Anton Webern's scores look more like calculus than music, and after World War II a generation of avant-garde composers crowned him the prophet of pure, emotionless sound. This episode argues they missed the point entirely. Born in Vienna in 1883 and raised at his family's Preglhof estate in Carinthia, Webern hiked the Alps, studied the alpine paintings of Giovanni Segantini, and wrote in his diary that he wanted to be the Beethoven of our day for alpine solitude. At the University of Vienna, under Guido Adler, he dissected 15th-century Franco-Flemish choral music and found in its mirrored, inverted canons a structural blueprint he would later apply to modern pitches.

We follow his devotion to Arnold Schoenberg, his misery conducting operettas in provincial theaters, and the losses that compressed his music into aphoristic pieces lasting sec ...