Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/494

Rh 468 WEBER berg in 1803. In that year he again visited Vienna, where, though the veterans Haydn and Albrechtsberger were both receiving pupils, his father preferred placing him under the Abb6 Vogler, a man of kind and sympathetic nature, but quite unfit to train so great a genius. Through Vogler s instrumentality Carl Maria was appointed con ductor of the opera at Breslau, before he had completed his eighteenth year. In this capacity he greatly enlarged his experience of the stage ; but he lived a sadly irregular life, contracted debts which his slender salary was insuffi cient to defray, and lost his beautiful voice through accidentally drinking a poisonous liquid used in litho graphy, a mishap that nearly cost him his life. These hindrances, however, did not prevent him from beginning a new opera called Riibezahl, the libretto of which was based upon a well-known legend of the Eiesengebirge. The plot of the piece was &quot;romantic&quot; to the last degree, and Weber worked at it enthusiastically, but it was never completed, and little of it has been preserved beyond a quintett 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 fol lowing year to Stuttgart, where he had been offered the post of private secretary to Duke Ludwig, brother of Frederick, king of Wiirtemberg. 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. 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 Waldmcidchen, under the title of Sylvana, 1 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. 2 Both father and son were charged with embezzlement, and, on February 9, 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 February 27 they began a new life at Mannheim. Having provided a comfortable home for his father, and begun the composition of a new comic opera, in one act, called Abu Hassan, Weber removed to Darmstadt in order to be near his old master the Abbe Vogler, and his fellow- pupils Meyerbeer and Gansbacher, with whom he lived on terms of the closest intimacy. On September 16, 1810, he reproduced Sylvana under its new title at Frankfort, but with very doubtful success. Abu Hassan was com pleted at Darmstadt in January 1811, after many inter ruptions, one of which exercised a memorable influence upon his later career. While reading with his friend, Alexander von Dusch, George Apel s then recently pub lished Ges2)ensterbuch, he was so much struck with the story of Der Freischiitz that he at once began to meditate upon its transformation into an opera, and the two friends actually set to work upon it then and there. But it was not until many years afterwards that the idea was carried out in a practical form. 1 As the MS. of Das Waldmwlchen has been lost, it is impossible now to determine its exact relation to the later work. 2 Spitta gives a different account of the occurrence, and attributes the robbery to a servant. Weber started in February 1811 on an extended artistic tour, during the course of which he made many influential friends, and on June 4 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 governed 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 exist ence. First among these stand ten songs from Korner s Leyer und Sclnverdt, including &quot;Vater, ich rufe dich,&quot; and &quot;Liitzow s wilde Jagd&quot;; and in no respect inferior to these are the splendid choruses in his cantata Kampf und Sieg, which was first performed at Prague, December 22, 1815. Weber resigned his office at Prague, September 30, 1816, and on December 21 Frederick Augustus, king of Saxony, appointed him kapellmeister at the German opera at Dresden. The Italian operas performed at the court theatre were superintended by Morlacchi, whose jealous and intriguing disposition produced- an endless amount of trouble and annoyance. The king, however, placed the two kapellmeisters on an exact equality both of title and salary, and Weber found ample opportunity for the exercise of his remarkable power of organization and control. And now he once more gave his attention to the story of Der Freischiitz, which, with the assistance of Friedrich Kind, he developed into an admirable libretto, under the title of Des Jayers Braut. The legend of &quot; The Seventh Bullet,&quot; though well known in the 17th century, and probably much earlier, seems to have been first given to the world in a connected form in a work entitled Unterredunf/en rom Reiche der Geister, the second edition of which was printed at Leipsic in 1731. In this version of the story the scene is laid in Bohemia, and the action referred to the year 1710. Apel reproduced the legend, under the title of &quot; Der Freischiitz,&quot; in the first volume of his Gespensterbuck, in 1810. Since then the story has been repeated in many varying forms, but it was Apel s version that first attracted Weber s attention, and it was from this that he and Kind together made their first sketch of the libretto, on February 21, 1817, though they found it necessary to increase the interest of the drama by the introduction of some accessory characters, and to substitute a happy ending for the fatal catastrophe of the original story. No subject could have been better fitted than this to serve as a vehicle for the new art-form which, under Weber s skilful management, developed into what is now universally recognized as the prototype of the true &quot; romantic opera.&quot; He had dealt with the supernatural in Riibezahl, and in Sylvana with the pomp and circumstance of chivalry, but in neither case with the unquestioning faith which alone can invest the treatment of such subjects with befitting dignity. The shadowy impersonations in Riibezahl are scarcely less human than the heroine who invokes them ; and the music of Sylvana might easily have been adapted to a story of the 19th century. But in the master s later operas all this is changed. We cannot choose but shudder at the fiend in Der Freischiitz, for the infernal apparition comes straight to us from the nether world. Every note in Euryanthe breathes the spirit of mediaeval romance ; and the fairies in Oberon have a real existence, quite distinct from the tinsel of the stage. And this it is, this uncompromising reality, even in face of the