Carl Maria von Weber

Carl Maria von Weber (born Nov. 18, 1786, Eutin, Holstein [Germany]—died June 5, 1826, London, Eng.) German composer and opera director during the transition from Classical to Romantic music, noted especially for his operas Der Freischütz (1821; The Freeshooter, or, more colloquially, The Magic Marksman), Euryanthe (1823), and Oberon (1826). Der Freischütz, the most immediately and widely popular German opera that had been written to date, established German Romantic opera.

Weber was born into a musical and theatrical family. His father, Franz Anton, who seems to have wished upon the family the baronial von to which it had in fact no title, was a musician and soldier of fortune who had formed a small traveling theatre company. His mother, Genovefa, was a singer; his uncles, aunts, and brothers were to some degree involved in music and the stage. Carl Maria was a sickly child, having been born with a diseased hip that caused him to limp throughout his life. When he began to show signs of musical talent, his ambitious father set him to work under various teachers in towns visited by the family troupe in the hope that he might prove a Mozartean prodigy. Among these instructors was Michael Haydn, the younger brother of the composer Joseph Haydn. Under Haydn, Weber wrote and published his Opus 1, Sechs Fughetten (1798).

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The troupe paused briefly in Munich, where Weber learned the art of lithography under its inventor, Aloys Senefelder. Moving on to Freiberg, the Webers planned to set up a lithographic works in order to propagate the young composer’s music. The scheme fell through; but meanwhile Weber had composed his first opera, Das Waldmädchen (“The Forest Maiden”), which partially survives. Staged at Freiberg in 1800, it was a failure. On a return visit to Salzburg, Weber completed his first wholly surviving opera, Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn, which also failed when it was produced in Augsburg in 1803. Weber resumed his studies under the influential Abbé Vogler, through whom he was appointed musical director at Breslau (now Wrocław, Pol.) in 1804. After many difficulties, occasioned by the inexperience of a young director in putting through reforms, and a near-fatal accident in which he permanently impaired his voice when he swallowed some engraving acid, Weber was forced to resign. He was rescued by an appointment as director of music to Duke Eugen of Württemberg, for whose private orchestra he wrote two symphonies. They are attractive, inventive works, but the symphony, with its dependence on established forms, was not the natural medium of a composer who sought to bring Romantic music to a freer form derived from literary, poetic, and pictorial ideas.

Weber was next a secretary in the court of King Frederick I of Württemberg. Here he lived so carelessly and ran up so many debts that, after a brief imprisonment, he was banished. The principal fruits of these years (1807–10) were his Romantic opera Silvana (1810), songs, and piano pieces. Weber and his father fled to Mannheim, where he was, in his own words, “born for the second time.” He made friends with an influential circle of artists, from whom he stood out as a talented pianist and guitarist; he was also remarkable for his theories on the Romantic movement. Moving on to Darmstadt, he met Vogler again, as well as the German opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. From this period came principally the Grand Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Opus 11, for piano, and the delightful one-act opera Abu Hassan (1811).

Disappointed in not winning a post in Darmstadt, Weber traveled on to Munich, where his friendship with the clarinet virtuoso Heinrich Bärmann led to the writing of the Concertino, Opus 26, and two brilliant, inventive clarinet concerti. In all, he was to write six clarinet works for Bärmann, with whom he also toured. The clarinet remained, with the horn, one of the favourite instruments of a composer whose ear for new sounds and new combinations of instruments was to make him one of the greatest orchestrators in the history of music. Weber was also one of music’s great piano virtuosos; his own music reflects something of the brilliance and melancholy and exhibitionist charm described by his contemporaries when he performed it. From 1809 to 1818 Weber also wrote a considerable number of reviews, poems, and uncompromising, stringent music criticisms. All his work, music, and critical writings furthered the ideals of Romanticism as an art in which feeling took precedence over form and heart over head.

Appointed conductor of the opera at Prague in 1813, after a period in Berlin during which he caught the patriotic fervour of the day in some stirring choruses and songs, Weber was at last able to put his theories into full practice. His choice of works showed his care for Romantic ideals, and his choice of artists showed his concern for a balanced ensemble, rather than a group of virtuosos. Furthermore, by publishing introductory articles to his performances, he saw to it that his audiences were carefully prepared. Obstacles again appeared: a stormy love affair left him disconsolate, and opposition to his reforms forced him to resign in 1816. His reputation by now, however, was such that he was able to secure an appointment as director of the German opera at Dresden, beginning in 1817. The same year he married one of his former singers, Caroline Brandt.

Dresden was a city more backward than most in Germany, and it had a flourishing rival Italian opera. As the prophet of a German national opera, Weber was faced with even greater difficulties. Happily married, he applied himself energetically to his work, assuming full control over all aspects of the operatic production. No detail escaped him: he supervised repertory, recruitment, casting, scenery, lighting, and production, as well as the orchestra and the singers, taking care to see that every performer fully understood the words and plot of each opera. These tasks left him little time for writing operas himself, however, especially in view of the inexorable advance of his tuberculosis. He nevertheless produced several works during this period, including the last of his four piano sonatas, many songs and shorter piano solos, such as the famous Invitation to the Dance (1819), and the Konzertstück, Opus 79 (1821), for piano and orchestra.

It was also in Dresden that Weber began to work on Der Freischütz, which was an immediate success when it was performed in Berlin in 1821. The story, deriving from folklore, concerns a man who has sold his soul to the Devil for some magic bullets that will enable him to win a marksmanship contest and with it the hand of the lady he loves. The opera presented, for the first time, things familiar to every German: the simple village life, with its rough humour and sentimental affections, and the surrounding forest, with its smiling appearance concealing supernatural horror. Above all, the characters, from the cheerful huntsmen and village girls to the simple, valiant hero and the prince who rules over them, were all—with the tuneful, sensational music—a mirror in which every German could find his reflection. In Der Freischütz Weber not only helped liberate German opera from French and Italian influences, but, in his novel orchestrations and in his choice of a subject matter containing strong supernatural elements, he laid the foundations of one of the principal forms of 19th-century opera. Der Freischütz made Weber a national hero.

His next opera, Euryanthe was a more ambitious work and a larger achievement, anticipating Wagner as his piano music does Chopin and Liszt. It nevertheless foundered on its clumsy, though not intolerable, libretto. When Covent Garden in London commissioned a new opera, Weber took on the task of learning English and working with a librettist, James Robinson Planché, by correspondence. His motive was to earn enough money to support his family after his death, which he knew to be not far off. In form, Oberon was little to his taste, having too many spoken scenes and elaborate stage devices for a composer who had always worked for the unification of the theatrical arts in opera. But into it he poured some of his most exquisite music, and he traveled to London for the premiere in 1826. Barely able to walk, he was sustained by the kindness of his host, Sir George Smart, and by the longing to get home again to his family. Oberon was a success and Weber was feted, but his health was declining fast. Shortly before he was due to start the journey back to Germany, he was found dead in his room.