Word: webern
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...pianist of comparable stature can match Pollini as an exponent of contemporary music. His programs feature the works of Webern, Schoenberg, Boulez, Stockhausen and his friend Luigi Nono, alongside more standard offerings. "The music of today is a mirror of our time, of its problems," he says. "Why is it normal to be interested in Picasso and Joyce and not in Schoenberg and Stockhausen?" He has sometimes paid for this conviction by being booed at performances, an experience that he shrugs off: "No response at all would be worse." Once, in Vienna, a Stockhausen score called for him to strike...
...page Anton von Webern (Knopf) is the magnum opus of Scholar and Archivist Hans Moldenhauer, 72, in collaboration with his wife Rosaleen. The Moldenhauers do not set out to interpret Webern's personality or evaluate his music. But they furnish such extensive extracts from diaries and letters, as well as such detailed ''work histories'' of the compositions, that their valuable book adumbrates the shape of many biographies and studies to come. It also reflects their recovery of a number of Webern manuscripts-characteristically neat, finely etched documents in which individual notes range over the staves...
Born in 1883, Webern came of age amidst the last flowering of Viennese culture. He knew the writer Karl Kraus; he was painted by Oskar Kokoschka and treated by Psychiatrist Alfred Adler. Yet by choice and necessity, he remained a soul apart. He lived a frugal, ascetic life with his wife and four chil dren, eking out his income by teaching, by doing hack jobs for his music pub lisher and by conducting. He had a mea sure of success on the podium despite his distaste for the hubbub of the per forming life. He demanded unusual expressive nuances from...
...Webern's whole life, Craft commented, was ''a search for the strongest, the most all-abiding rules.'' He believed that only in ''unprecedented shackles'' could ''complete freedom'' be found. He pursued the search in his lifelong veneration of Schoenberg, in his ardent religiosity and in his rigid domestic discipline, which included aligning the pencils on his desk according to length and color. He even carried it into the pages of Mein Kampf. Although Schoenberg and other Jewish colleagues were ostracized, although his own music was denounced...
...composer who is perceived as an epochal innovator, Webern never saw himself in opposition to the Austro-German musical tradition that extends from Bach through Mahler. To his composition students he held up Beethoven's sonatas as the supreme models of craftsmanship. The Columbia LPs conclude with a 1932 recording of him conducting his own orchestration of some Schubert dances-a gesture of homage that was not unusual for him. What passed for classicism in his own day, he wrote in one of the letters quoted by the Moldenhauers, ''emulates the style without knowing its meaning . . . whereas...