Anton Von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work

Rating:
Summary: Indispensable
Review: I bought this book when it was first published, and it remains the most thorough study of the composer available. I've seen no book, before or since this book, which is as extensive. The author is sympathetic, but retains his objectivity; there's no trace of fauning admiration here, nor of academic aloofness. Mixes biography with discussions of his musical works. This is that proverbial "must-have' book for anyone with an interest in the composer.

Rating:
Summary: comprehensive personal
Review: Shame this is diffucult to obtained,Moldenhauer is an archivist, a collector of the particles, anf filiments from one's lifeworld, and here this large book presents an exhaustive account of Webern's life down to much perosnal fragments, anxieties and wishes. We learn he remained afraid to conduct, and cancelled many times,also hated travel, he was very much like his music, thought thru down to finest rarefied details.,plucked strings, pencil-thin harmonics, Am Steg;a new musical language advanced like his "Six Pieces Op.6 for Orchestra",miniature gems of timbre here/there. There is not much on the creativity moments of his life, this is fairly a personal day to day ad nauseum at times narrative. It is fairly exhaustive, and really brings the commonplace aspects that fills really much of a composer's life, that in fact those moments of "illumination" or clarvoyance we as consumers continue wish to phanthom occur many times quite spontaneously and never within a durational frame of predictability; while walking or un-boarding a train, lighting up a cigarette, watching the troops from the train, returning home. His music, his diamond-cut pieces (Stravinsky decribed him) inspired a generation of composers. He affinity for purity number,density proportion shape and design were all welcome elements from the overdetermined political pages of Europe with Two Massive Wars, no one has seem to learn from.
There are nice vintage photos all included here.