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] Nazison-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 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 in-laws, 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 had made himself politically suspect.” (Mattel was in fact a former storm trooper; he had married Christine Webern in his brown uniform.) While the Americans talked to Mattel in the kitchen, Webern left the house to smoke; since it was 10:00 he “apparently was mistaken for his son-in-law” and was shot at the moment he walked out of the house.
Moldenhauer’s passion to discover the true circumstances of Webern’s death impelled him to carry on painstaking inquiries of U.S. governmental and military offices and in November 1959 brought him a promising reply from the U.S. Army Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Records in that office showed that units of the 42nd (Rainbow) Division were located at Mittersill on the date of the shooting; the center’s commanding officer furnished Moldenhauer the names and latest addresses of officers assigned to those units. This information, supplemented by a response of the Adjutant General’s office, enabled Moldenhauer to write letters to two dozen men inquiring about their possible knowledge of facts concerning the shooting. One of the letters led Moldenhauer to a valuable source, Martin U. Heiman, who was attached to the 242nd Infantry Regiment of the Rainbow Division, which served in Mittersill in September 1945, and who acted as interpreter of German-speaking witnesses and investigator in the whole regimental area.
Heiman forwarded Moldenhauer a copy of his affidavit of December 28, 1959, recording his knowledge of circumstances of Webern’s death. According to Heiman, on Saturday evening, September 15, 1945, he was called away from a dance to follow a man he knew well, a headquarters company cook, to “a nearby civilian home in order to help arrest a black marketeer, Benno Mattel, and to act as interpreter in a shooting which took place in this connection.” The victim “lying dead from newly inflicted bullet wounds” on the ground floor opposite the kitchen was Anton von Webern. During the investigation Heiman acted as interpreter. The ensuing trial resulted in the imposition of a one-year jail sentence on Mattel for black market activities. The first sergeant and the cook who were involved in the arrest had contacted Mattel after learning that he “was a real or prospective black marketeer.” With permission from superiors, the two soldiers took army food and supplies to Mattel’s home on the evening of September 15 and negotiated sale prices. When Mattel agreed to the purchase, they drew their pistols and placed him under arrest. Heiman observed that the cook may not have been an ideal choice for a sting operation: “It should be noted at this time that the cook involved was even normally a very nervous person, easily aroused and excitable, even though—according to my knowledge—not a bad character and sometimes helpful.”
The cook’s high-strung nature may have played a key role in what transpired: “The cook—already in a very excited state—stepped out of the hallway and the house into the darkness and promptly bumped into a figure by whom he felt himself attacked. He fired 3 shots ‘in self-defense’ and kept on going to the restaurant to get the undersigned [Heiman]. . . . [Webern] only stepped outside the house shortly before, coming from the room across the hallway, to smoke an American cigar, given to him earlier by his son-in-law, B. Mattel.” Additional details were provided in a statement of Wilhelmine Webern, a copy of which Heiman attached to his report. She confirmed that, at 9:45 P.M. exactly, her husband walked outside because “he wanted to smoke the cigar which he had received the same evening from our son-in-law.” Webern “wanted to smoke it . . . outside the [bedroom] in order not to bother the children.” Frau Webern discounted the cook’s claim of self-defense: “My husband was reconvalescent and weighed only about 50 kilos (110 lbs.); he is about 160 cms (5’4”) high. According to my belief it would be against his nature to attack anybody, especially a soldier.”
In further correspondence Heiman was able to inform Moldenhauer that the last name of the cook who shot Webern was Bell. His report was accurate, because army records identified the cook as Raymond N. Bell. It turned out that Bell was deceased, but his wife, Helen, wrote graciously to Moldenhauer. Her husband had been a restaurant chef after the war and had died of alcoholism. She knew little about the accident except that it troubled her husband: “When he came home from the war he told me he killed a man in the line of duty. I knew he worried greatly over it. Everytime he became intoxicated, he would say, ‘I wish I hadn’t killed that man.’ I truly think it helped to bring on his sickness. He was a very kind man who loved everyone. These are the results of war. So many suffer.”
The persevering quest of Hans Moldenhauer did not put at rest the minds of commentators who have favored more sensational explanations of Webern’s death. According to Kathryn Bailey, “most accounts have agreed that in stepping outside . . . Webern was breaking a curfew.” The composer’s 1966 biographer, Friedrich Wildgans, wrote that an 8:00 general curfew had recently been imposed but that, in view of the arrangements for the sting, Mattel had not been informed. This explanation justifiably does not satisfy Kathryn Bailey, who counters that “Wildgans fails to explain how it was that none of the (ten?) people living in the Halbich household [where Webern was living] knew about the curfew either.” She regards as more plausible a speculation that “a special curfew had been placed on the house where the Mattels lived for this occasion only, and that the others living in the house had been told of the curfew but the Mattels naturally had not been, and that it had not occurred to anyone that the Mattels might have visitors that night.”
The alternative supposition of a single-house curfew appears fanciful, particularly since such an order would have relied on the discretion of the Mattels’ landlady, Elise Fritzenwanger, who, in the eyes of the American occupation authorities, would likely have been regarded as an enemy civilian. Rendering the special curfew thesis even more dubious is a further observation by Bailey. According to a written report by Mittersill’s mayor, “the reason no one was allowed to leave the house was that it was being searched; no curfew is mentioned.”
Other explanations of the Webern shooting are advanced by devotees of conspiracy theory. Conductor Hans Rosbaud suggested that Webern was clearly silhouetted in front of a lighted window and was therefore known to his killer. Disregarding the fact that Mattel was arrested, Louis Krasner retold a story that Webern had intentionally exposed himself to gunfire in order to allow his son-in-law to escape.
The random nature of the Mittersill shooting, which put a tragic end to the life and creativity of one of twentieth-century music’s greatest geniuses, has inspired playwrights and opera composers to revisit the event. One of those to do so was poet-playwright James Schevill, who included “The Death of Anton Webern” in his Collected Short Plays. Schevill’s “counterpoint for voices” on Webern’s death, intended to be presented as a radio play, a concert reading, or a television piece with film or projections, was first performed by the Radio Players of San Francisco State University in 1967. Drawing on the factual revelations made by Moldenhauer, Schevill includes among his characters Webern, his wife, one of his daughters, his black-marketeer son-inlaw, and the American cook who took the composer’s life. The unifying plot element in the short drama is the ominous cigar. Webern’s family recalls the composer’s fondness for cigars. His daughter recalls that her “father composed through smoking cigars,” and his widow muses affectionately,
Music and cigars . . . He smoked me out
Constantly from his study. I never really
Understood his music, so short, whispering angles,
Jumping rhythms, but I never heard it often.
Benno Mattel attributes the origin of the sting operation to his purchase of the cigar that he gave to Webern:
At the door stood an American cook,
A simple man, drawling a southern accent,
Who desired the pleasures of money.
We drank as friends, even if it was I who joked.
We celebrated war’s end, the birth of leisure,
And he sold me the cigar to burn away my world.
And the ghost of Webern recalls how the pleasures of that cigar were effaced by gunsmoke:
I stood in the doorway, savoring the smoke,
the shape, the touch,
A sensuous man hoping for a return
of the sensuous time,
Staring at the stars, the mountains
huge over the quiet village . . .
I heard voices, turned back in alarm . . .
A frantic figure broke the darkness of the hall . . .
I grappled with him . . .
The author attempts to imitate in Webern’s mode of speech the jagged rhythms and enigmatic silences of the composer’s style. Webern’s wife, Wilhelmine, reported in her statement to investigators that his last words were “It’s over.” In Schevill’s imaginative rendering, however, Webern prefers as his finale the subtler markings in his scores, and he places the beauty and inventiveness of his music above life’s vicissitudes:
“It’s over.”
The language of stupidity,
of artificial life,
not of music.
Scarcely audible
Dying away
The directions of my music,
Desires of intense, natural change,
the constant changes of inconstancy,
the horror and beauty of opposed forces
resolved by the ear,
shifting structures
of mystery
transcending death and time,
crab-like movements,
silent pauses . . .
British writer and film director Peter Greenaway has produced three versions of a surrealist work on murders of composers, including Anton Webern. Entitled at first Rosa and later given the additional name The Death of a Composer, Greenaway’s enterprise successively took the form of a 1993 novel conceived as an elaborately annotated opera libretto without music; an opera, which premiered in 1994, with a libretto drawn from Greenaway’s novel and music by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen; and a 1999 film adaptation for television. At the beginning of his novel, Greenaway describes the birth of his idea:
I have been interested for a long time in a melodramatic conspiracy against composers, and have talked and written about it in so many complicated ways, that I am no longer completely certain how to tell it any more. So anticipating credulity, I am going to write of it as though it was an opera, for perhaps opera is capable of indulging in concepts and illusions too preposterous to be tolerated in any form.
There are ten assassinations in the conspiracy. All of them are composers. At this stage you must believe that five of the composers are already dead. With dry ceremony their five coffins have been brought on to the stage. We are to consider the death of a sixth composer and to fill a sixth coffin. The composer’s name is Rosa—Juan Manuel de Rosa, almost the same as the General, Juan Manuel de Rosas, who slaughtered two million South American Indians in Brazil in 1857.
Composer Rosa, like most in the sequence of ten victims conceived by Greenaway, is fictional; described as a writer of scores for Hollywood Westerns who was fonder of his black horse Ebola than of his fiancée Esmeralda, he was found dead in an abandoned slaughterhouse in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, in 1956. But the first and last in Greenaway’s series of murdered composers were tragically real, Anton Webern and John Lennon.
A passage in the novel Rosa invokes the mysteries associated in history and myth with the sudden deaths of composers: “The death of a composer needs investigating. Was Mozart poisoned? Was Tchaikovsky murdered? Was Webern assassinated? Was Orpheus really slaughtered? Was Rosa murdered in mysterious circumstances in Fray Bentos? He was shot by mysterious assailants whilst riding his horse. Who were the murderers?” Broom-sweepers who clean the blood of the abattoir ask, “Who would ever want to kill a composer?” and the novel’s text replies only with more questions: “Is it indeed a fact that Rosa was killed because he was a composer? It might have been because Rosa was a fornicator and an abuser of women. Or an abuser of horses? Or was it because he abused his talent writing trash for the movies? Who says it was trash?”
Toward the novel’s end, Greenaway introduces the Investigatrix to identify the principal pieces of evidence in Rosa’s murder. In an apparent send-up of assassination conspiracy theories, the Investigatrix promises that
we can show you that the death was not
Coincidental
And no random assassination.
There are clues that unite this death of a famous
composer to a conspiracy.
Winnowing her findings, the Investigatrix finds ten clues present at the death of each of the ten composers linked together in a series of murders—“a hat, a pair of spectacles, a smoking cigar, a gun, three bullets, vegetation, night, a grieving widow, American passports and a composer.” Most of these circumstances are so frequently present at the scenes of composers’ deaths, regardless of their cause, that they do not go far to sustain the Investigatrix’s claim to have discovered an overarching criminal design. But buried in this joke at the would-be sleuth’s expense, a juxtaposition of certain clues points suggestively to Anton Webern’s death. Is he not the only historical composer in Greenaway’s series who, while smoking a cigar, was shot in the night with three bullets by a killer of American nationality and who left behind a grieving widow?
In “Filming Opera,” an “open discussion” held in August 2000 with the European Graduate School on the filming of Rosa, Greenaway revealed that since the 1970s he had been “deeply fascinated” by the death of Anton Webern, saying, “There are lots of theories about his death because nobody could actually believe that it was so peculiarly accidental.” Greenaway’s acquaintance with the facts of the case seems sketchy. He remarks that “three shots suddenly rang out and the man lay dying in the snow. He was dead twenty-four hours afterward.” But Greenaway’s wildest contribution to the catalog of myths about Webern’s shooting is his reference to a theory that the composer, born into a Roman Catholic family ennobled in the sixteenth century, “recently had converted from Judaism to Christianity and this was a reprisal by some very keen Zionists.” Greenaway also referred to suggestions that “departing Nazis had a particular antagonism to anybody who subverted the German tradition of music” and that Webern was “embroiled in some dubious associations with his son-in-law.” The filmmaker added mysteriously that “there were also some extenuating [sic] circumstances surrounding his autopsy.” This accumulation of “fiction” and “apocrypha” led to the director’s decision to “make something fictional” of Webern’s death. In the discussion of the televising of Rosa, Greenaway (perhaps with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek) purported to have discovered a link between Webern’s death and the 1980 murder of John Lennon. He “noticed that there were a remarkable number of clues present at the death of John Lennon, exactly the same clues present so much earlier at the death of Anton Webern.”
Christopher Bernard, a writer of poetry, fiction, plays, and journalism and the founder of an online literary and arts magazine, Caveat Lector, is the composer and librettist of an opera, “Nachtstück: An Opera on the Death of Anton Webern,” which was given a reading at the Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco on August 14, 1992. The opera’s action begins with the entry of Webern, the only named character, into his son-in-law’s garden after the family dinner of September 15, 1945. A military loudspeaker announces a curfew beginning at exactly 9:30 P.M., and a fresh poster near the garden gate warns that violators may be shot. “Our new occupiers!” Webern muses. “But better than the others.” He lights his cigar, three gunshots sound, and he reels as if struck. The light on Webern fades.
When the mountains brighten, the play takes a retrospective turn. Webern reappears overcome with guilt, regretting his belief in Hitler and his betrayal of his friendship with Arnold Schoenberg. Images of trains carrying Jews to death camps haunt him, and he laments his failure to save his son Peter’s life by leaving before the war. A fantasy of his own death in a curfew violation appeases a sense of justice:
There is a gate that leads outside here.
If I leave by it,
I’ll meet a patrol
of the Americans
and be shot, no questions asked.
The Germans were no kinder!
It would be “poetic justice”:
maybe my folly deserves no better.
Such a death will be forgotten quickly,
a minor incident of the occupation—
regrettable, to be sure, but to be expected:
at any rate, the victim should not have been
taking his constitutional after curfew. . . .
It would be a fair punishment.
These reflections introduce what Bernard terms an “opera within an opera,” based on the historical Webern’s unpublished 1913 play in six scenes, “Tod” (Death), inspired by the death of a nephew. Webern observes a Man and Woman in grief over their lost child and draws a parallel to his own suffering over the death of Peter:
My nephew
died that summer
just before
the other war—
I wrote my dream out,
then forgot it,
It comes again.
The earlier family tragedy is resolved when the Woman is confronted by the dead child’s guardian angel and the Man recognizes that “our life on earth is the image of eternity.” The Man sees the hand of God in the beauty of the mountains:
A mountain flower shows that beauty,
uncanny in its perfection,
the tenderness,
the holiness
of the nameless One.
The light on the forestage goes up, showing Webern once more at the garden gate. He expresses hope that he will “build a life of good” in his music and will have “just enough time to erase that memory that hounds” him. But the three gunshots are heard again and Webern intones the last three words that he spoke in life: “It is over.”
In May 1998 a ludicrous hoax linking Anton Webern’s music to the Nazi SS circulated on the Internet. An article originally attributed to an author bearing the transnational name “Heinrich Kincaid” and supposedly copyrighted by the Associated Press headlined its revelations: “Composer Webern Was Double Agent for Nazis.” A sampling of Kincaid’s disclosures makes his attempt at heavy-handed satire apparent:
BERLIN, GERMANY (AP)—Recent admissions by an ex-Nazi official living in Argentina have confirmed what some musicologists have suspected for years: that early twentieth century German composer Anton Webern and his colleagues devised the so-called “serial” technique of music to encrypt messages to Nazi spies living in the United States and Britain.
In what can surely be considered the most brazen instance of Art Imitating Espionage to date, avant garde composers of the Hitler years working in conjunction with designers of the Nazi Enigma code were bamboozling unsuspecting audiences with their atonal thunderings while at the same time passing critical scientific data back and forth between nations. . . .
It is now known that Webern was using music to shuttle Werner Heisenberg’s discoveries in atomic energy to German spy Klaus Fuchs working on the Manhattan atom bomb project in New Mexico. Due to the secret nature of the project, which was still underway after the invasion of Berlin, Army officials at the time were unable to describe the true reason for Webern’s murder.
Hans Scherbius, a Nazi party official who worked with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, admitted at age eighty-seven that the Nazis secretly were behind the twelve-tone technique of composition, which was officially reviled to give it the outlaw status it needed to remain outside of the larger public purview.
“These pieces were nothing more than cipher for encoding messages,” he chuckled during an interview on his balcony in Buenos Aires. “It was only because it was ‘naughty’ and difficult that elite audiences accepted it, even championed it.”
Arnold Schonberg [sic], the older musician who first devised the serial technique at the request of the Weimar government of Germany, composed in America to deliver bomb data stolen by Fuchs back to the Nazis, who worked feverishly to design their own atomic weapons.
As an example, Scherbius showed Associated Press reporters the score of Webern’s Opus 30 “Variations for Orchestra” overlaid with a cardboard template. The notes formed a mathematical grid that deciphered into German a comparison between the neutron release cross-sections of uranium isotopes 235 and 238.
Schonberg responded with a collection of songs for soprano and woodwinds that encrypted the chemical makeup of the polonium-beryllium initiator at the core of the Trinity explosion.
Exposure of the Webern hoax was soon to follow. Under a dateline of June 29, 1998, “Urban Legends and Folklore,” an online series on About.com, published a “short list of factual errors and logical inconsistencies” in Kincaid’s article, “more than sufficient to debunk the central claims.” Included in the errors were the following howlers:
1. Klaus Fuchs spied for Russia, not Germany.
2. Why would “Arnold Schoenberg, a Jew who fled Nazi oppression in Germany in 1933, spy for the Third Reich”?
3. The author of About.com’s rebuttal could “find no evidence that a ‘Hans Scherbius,’ the supposed ‘Nazi party official’ who was the source of these shocking revelations, actually existed.”
On July 3, 1998, American composer Chris Hertzog supplemented this list with the observation that Arnold Schoenberg’s famous article explaining his invention of twelve-tone serial composition appeared in the 1920s, long before the Nazis came to power.
Although the Webern Internet hoax was readily detected, the surviving riddle is why its originator found amusement in suggesting a tie between the composer and the Nazi cause. It is possible that the deviser of the scheme was aware of Webern’s temporary enthusiasms over the Nazi conquest of Europe. However, this is a relatively obscure chapter in the composer’s life that would not resonate in the minds of many blog readers. It is also apparent that Webern is by no means the sole butt of Kincaid’s espionage joke; he also included Arnold Schoenberg, an eminent Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution, among the agents in his fictitious spy network. Therefore, Nazi sympathies can be put aside as the satirist’s principal target. More likely, the Internet jest is at the expense of twelve-tone music, which, Kincaid suggests, could not have been invented to please the ear and must therefore have been meant to transmit covert messages.
Bibliographical Notes
The principal source concerning the death of Anton Webern remains Hans Moldenhauer, The Death of Anton Webern: A Drama in Documents (New York: Philosophical Library, 1961). The facts revealed in this work are reaffirmed in Hans Moldenhauer, in collaboration with Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work (New York: Knopf, 1979). I also consulted Friedrich Wildgans, Anton Webern (New York: October House, 1967); Malcolm Hayes, Anton von Webern (London: Phaidon, 1995); and Kathryn Bailey, The Life of Webern (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 164–91.
James Schevill’s play The Death of Anton Webern is included in his Collected Short Plays (Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio Univ. Press, 1986), 235–44. The novel that begins the Rosa project is Peter Greenaway, Rosa (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1993), 48, 84, 106–14. Peter Greenaway’s discussion with the European Graduate School in August 2000, “Filming Opera,” is found at http://www.egs.edu/faculty/greenaway/greenaway-opera-2000.html (accessed Oct. 6, 2007). Author Christopher Bernard kindly provided me a copy of the unpublished libretto of “Nachtstück: An Opera on the Death of Anton Webern,” 7, 13, 22, 29, 39, 44.
For text and commentary relating to the Webern Internet hoax, see About.com: Urban Legends and Folklore, “Webern’s Dodecaphonic Conspiracy,” June 29, 1998, http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa062998.htm (accessed Oct. 6, 2007); “More on the Webern—Nazi Hoax,” About.com: Urban Legends and Folklore, July 3, 1998, http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa070398.htm (accessed Oct. 7, 2007).