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Where might I find the original account of the hysteria caused by the first public performances of Anton von Webern's 12-tone pieces?

You might start with Slonimsky's classic Lexicon of Musical Invective, a compilation of bad reviews and comments on masterpieces from Beethoven on. My copy is in storage so I can't check it directly but from the Amazon preview pages, I see that there is a section on Webern in the Table of Contents. And if you enter Webern in the Search Inside this Book slot, lots of juicy stuff comes up (though probably not all of it, since it is a preview). The book as a whole is entertaining and enlightening, as most of Slonimsky's books are, and I highly recommend it.

--Sixtus

http://www.amazon.com/Lexicon-Musical-I ... 681&sr=1-2

Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer's _Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work_ has tons of information about all aspects of Webern's life, including detailed reports on reactions to concerts. (You'll find that his atonal, pre-12-tone works were received more hysterically than the 12-tone works, for a variety of reasons.)

If you can get through Spanish of French, Esteban Buch has analyzed the hysteria well in a book called _El Caso Schonberg_ (_Le cas Schoenberg_), some of which is summarized in this article: http://www.cairn.info/revue-politix-2005-3-page-107.htm