With a publication contract through Emil Hertzka at Universal Edition and Schoenberg based in Berlin, Webern began writing music of increasing confidence, independence, and scale using twelve-tone technique.

After a trip to Bayreuth,[23] Webern studied musicology at the University of Vienna (1902–1906) with Guido Adler, a friend of Mahler, composition student of Bruckner,[d] and devoted Wagnerian who had been in contact with both Wagner and Liszt.

[23] His cousin Ernst Diez [de], 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.

[41] Also through Schoenberg, who painted and had a 1910 solo exhibition at Hugo Heller [de]'s bookstore, Webern met Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer (with whom he corresponded on ich–Du terms), Egon Schiele, and Emil Stumpp.

[53] J. P. Hodin contextualized the opposition of the "youthful intelligentsia" to operetta with a quote from Hermann Bahr's 1907 essay Wien:[54]everyone knows ... it is always Sunday in Vienna ... one lives in a world of half-poetry which is very dangerous for the real thing.

[59][n] 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.

[88] 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.

[114] 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".

[152][153][ac] Armand Machabey noted Webern's regional reputation as a conductor of "haute valeur"[ad] for his meticulous approach to then contemporary music, comparing him to Willem Mengelberg in Le Ménestrel (1930).

[163] Financial crises, complex social and political movements, pervasive antisemitism, culture wars, and renewed military conflicts[al] continued to shape Webern's world, profoundly circumscribing his life.

[276] The Frankfurt School first treated it within the rubric of class conflict (Adorno began to consider it otherwise in his 1939 "Fragments on Wagner"),[277] 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).

[267] Sharing in wartime public sentiment at the height of Hitler's popularity (spring 1940), Webern expressed high hopes, crediting him as "unique" and "singular"[bh] for "the new state for which the seed was laid twenty years ago".

[bo] He engaged with the work of Goethe, Bach,[bp] and the Franco-Flemish School in addition to that of Wolf, Brahms,[bq] Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Beethoven, Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), and Mozart.

[372] 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.

[390] 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.

1 at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-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 Moderner Abend[ce] concert.

[411] 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, Heimat (e.g., the Preglhof, the Eastern Alps).

[412] 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.

[cl] Expanding on Mahler's orchestration, Webern linked colorful, novel, fragile, and intimate sounds, often nearly silent at ppp, to lyrical topics: solo violin to female voice; closed or open voicings, sometimes sul ponticello, to dark or light respectively; compressed range to absence, emptiness, or loneliness; registral expansion to fulfillment, (spiritual) presence, or transcendence;[cm] celesta, harp, and glockenspiel to the celestial or ethereal; and trumpet, harp, and string harmonics to angels or heaven.

"[ct] 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.

[450] 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.

[466] Studying his compositional materials and sketches, Bailey Puffett wrote,[467]... [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.

[513] 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).

[523] Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski criticized some Darmstadt music as "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing" (Darmstädter Tagblatt [de], 1959); a Der Kurier article of his was headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at".

Sheet music and recordings entered via journalists, friends, family (e.g., from Nicolas to Sergei Slonimsky), and especially composers and musicians (e.g., Igor Blazhkov [ru], Gérard Frémy, Alexei Lubimov, Maria Yudina), who traveled more.

[555] 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[dz]) ironically learned more about what had been and even was still forbidden.

Rudi van Dantzig choreographed Webern's music in Ogenblikken[ea] (1968) and Antwoord gevend[eb] (1980); Glen Tetley in Praeludium (1978) and Contredanses (1979);[564] Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker alongside that of Beethoven and Schnittke in Erts (1992);[565] and Trisha Brown in Twelve Ton Rose (1996).

[610][ep] He excoriated the Second Viennese School's "idiosyncratic view of the past", linking Webern and Adler to Eduard Hanslick and "neo-Hegelian" Franz Brendel;[612][eq] he criticized historical determinism, "the natural ally of totalitarian politics.

[632][eu] Johnson noted the "co-existence and interaction of diverse stylistic practices" with "remarkable similarities", challenging "conservative and progressive" campism[635] and decentering musicology's technical periodizations[636] via the longue durée of global modernity.

[643] Building on Shreffler's and Felix Meyer's sketch studies as institutions like the Paul-Sacher-Stiftung [de] acquired and made the Moldenhauers' estate accessible,[644][ex] Johnson worked toward a hermeneutics of Webern's (and Mahler's) music.