= |oclc=612743015 |asin=B000002707 }}
• Webern conducts his arrangement of Schubert's German Dances

{{Notelist}}

{{Reflist|20em}}

{{refbegin|30em}}

• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Adlington|2019}}|reference=Adlington, Robert. 2019. "Modernism: the people's music?". The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, eds. and intro. {{ill|Björn Heile|et}} and Charles Wilson, 216–238. London: Routledge. {{ISBN|978-1-315-61329-1}} (ebk). {{ISBN|978-1-4724-7040-9}} (hbk).}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Allen-Russell|2023}}|reference=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).}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Adamson|2003}}|reference=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}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Adorno|1984}}|reference=Adorno, Theodor. 1984. Musikalische Schriften, Vol. 5. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 18. Suhrkamp Verlag {{ISBN|978-3-518-57696-0}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Adorno|1999}}|reference=Adorno, Theodor. 1999. Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University Press. {{ISBN|978-0-8047-3558-2}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Adorno|2004}}|reference=Adorno, Theodor. 2004. Aesthetic Theory. Impacts Series. A&C Black. {{ISBN|978-0-8264-7691-3}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Adorno and Berg|2005}}|reference=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.)}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Ahrend and Münnich|2018}}|reference=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).}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Alegant|2010}}|reference=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).}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Andriessen|2002}}|reference=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}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Andriessen and Trochimczyk|2002}}|reference=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}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Antokoletz|2014}}|reference=Antokoletz, Elliott. 2014. A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic–Analytical Context. New York: Routledge. {{ISBN|978-0-415-88187-6}} (hbk).}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Antokoletz and Susanni|2011}}|reference=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}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Arnold|2002}}|reference=Arnold, Ben (ed.). 2002. The Liszt Companion. Jazz Companions Series. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. {{ISBN|978-0-313-30689-1}} (accessed 9 Aug. 2014).}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Arnold Schönberg Center|n.d.}}|reference=Arnold Schönberg Center. n.d. "[http://schoenberg.at/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=217&Itemid=381&lang=de Concerto for Violin and Orchestra Op. 36]". Werk- und Quellendatenbank: Werke mit Opuszahlen (op. 26–50c). Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center (accessed 9 Aug. 2014).}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Auner|1999}}|reference=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}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Auner|2003}}|reference=Auner, Joseph. 2003. A Schoenberg Reader. New Haven: Yale University Press. {{ISBN|978-0-300-12712-6}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Babbitt|2003}}|reference=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}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Bailey Puffett|2001}}|reference=Bailey Puffett, Kathryn. 2001. "Webern, Anton". Grove Music Online (accessed 9 Oct. 2022).}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Bailey Puffett|1998}}|reference=Bailey Puffett, Kathryn. 1998. [https://archive.org/embed/lifeofwebern0000bail 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).}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Bailey Puffett|1997}}|reference=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}}.}}
• {{wikicite|ref={{harvid|Bailey Puffett|1996}}|reference=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).}}
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{{div col end}}

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• Kennicott, Philip. 2000. "[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/2000/06/11/weberns-atonal-recall/34ec06b5-30b8-4d71-a9b6-384d4da62628/ 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. [https://www.anton-webern.ch/index.php?id=34 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. [https://archive.org/details/antonvonwebernpe0000unse 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. [https://www.anton-webern.ch/index.php?id=34 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.

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