Webern was born on 3December 1883, in Vienna, in Austria, as the only surviving son of a civil servant, Carl Von Webern and Amelie, who was a pianist and an established singer. Young Webern might have inherited the talent from his mother. Webern never used his middle names and dropped the Von in 1918 as directed by the reforms of the Austrian government after the World War II. Webern spent his youth in Graz and Klagenfurt and attended the Vienna University in 1902. There he studied musicology with Guido Adler and wrote his theses on Heinrich Isaac’s ‘Choralis Constantinus’. He received his doctoral thesis in 1906. This early interest in music greatly influenced his compositional techniques in later years.
In 1904, he started private studies in composition with Arnold Schoenberg and became his keen supporter. His fellow student was Alban Berg, who would have a strong influence in his music. A. Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Webern together laid the foundation for what later became popular as the SecondViennese School of Composition. The unifying element in this was the adoption of A. Schoenberg’s ‘twelve-tone technique’ in composition. Their rivals would refer them as—Arnold Schoenberg as God the Father, Berg as the Son and Webern as the Holy Ghost.