Editing Anton Webern (section)

===1947–1950s: (Re)discovery and post-Webernism===

{{Quote box|bgcolor=#FFFFF0|width=25%|quoted=true|salign=right|Webern's death should be a day of mourning for any receptive musician. We must hail ... this great ... a real hero. Doomed to ... failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference he ... kept on cutting ... dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had ... perfect knowledge.|source=Stravinsky lauded Webern in ''[[die Reihe]]''{{sfnm|Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer|1978|1loc=693|Stravinsky|1959}}{{efn|Or possibly Craft, who often [[Ghostwriter|ghostwrote]] for Stravinsky.}}}}

After World War II, there was unprecedented engagement with Webern's music. It came to represent a universally or generally valid, systematic, and compellingly logical model of new composition, especially at the {{lang|de|[[Darmstädter Ferienkurse]]|italic=no}}.{{sfnm|Andriessen|2002|1loc=131|Fosler-Lussier|2007|2loc=38|Grant|2001|3loc=103|Ross|2007|4loc=267}} [[René Leibowitz]] performed, promulgated, and published ''Schoenberg et son école'';{{sfn|Taruskin|2009a|loc=15–18}} Adorno,{{sfn|Bols|2020|loc=125–126}} [[Herbert Eimert]], Scherchen,{{sfn|Fosler-Lussier|2007|loc=40}} and others contributed. Composers and students{{efn|See [[Darmstadt School]].}} listened in a quasi-religious trance to Peter Stadlen's 1948 Op. 27 performance.{{sfn|Ross|2007|loc=267}}

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 [[serialism|serial]] or [[avant-garde]] composers (e.g., [[Messiaen]], Boulez, [[Stockhausen]], [[Luigi Nono]], [[Pousseur]], [[Ligeti]], [[Sylvano Bussotti]], [[Bruno Maderna]], [[Bernd Alois Zimmermann]], [[Barbara Pentland]]).{{sfn|Erwin|2020|loc=93–94}} Eimert and Stockhausen devoted a special issue of ''[[die Reihe]]'' to Webern's {{lang|fr|œuvre}} in 1955. UE published his lectures in 1960.{{sfn|Grant|2001|loc=103}}

In the US, Babbitt{{sfn|Vandagriff|2017|loc=332}} and initially Rochberg{{sfnm|Rochberg|2004|1loc=47–48|Wlodarski|2019|2loc=59}} found more in Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice. [[Elliott Carter]]'s and [[Aaron Copland]]'s critical ambivalence was marked by a certain enthusiasm and fascination nonetheless.{{sfn|Emmery|2020|loc=72–82}} Craft fruitfully reintroduced Stravinsky to Webern's music, without which Stravinsky's late works would have taken different shape. Stravinsky staked his contract with [[Columbia Records]] to see Webern's then known music first both recorded and widely distributed.{{sfnm|Clements|2022|Miller|2022a|2loc=99}} Stravinsky lauded Webern's "not yet canonized art" in 1959.{{sfn|Straus|2001|loc=22}}

Among the [[New York School (art)|New York School]], [[John Cage]] and [[Morton Feldman]] first met in [[Carnegie Hall]]'s lobby, ecstatic after a performance of Op. 21 by [[Dimitri Mitropoulos]] and the [[New York Philharmonic]]. They cited the effect of its ''sound'' on their music.{{sfn|Feldman|2000|loc=114–115}} They later sung the praises of [[Christian Wolff (composer)|Christian Wolff]] as "our Webern".

[[Gottfried Michael Koenig]] suggested some early interest in Webern's music may have been that its concision and apparent simplicity facilitated didactic [[musical analysis]]. {{Interlanguage link|Robert Beyer (composer){{!}}Robert Beyer|de|3=Robert Beyer}} criticized serial approaches to Webern's music as [[reductionism|reductive]], narrowly focused more on Webern's procedures than his music while neglecting timbre in their typical selection of Opp. 27–28.{{sfn|Grant|2001|loc=104}} Webern's music sounded like "a [[Piet Mondrian|Mondrian]] canvas", "crude and unfinished", to [[Karel Goeyvaerts]].{{sfnm|Goeyvaerts|1994|1loc=39|Grant|2001|2loc=104-105}} [[Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski]] criticized some Darmstadt music as "acoustically absurd [if] visually amusing" (''{{ill|Darmstädter Tagblatt|de}}'', 1959); a ''[[Der Kurier]]'' article of his was headlined "Meager modern music—only interesting to look at".{{sfn|Iddon|2013|loc=250}}