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.