Anton Webern

“The most brilliant refutation of all the ill-willed, envious hostility and slander that oldfashioned brains have plotted against Arnold Schönberg has been offered by himself in his essay ‘Problems in Teaching Art.’ Never have more penetrating and truer words been said about those things. And each of his pupils can and could experience for themselves what Schönberg expresses in that essay. People are of the opinion that Schönberg teaches his style and forces the pupil to adopt it. That is completely and utterly false. Schönberg teaches no style; he preaches the use of neither old nor new artistic means. He says: ‘So what is the point of teaching how to master everyday cases? The pupil learns how to use something he must not use if he wants to be an artist. But one cannot give him what matters most – the courage and the strength to find an attitude to things which will make everything he looks at an exceptional case, because of the way he looks at it.’” (Anton Webern, The Teacher, in Arnold Schönberg. Mit Beiträgen von Alban Berg et al. Munich 1912)