Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon

6 The Tragic Night of Anton Webern

73 6 The Tragic Night of Anton Webern For many years an abundance of inconsistent theories were offered to account for the fatal shooting of composer Anton Webern on the evening of September 15, 1945, in Mittersill, an Alpine town southwest of Salzburg in the U.S.-occupied zone of Austria. It was a deadly response to a curfew violation, some said, when Webern stepped into the night air to enjoy an American cigar. Other explanations received by musicologist Hans Moldenhauer , who studied the riddle of Webern’s sudden death, were more sinister: a well-known Swiss composer opined that the killing had been “intentional” and the result of a “criminal act,” and the widow of a Viennese composer wrote to Moldenhauer of “rumors that [Webern’s] Nazi son-in-law Benno mattel had shot him.” in the last decade of his life, Anton Webern as a man and musician had been a victim of cultural totalitarianism and the Nazification of Europe . After leading a Mendelssohn program for Ravag (Radio Austria) in honor of the composer’s birthday, he saw his career as a conductor come to an end. in the wake of the Anschluss, Webern’s music was included in a Nazi propaganda exhibit of “Degenerate Art” in Vienna’s Künstlerhaus. This official proscription made it impossible to have his works performed in his homeland or elsewhere in Nazi dominions. The income from his teaching also dwindled away. Webern’s biographers, including Hans Moldenhauer and Kathryn Bailey , have cited evidence that, despite the political oppression from which his career suffered, Webern was, during the first years of World War II, strangely attracted to Nazism. Kathryn Bailey writes that “in the early 74 · Musical Mysteries 1940s . . . Webern shows great enthusiasm for Hitler and Nazi domination as the German world’s ordained and proper destiny.” At least for a time Webern expressed admiration for Hitler as the force behind German resurgence . in a letter of march 4, 1940, to his friend Josef Hueber he wrote that a reading of Mein Kampf had brought him “much enlightenment.” Bailey notes that, among Webern’s children, only his daughter maria Halbich managed “to resist the pull towards National Socialism.” Perhaps in the interest of protecting his family, Webern maintained silence on the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitism, a stance that upset Jewish friends and colleagues , notably Arnold Schoenberg and pianist Eduard Steuermann. The last years of World War II brought tragedy and hardship to Webern and his family. In the spring of 1944 Webern, at age sixty, was inducted into service in the air raid protection police, living in a barrack away from his home in mödling, a town outside Vienna. in march 1945 he learned of the death of his soldier son Peter, whose troop train was hit by low-flying Allied bombers. On March 31 Webern and his wife, Wilhelmine , their daughter Amalie, and her two children left Vienna on foot to join their other two daughters, Christine and Maria, and their families in Mittersill. The hope of the Weberns was to escape the bombings and privations of the Austrian capital. For a while the entire Webern family lived together with maria’s inlaws , but Christine and her husband, Benno mattel, moved to the rented ground floor of a house located “am Markt 101” on the outskirts of Mittersill . it was here that Anton and Wilhelmine were invited for dinner on the last evening of his life. After the meal was over, Webern was shot to death outside the front door. In August 1959 Moldenhauer, accompanied by his wife, Rosaleen, made a pilgrimage to the site. In his 1961 book The Death of Webern: A Drama in Documents, moldenhauer recalled that the marks left by the bullets that killed Webern were still visible: “I walked along the pathway up to the door. There, in the stucco wall next to the log frame, three bullet holes can still be seen. They are about waist high above the ground, two on the left, and one on the right side of the door. Three small holes puncturing the stone bespeak the violence which had struck here.” The Moldenhauers spoke to the few Mittersill residents who remembered the shooting. They told the Moldenhauers that on the evening in question, American occupation soldiers were searching for Bruno mattel, Webern’s son-in-law, “who The Tragic Night of Anton Webern · 75 Left: Anton...