Carl Maria von Weber

German composer

• Born: November 18, 1786
• Birthplace: Eutin, Holstein (now in Germany)
• Died: June 5, 1826
• Place of death: London, England

Best known as an opera composer, Weber was the principal founder of German Romantic music. He made many significant contributions to piano music and wrote some of the staples of the wind instrument player’s repertoire.

Early Life

Carl Maria von Weber (VAY-ber) was the son of Franz Anton Weber, who directed a touring theatrical troupe, and Genovefa Brenner, an actor and singer. Weber’s earliest memories were of playing among the theatrical scenery of his father’s troupe. Sickly, and with a damaged right hipbone, he did not have an active childhood, and his early education was haphazard. Weber’s father was the uncle of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s wife and hoped that the boy would become a musician.

When the theatrical company was trapped in Salzburg in 1797 by Napoleon I’s invading army, Carl was enrolled in the choir school at the cathedral and received his first systematic instruction in music from Michael Haydn, the younger brother of the famous composer Franz Joseph Haydn. His first compositions, a set of six fughettas, were published in 1798 and favorably reviewed in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Germany’s leading music periodical, for which Weber was later to write. After more travels, Weber returned to Salzburg to revise an early mass (now lost) and his first surviving opera, Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn (1803), of which the overture is still performed.

Weber then traveled extensively, and he studied most profitably with the composer-priest Georg Joseph Vogler in Vienna in 1803 and 1804. Vogler helped him obtain an appointment as music director in Breslau (modern Wrocław, Poland), where, at the age of seventeen, he was unable to cope with the intrigues of the musicians and singers and resigned. While in Breslau, he had a near-fatal accident, drinking by mistake engraving acid, which his father had carelessly stored in a wine bottle; though Weber recovered, his fine tenor singing voice was destroyed. After his resignation from Breslau, he stayed briefly in nearby Karlsruhe, where he wrote his only two symphonies and the first version of his Concertino for French Horn for the orchestra of the duke of Württemberg-Öls.

Life’s Work

The reasons for Weber’s departure from Karlsruhe are unclear, but he left Breslau hurriedly when recognized by a creditor and, after a concert tour, accepted a post as secretary to the brother of the duke of Württemberg in Stuttgart in 1807. Weber went through a dissolute period when he was socially in great demand for his improvisations on the piano or guitar but was in disfavor with the tyrannical duke. Among his few Stuttgart works are piano pieces and his opera Silvana (1810).

Weber lost his position in Stuttgart in 1810. One account is that he was involved in selling a deferment from Napoleon’s army; another is that the duke’s brother entrusted Weber with money to buy horses but Weber’s father, who was visiting at the time, used it to settle his own debts and left his son to get into financial trouble to cover the loss. In any case, Weber was imprisoned and banished from Württemberg.

Weber then embarked on a series of tours, including a visit to his teacher Vogler in Darmstadt, and resumed composing, with his first piano concerto, his first piano sonata with its perpetual-motion finale, and his sparkling one-act comic opera Abu Hassan (1811) as the main results. He began a fruitful association with the clarinetist Heinrich Baermann, for whom he wrote a successful clarinet concertino, which is still frequently performed. Weber later wrote a number of major works featuring the clarinet, including two concerti for that instrument and the Grand Duo Concertant for clarinet and piano. He also suffered several misadventures, including a string of unsuccessful love affairs and, while crossing Württemberg territory on his way to Switzerland, of being recognized, arrested, and briefly imprisoned before being allowed to proceed on his journey.

Weber’s first really stable position was in Prague, where he accepted a three-year contract as director of the opera in 1813. He not only reorganized the musical establishment but also paid careful attention to the acting, to the scenic designs, and to the costumes in order to create a musical-dramatic whole. The repertoire was composed mainly of French operas of the time in German translation. One of the many new singers he engaged was Caroline Brandt, who was later to become his wife. During his stay in Prague, the first symptoms of the tuberculosis of which he was to die became evident. He resigned in 1816, ostensibly because of the damp winter weather, and, after visits to Berlin, accepted the post as director of the German opera in Dresden.

During the brief interval between Prague and Dresden, Weber wrote some of his most characteristic piano music, especially the second and third sonatas. Weber’s piano music is quite unusual, because he had unusually long fingers and especially extended thumbs, which permitted him to execute extremely wide leaps or span large chords that are physically beyond the reach of most pianists. These characteristics account for the brilliant sonority of his piano music and for its neglect by most pianists, who lack the physical ability to do this music justice.

The capstones of Weber’s piano works, the Konzertstück (concert piece) in F Minor (1821) and the fourth sonata (1819-1822), were written later. The freedom of form in the Konzertstück influenced Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann in their piano concerti; the programmatic character and deep expression of the fourth sonata influenced Schumann and Franz Liszt, who were champions of Weber’s music.

Weber’s position in Dresden, though it became permanent after 1818, was nevertheless difficult. He was director of the newly organized German opera (part of the movement of national consciousness that swept the German states during and after the wars with Napoleon), but the principal court opera was Italian, under the direction of Francesco Morlacchi. The Italian opera was able to hire the better singers and had the larger budget. Weber sought to resign to move to Berlin, but the opera house there was destroyed by fire. Weber’s patron, Count Vitzthum, was able to obtain for Weber a permanent appointment in Dresden, enabling him to marry Caroline Brandt, whom he had courted for four years.

In Dresden, Weber extended his concern about producing operas in a manner that would ensure their dramatic as well as musical effect by insisting that the singers and chorus be able to act as well as sing, by strengthening the orchestra, and by improving the set designs. His ideal was to create a whole that would be greater than the sum of its individual parts and thus paved the way for such later reformers of operatic production as Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. He was a pioneer in the conducting of operas; instead of directing the performance from the piano, he stood in front of the stage, conducting with a thick baton, which he held in the middle, and rearranged the seating of the orchestra so that all the players could see his gestures. In addition, he published introductory summaries of the new operas before their performance in the local press to explain the works and thus educate his audience.

The work that occupied most of Weber’s free time was the opera Der Freischütz , which was finished in 1820 and first performed in Berlin in the following year. The title is best translated as “the charmed bullet,” although it is usually literally rendered as “the free shooter”; the libretto came from a popular ghost story adapted by Weber’s poet friend in Dresden, Johann Friedrich Kind.

In the opera, the huntsman Max is unable to hit anything at which he shoots and thus is certain to lose the shooting contest at which the hand of his beloved Agathe is to be bestowed. In reality he is under a curse set by his colleague Caspar, who offers Max the chance to obtain charmed bullets from the devil Samiel. The climactic scene is the second act finale, laid in a desolate ravine in the forest, where Caspar and Max cast the magic bullets amid a host of various apparitions. Unknown to Max, the last bullet is Caspar’s to direct; he plans to kill Agathe with it. At the shooting contest, however, the bullet kills Caspar; Max then confesses what he has done and is sentenced to temporary banishment, but Agathe will wait for him. The work’s popularity in German-speaking countries is owing not as much to the plot as to the musical numbers, the arsenal of Romantic horror effects in the Wolf’s glen scene, the depictions of a smiling nature in the arias of the main protagonists, and the choruses composed in a popular vein.

Weber’s opera was so popular so quickly that he was invited to write an opera for Vienna. He chose a medieval topic, Euryanthe (1823), for which Helmine von Chezy, a poet in Dresden, wrote an extremely convoluted libretto. The numerous inconsistencies of the plot and its stilted verse have been accused of having adversely affected an experimental opera with continuous music that contains some of Weber’s best writing; attempts have been made to rewrite the libretto, but none has been successful.

During Weber’s stay in Vienna, the symptoms of tuberculosis recurred, causing Weber to depart for Dresden. He had to abandon his writing about music (he had even drafted a semiautobiographical musical novel) and writing for piano in order to concentrate on a commission from London for a musical-dramatic work, which took shape as Oberon (1826), his last composition. With this work and his appearance as conductor in London, Weber hoped to amass enough money to support his wife and two sons after his death, which he sensed would be soon, because his illness was becoming worse. Weber even learned English in order to set the text appropriately.

Oberon can best be described as a multimedia work, a series of elaborate stage tableaux with vocal and instrumental music, as shown by the original playbill indicating the “order of the scenery,” which includes Oberon’s bower with an apparition of the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid at the opening, and the hall of arms in the palace of Charlemagne at the end. Huon of Brabant is assigned the task of rescuing Rezia and her friends from the Emir of Tunis and bringing them before Charlemagne. Weber was thus given the opportunity to write in his chivalresque vein as well as to write exotic music for the Arabs and nature music in Rezia’s grand air “Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster” and in the subsequent chorus of mermaids.

Weber had planned to rewrite Oberon as an opera with recitatives rather than spoken dialogue upon his return to Germany, but his death in London of tuberculosis and an ulcerated windpipe on June 5 brought an end to this project. Subsequent attempts have been made, mostly in Germany, to complete Weber’s project or to perform the individual numbers linked together with spoken dialogue, as in the original production.

Significance

Carl Maria von Weber is known in the twenty-first century chiefly through the overtures to his operas, his clarinet works, and Berlioz’s arrangement for orchestra of his piano piece “Invitation to the Dance,” a brilliant waltz. In German-speaking countries, the opera Der Freischütz is a national tradition, but it has resisted translation into other repertoires. Weber’s extensive use of the orchestra to underscore the drama, his freedom of form, and his occasional use of leading motives and transforming their musical contexts influenced Wagner as well as several other composers.

In Der Freischütz, Weber had given a model of what a true national opera should be, with its use of popular idioms and with common people rather than kings and lords as principal characters. In this work and in Oberon, he furnished models for musically depicting both nature and the supernatural spirit world, as he provided examples for portraying the world of chivalry in Euryanthe and later in Oberon. Though Weber’s reach often exceeded his grasp, and his development as a composer was cut short by an early death, he remains one of the most influential composers of the early nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Finscher, Ludwig. “Weber’s Freischütz: Conceptions and Misconceptions.” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 40 (1983/1984): 79-90. The author examines the assumption that the first performance of Weber’s Der Freischütz was the birthday of German Romantic opera. The libretto is based on the trivial aspects of “dark” Romanticism and has little to do with German Romantic poetry; the work owed its success not to folk melodies but to Weber’s ability to compose in a popular vein.

Grout, Donald Jay, with Hermine Williams. “The Romantic Opera in Germany.” In A Short History of Opera. 3d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Presents the different characteristics of eighteenth and nineteenth century opera and the traits of German opera in particular before discussing Weber’s last three operas. Weber was the real founder of German Romantic opera and the most important composer in that genre before Wagner.

Meyer, Stephen C. Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Germans sought a national opera that would create a vision for a new German nation. Meyer examines the aesthetic and political reception of four of Weber’s operas, including Der Freischütz and Euryanthe, by contemporary German critics.

Tusa, Michael C. “Richard Wagner and Weber’s Euryanthe.” Nineteenth Century Music 9 (Spring, 1986): 206-221. Many writers have commented on the strong influence and resemblances between Weber’s Euryanthe of 1823 and Wagner’s Lohengrin of 1847. The author identifies the various similarities between the two works in detail and shows the strong influence of Weber’s opera on Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1845).

Warrack, John. Carl Maria von Weber. New York: Macmillan, 1968. The standard biography of Weber in any language. The author presents careful discussion of the composer’s life and music, with special attention to the operas. General readers will be grateful for the extensive plot summaries of each opera.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Carl Maria von Weber.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, vol. 20. London: Macmillan, 1980. A shorter version of the biography, with an updated bibliography, presented in a concise form but without the detail and operatic plot summaries of Warrack’s full-length biography.

Weber, Carl Maria von. Writings on Music. Edited by John Warrack, translated by Martin Cooper. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. The volume contains Weber’s fragmentary autobiographical novel as well as his reviews for various papers and journals and his introductions to the operas he conducted in Prague and Dresden. Each entry is given an extensive preface and is thoroughly annotated. The introduction shows that Weber’s alleged attacks on Ludwig van Beethoven’s music are unfounded; rather, he generally praised Beethoven’s works. Weber’s reviews illustrate the immense amount of music that was performed then but is completely forgotten in the twenty-first century.

Weber, Max Maria von. Carl Maria von Weber: The Life of an Artist. Translated by J. Palgrave Simpson. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1865. Reprint. New York: Haskell House, 1968. Though this biography by Weber’s son—based on the letters and documents saved by Weber’s widow and the recollections of Weber’s family—is extremely partisan and chauvinistic with reliance on obsolete information, it nevertheless presents a lively account of the petty intrigues and frustrations of court life, especially in Dresden, that Weber underwent.