Anton Webern

Anton Webern left thirty-one numbered opuses as well as works without opus numbers; his music influenced composers including Boulez and Stockhausen after the Second World War. A Viennese who took his doctorate under Guido Adler on the Renaissance polyphonist Heinrich Isaac, he studied privately with Arnold Schoenberg from 1904 and formed, with Alban Berg, the circle later called the Second Viennese School. The Passacaglia Op. 1 still belongs to the late Romantic world; after it the pieces contract — the Six Bagatelles, the Three Little Pieces for cello and piano — until a single note, or a rest, carries structural weight. In the twelve-note works he built rows out of symmetry and canon and let instrumental colour do the articulating, an idea the next generation seized on. He earned his living conducting in theatres and directing workers' choruses and orchestras in Vienna. He died at Mittersill in September 1945. His first attempts at composition date from 1899, and from 1902 to 1906 he worked at the institute of music history of the University of Vienna, where the dissertation on Isaac was written and defended; his early compositions included chamber music and songs, and he remained Schoenberg's pupil until 1908. Only from the seventeenth opus onward did he write in twelve-note style alone. He continued composing during the Second World War, writing his Second Cantata, Op. 31, in 1941–1943.