Entering into Anton Webern’s twelve-tone music and its complex reception history is like entering into a combat with the Hydra: cleave off one head of the Webern myth, and two more grow in its place. Taking a step back from the embattled scenes of the past in search of a broader vantage point, this chapter argues that the crux in understanding late Webern lies in understanding that the competing, often contradictory images of the composer that have emerged pose no real contradictions after all. Instead, in the same way that the Hydra’s separate heads are essentially connected entities, these different images are best understood as mediated with one another on a deeper level, representing different aspects of one and the same aesthetic concern: musical lyricism.

As one of the inventors of the twelve-tone technique and the first well-known composer of twelve-tone music, it makes eminent sense that Arnold Schoenberg would be understood by scholars and musicians as a traditionalist. This chapter explores an important, but often neglected, way Schoenberg preserved tradition in his serial music: through the use of a ‘musical idea’ that involves the introduction and elaboration of a problem and its eventual solution. The chapter presents two analyses: of the Prelude op. 25 and the Piano Piece op. 33a. Both pieces illustrate problems and elaborations that stem from the differences between a symmetrical pitch-class or interval pattern (presented or implied at the beginning) and various close or distant approximations of it. The symmetrical pattern is then reasserted at or near the end, and the approximations are connected to it in significant ways, as a solution.

Gustav Klimt’s Mahlerian knight in his Beethoven Frieze (1902), produced for the opening of the Secession building, represented Mahler as an allegorical, even mythical figure, building on the painter’s already a considerable reputation for allegorical paintings on topics ranging from philosophy and jurisprudence to love. A remarkable feature of Mahler reception in Vienna in the early 1900s is that so many other creative artists and intellectuals in the composer’s orbit likewise framed his impact on music or society in allegorical terms. These included figures who had known the composer personally since youth, and others who barely knew him at all, and in both groups were thinkers not otherwise prone to public displays of romantic imagining. Three main figures are considered here – the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the musicologist Guido Adler, and the critic Max Brod – who together established the generally current image of Mahler as a saint, a visionary, and a cementer and proclaimer of community.