Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/474

Rh officer in the service of the palgrave Karl Theodor, was an excellent violinist, and his mother once sang on the stage. His cousins, Josepha, Aloysia, Constanze and Sophie, daughters of Franz Anton's brother Fridolin, attained a high reputation as vocalists. The great composer, Mozart, after having been rejected by Aloysia, married Constanze, and thus became Franz Anton's nephew by marriage. Fridolin played the violin nearly as well as his brother; and the whole family displayed exceptional talent for music. Franz Anton von Weber was a man of thriftless habits and culpable eccentricity. Having been wounded at Rosbach, he quitted the army, and in 1758 he was appointed financial councillor to Clement August, elector of Cologne, who for nine years overlooked his incorrigible neglect of duty. But the elector's successor dismissed him in 1768; and for many years after this he lived in idleness at Hildesheim, squandering the property of his wife, Anna de' Fumetti, and doing nothing for the support of his children until 1778, when he was appointed director of the opera at Lübeck. In 1779 the prince bishop of Eutin made him his kapellmeister, and not long afterwards his wife died of a broken heart. Five years later he went to Vienna, placed two of his sons under Michael Haydn, and in 1785 married the young Viennese singer Genovefa von Brenner. In the following year Carl Maria von Weber was born &mdash; a delicate child, afflicted with congenital disease of the hip-joint.

On his return from Vienna, Franz Anton, finding that a new kapellmeister had been chosen in his place, accepted the humbler position of &ldquo;Stadt Musikant.&rdquo; This, however, he soon relinquished; and for some years he wandered from town to town, giving dramatic performances, in conjunction with the children of his first wife, wherever he could collect an audience. The effect of this restless life upon the little Carl Maria's health and education was deplorable; but, as he accompanied his father everywhere, he became familiarized with the stage from his earliest infancy, and thus gained an amount of dramatic experience that laid the foundation of his future greatness. Franz Anton hoped to see him develop into an infant prodigy, like his cousin Mozart, whose marvellous career was then rapidly approaching its close. In furtherance of this scheme, the child was taught to sing and place his fingers upon the pianoforte almost as soon as he could speak, though he was unable to walk until he was four years old. Happily his power of observation and aptitude for general learning were so precocious that he seems, in spite of all these disadvantages, to have instinctively educated himself as became a gentleman. In 1798 Michael Haydn taught him gratuitously at Salzburg. In the March of that year his mother died. In April the family visited Vienna, removing in the autumn to Munich. Here the child's first composition &mdash; a set of &ldquo;Six Fughettas&rdquo; &mdash; was published, with a pompous dedication to his half-brother Edmund; and here also he took lessons in singing and in composition. Soon afterwards he began to play successfully in public, and his father compelled him to write incessantly. Among the compositions of this period were a mass and an opera &mdash; Die Macht der Liebe und des Weins &mdash; now destroyed. A set of &ldquo;Variations for the Pianoforte,&rdquo; composed a little later, was lithographed by Carl Maria himself, under the guidance of Alois Senefelder, the inventor of the process, in which both the father and the child took great interest.

In 1800 the family removed to Freiberg, where the Ritter von Steinsberg gave Carl Maria the libretto of an opera called Das Waldmädchen, which the boy, though not yet fourteen years old, at once set to music, and produced in November at the Freiburg theatre. The performance was by no means successful, and the composer himself was accustomed to speak of the work as &ldquo;a very immature production&rdquo;; yet it was afterwards reproduced at Chemnitz, and even at Vienna.

Carl Maria returned with his father to Salzburg in 1801, resuming his studies under Michael Haydn. Here he composed his second opera, Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn, which was unsuccessfully produced at Nuremberg in 1803. In that year he again visited Vienna, where, though Joseph Haydn and Albrechtsberger were both receiving pupils, his father preferred placing him under Abt Vogler. Through Vogler's instrumentality Carl Maria was appointed conductor of the opera at Breslau, before he had completed his eighteenth year. In this capacity he greatly enlarged his experience of the stage, so that he ranks among the greatest masters of stage-craft in musical history; but he lived a sadly irregular life, contracted debts, and lost his beautiful voice through accidentally drinking an acid used in lithography &mdash; a mishap which nearly cost him his life. These hindrances, however, did not prevent him from beginning a new opera called Rübezahl, the libretto of which was &ldquo;romantic&rdquo; to the last degree, and Weber worked at it enthusiastically, but it was never completed, and little of it has been preserve beyond a quintet and the masterly overture, which, re-written in 1811 under the title of Der Beherrscher der Geister, now ranks among its author's finest instrumental compositions.

Quitting Breslau in 1806, Weber removed in the following year to Stuttgart, where he had been offered the post of private secretary to Duke Ludwig, brother of Frederick, king of Würtemberg. The appointment was a disastrous one. The stipend attached to it was insufficient to meet the twofold demands of the young man's new social position and the thriftlessness of his father, who was entirely dependent upon him for support. Court life at Stuttgart was uncongenial to him, though he yielded to its temptations. The king hated him and his practical jokes. He fell hopelessly into debt, and, worse than all, became involved in a fatal intimacy with Margarethe Lang, a singer at the opera. Notwithstanding these distractions he worked hard, and in 1809 re-modelled Das Waldmädchen, under the title of Sylvana, and prepared to produce it at the court theatre. But a dreadful calamity prevented its performance. Franz Anton had misappropriated a large sum of money placed in the young secretary's hands for the purpose of clearing a mortgage upon one of the duke's estates. Both father and son were charged with embezzlement, and, on the 9th of February 1810, they were arrested at the theatre, during a rehearsal of Sylvana, and thrown by the king's order into prison. No one doubted Weber's innocence, but after a summary trial he and his father were ordered to quit the country, and on the 27th of February they began a new life at Mannheim.

Having provided a comfortable home for his father, and begun a new comic opera, in one act, called Abu Hassan, Weber removed to Darmstadt in order to be near his old master Abt Vogler, and his fellow-pupils Meyerbeer and Gänsbacher. On the 16th of September 1810, he reproduced Sylvana at Frankfort, but with very doubtful success. Abu Hassan was completed at Darmstadt in January 1811, after many interruptions, one of which (his attraction to the story of Der Freischütz &mdash; see below) exercised a memorable influence upon his later career.

Weber started in February 1811 on an extended artistic tour, during which he made many influential friends, and on the 4th of June brought out Abu Hassan with marked success at Munich. His father died at Mannheim in 1812, and after this he had no settled home, until in 1813 his wanderings were brought to an end by the unexpected offer of an appointment as kapellmeister at Prague, coupled with the duty of entirely remodelling the performances at the opera-house. The terms were so liberal that he accepted at once, engaged a new company of performers, and directed them with uninterrupted success until the autumn of 1816. During this period he composed no new operas, but he had already written much of his best pianoforte music, and played it with never-failing success, while the disturbed state of Europe inspired him with some of the finest patriotic melodies in existence. First among these stand ten songs from Körner's Leyer und Schwerdt, including &ldquo;Vater, ich rufe dich,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Lützow's wilde Jagd&rdquo;; and in no respect inferior to these are the splendid choruses in his cantata Kampf und Sieg, which was first performed at Prague, on the 22nd of December 1815.

Weber resigned his office at Prague on the 30th of September