Anton Webern - Topic

Anton Webern was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its concision and use of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques in an increasingly rigorous manner, somewhat after the Franco-Flemish School of his studies under Guido Adler. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School. Their atonal music brought them fame and stirred debate. Webern was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in an aphoristic, expressionist style, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process.
During and after World War I, he set folk, lyric, and spiritual texts in texturally dense Lieder. Peripatetic and unhappy in his early conducting career, he came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher in Red Vienna.