Anton Webern

Anton Webern compressed whole movements into a dozen bars and was shot dead by an American soldier on his son-in-law's doorstep three months after the war ended. He took a doctorate in musicology on the Renaissance composer Isaac, which shaped everything: his interest was in canon, symmetry and the strictest possible construction. He studied with Schoenberg alongside Berg and remained the most rigorous of the three. His complete works run to about three hours. The pieces are extremely short, extremely quiet, scored so that almost every note has a different colour, and built on symmetries that are audible only if you already know they are there - the Symphony op. 21 is a double canon in mirror. He conducted workers' concerts in Vienna for the Social Democrats and lost the work when the Austrofascists banned them; the Nazis then classified his music as degenerate and he lived on proof-reading. In September 1945, in occupied Mittersill, he stepped outside after curfew to smoke a cigar and was shot by a soldier during an arrest operation. Boulez and Stockhausen built the post-war avant-garde on him. His Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 10 last about four minutes in total and one movement is nineteen bars long. He orchestrated the six-part ricercar from Bach s Musical Offering, splitting a single melodic line between instruments so that the colour changes mid-phrase, which is his clearest statement of method. His son was killed on a troop train in February 1945. The soldier who shot him, Raymond Bell, was a cook who had not been told the house was under guard and drank himself to death within ten years. Stravinsky wrote that Webern was a perpetual Pentecost for all who believe in music.

• Lived: 1883 CE – 1945 CE
• Nationality: Austrian
• Roles: artist