Sixty years ago next week, Anton Webern stepped outside of his house for a smoke and was accidentally shot dead by an American soldier. Thus ended the remarkable career of one of history’s brilliant and contradictory composers. Norman Lebrecht says that in order to appreciate Webern, it is best to embrace the contradiction. “Inspiration was anathema to Webern. All had to be strictly counted and numerically correct. If pleasure entered the process, it was the solitary satisfaction of making a line read the same forwards, backwards and upside down. Inverted by nature, Webern wrote music that turned in upon itself, rejecting every human value except absolute order. [And yet,] scan the entire canon, Passacaglia to posthumously published piano pieces, and you will not find one weak work of Webern’s, or one that fails immediately to proclaim its authorship. In the history of western music, that statement is true only of Beethoven and Wagner.”