page_title: Anton Webern
section_title: Youth, education, and other early experiences in Austria-Hungary
hierarchical_section_title: Anton Webern / Biography / Youth, education, and other early experiences in Austria-Hungary
caption_attribution_description: English: Pregelhof in Oberdorf near Neuhaus/Suha, Carinthia Deutsch: Pregelhof Hafner in Oberdorf, nahe Neuhaus/Suha, Kärnten
context_page_description: Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. Along with his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was in the core of those in the circle of the Second Viennese School, including Ernst Krenek and Theodor W. Adorno. As an exponent of atonality and twelve-tone technique, Webern exerted influence on contemporaries Luigi Dallapiccola, Křenek, and even Schoenberg himself. As a tutor, Webern guided and variously influenced Arnold Elston, Frederick Dorian, Matty Niël, Fré Focke, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Philipp Herschkowitz, René Leibowitz, Humphrey Searle, Leopold Spinner, and Stefan Wolpe.
  Webern's music was among the most radical of its milieu, both in its concision and in its rigorous and resolute apprehension of twelve-tone technique.
context_section_description: Webern was born in Vienna, then Austria-Hungary, as Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a civil servant, and Amalie (née Geer) who was a competent pianist and accomplished singer—possibly the only obvious source of the future composer's talent. He never used his middle names and dropped the "von" in 1918 as directed by the Austrian government's reforms after World War I.
  He lived in Graz and Klagenfurt for much of his youth. But his distinct and lasting sense of Heimat was shaped by readings of Peter Rosegger; and moreover by frequent and extended retreats with his parents, sisters, and cousins to his family's country estate, the Preglhof, which Webern's father had inherited upon the death of Webern's grandfather in 1889.
  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. Once Webern's father sold the estate in 1912, Webern referred to it nostalgically as a "lost paradise". He continued to revisit the Preglhof, the family cemetery in Schwabegg, and the surrounding landscape for the rest of his life; and he clearly associated the area, which he took as his home, very closely with the memory of his mother Amelie, who had died in 1906 and whose loss also profoundly affected Webern for decades.
  Art historian Ernst Dietz, Webern's cousin and at that time a student at Graz, may have introduced Webern to the work of the painters Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, whom Webern came to admire. Segantini's work was a likely inspiration for Webern's 1905 single-movement string quartet.
  In 1902, Webern began attending classes at Vienna University. There he studied musicology with Guido Adler, writing his thesis on the Choralis Constantinus of Heinrich Isaac. This interest in early music would greatly influence his compositional technique in later years, especially in terms of his use of palindromic form on both the micro- and macro-scale and the economical use of musical materials. After graduating, Webern took a series of conducting posts at theatres in Ischl, Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic), Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), and Prague before moving back to Vienna.
  As might be expected, the young Webern was enthusiastic about the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), Hugo Wolf, and Richard Wagner, visiting Bayreuth in 1902. He also enjoyed the music of Hector Berlioz and Georges Bizet. In 1904, he reportedly stormed out of a meeting with Hans Pfitzner, from whom he was seeking instruction, when the latter criticized Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. In 1908, Webern wrote rapturously to Schoenberg about Claude Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande. He conducted some of Debussy's music in 1911.
  It may have been at Guido Adler's advice that he paid Schoenberg for composition lessons. Webern progressed quickly under Schoenberg's tutelage, publishing his Passacaglia, Op. 1, as his graduation piece in 1908. He also met Berg, then another of Schoenberg's pupils. These two relationships would be the most important in his life in shaping his own musical direction.
  Some of Webern's earlier thoughts (from 1903) are as amusing as they might be surprising: besides describing some of Alexander Scriabin's music as "languishing junk," he wrote of Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 4 that it was "boring," that Carl Maria von Weber's Konzertstück in F minor was passé, and that he found Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 3 (which struck Eduard Hanslick as "artistically the most nearly perfect") "cold and without particular inspiration, ... badly orchestrated—grey on grey." These youthful impressions are in some, but not complete or altogether necessarily very significant, contrast to the considered opinions of Webern in the 1930s, by then a decided nationalist who, as Roland Leich described, "lectured at some length on the utter supremacy of German music, emphasizing that leading composers of other lands are but
caption: The Preglhof in Oberdorf, Webern's childhood home
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