Webern's Atonal Recall; Boulez Sets Record Straight on Composer
Fifty-five years ago this September, the Austrian composer Anton von Webern stepped into the autumn night outside the little town of Mittersill, Austria, and lit a cigar. No one knows quite what happened next, but he found himself on the wrong end of a GI's gun, and a few hours later he was dead.</br></br>It was a death that conductor Pierre Boulez, whose second complete edition of the works of Webern has just been released on Deutsche Grammophon, called "absurd" in a breathlessly adulatory article about the composer published in 1958.</br></br>Webern's death at age 61, a war casualty after the war was over, was absurd. It was most likely the result of a jittery soldier working undercover to nab the very same black marketeer who had given Webern his cigar. It was a silly, ignominious death for a composer who had suffered more than his share of unjustified ignominy.</br></br>The deaths of all three of the great Viennese modernists were absurd. Webern's teacher Arnold Schoenberg, the consummate Viennese curmudgeon, died in Los Angeles in 1951, grumpy, isolated and superstitious almost to the point of paralysis. Fellow Schoenberg disciple Alban Berg died at 50 in 1935 of an abscess that might have been easily treated today.</br></br>Although Schoenberg lived well into his seventies, not one of this great trinity of modernism, who elaborated a succession of post- tonal styles--most famously the 12-tone technique and serialism-- really got to be a grand old man. None of them enjoyed the esteem and career security that makes possible reassessment and stylistic reflection. Unlike Stravinsky's, for example, the music of the atonalists had little autumnal evolution; Berg and Webern didn't live long enough; and Schoenberg, desperate for commissions, made only feints in new directions.