Part 22

The year which gave him his wife also gave him the opera book with the composition of which it was destined he should crown his career as a National composer. Apel's "Gespensterbuch" had fallen into his hands seven years before, and he had marked the story of "Der Freischütz" for treatment. His mind reverted to it again in the spring of 1817. Friederich Kind agreed to write the book and placed it complete in his hands on March 1st, nine days after he had undertaken the commission. Weber's enthusiasm was great, but circumstances prevented him from devoting much time to the composition of the opera. He wrote the first of its music in July, 1817, but did not complete it till May 13, 1820. It was in his mind during all this period, however, and would doubtless have been finished much earlier had he received an order to write an opera from the Saxon court. In this expectation he was disappointed, and the honor of having encouraged the production of the most national opera ever written went to Berlin, where the patriotism which had been warmed by Weber's settings of Körner's songs was still ablaze and where Count Brühl's plans were discussing to bring him to the Prussian capital as Capellmeister. The opera was given under circumstances that produced intense excitement in the minds of Weber's friends. It was felt that the patriotic interest which the name and presence of Körner's collaborator aroused would not alone suffice to achieve a real triumph for a work of art. The sympathies of the musical areopagus of Berlin were not with Weber or his work,--neither before nor after the first performance; but Weber spoke to the popular heart and its quick responsive throb lifted him at once to the crest of the wave which soon deluged all Germany. The overture had to be repeated to still the applause that followed its first performance, and when the curtain fell on the last scene a new chapter in German art had been opened.

The difficulties which surrounded the production of "Der Freischütz" and the doubt felt touching its fate seemed to have almost unnerved Weber's friends. He alone had remained undisturbed. For a year his mind had been in a fever of creative activity. The incidental music for the melodrama "Preciosa" had gone to Berlin with the score of "Der Freischütz," and before he left Dresden to produce his opera he had begun to work on the music of "Die drei Pintos," a comic opera for which Theodor Hill had supplied the book. On the eve of the great "Freischütz" day he composed his "Concertstück," which until recent years was the most universally popular of his pianoforte compositions and now is esteemed as only second to the exquisitely graceful, eloquent and romantic "Invitation," which he composed and dedicated to his wife shortly after his marriage.

Weber had begun the hopeless fight against the disease that robbed him of his mother at the age of twenty-six years, before he came to Dresden. He did not possess the physical constitution for a long combat. He was small and narrow-chested. Much of the superhuman energy which marked the last five years of his life was due to the unnatural eagerness of his mind to put forth the whole of his artistic evangel before bodily dissolution should silence the proclamation.

There is no doubt that it was sheer will-power that kept the vital fires burning in his tortured body until the uttermost faggot of fuel which could nourish them was burned to ashes. The picture which Sir Julius Benedict draws of him as he appeared when Sir Julius entered his house to become his pupil in February, 1821, is indescribably pathetic in its simple eloquence: "I found him sitting at his desk and occupied with the pianoforte arrangement of his 'Freischütz.' The dire disease which but too soon was to carry him off had made its mark on his noble features; the projecting cheek-bones, the general emaciation, told their sad tale; but in his clear eyes, too often concealed by spectacles, in his mighty forehead fringed by a few straggling locks, in the sweet expression of his mouth, in the very tone of his weak but melodious voice, there was a magic power which attracted irresistibly all who approached him." The last period of his life, the period in which he went on uninterruptedly from one great achievement to another, strengthening the foundations of the new structure his genius had reared, lifting it higher and extending it in all directions, was for his physical body but a period of torment. His rewards were many, but those which brought the greatest benison of felicity and comfort flowed from his domestic life, or came from without the province of his official labors. Dresden shared the glory which he had won in Berlin and elsewhere, but his masters refused him the honors the rest of the world was glad to give. His king denied him the petty insignias of distinction which no man in the kingdom had so richly earned, yet, though opportunities offered (such as an invitation to become musical director at Hesse Cassel) he refused to change his field of labor, inspired by a desperate determination to conquer the indifference of the Saxon court. "Der Freischütz" had set Germany on fire, but its composer waited a year before he was privileged to produce it in Dresden. Nearly three months before that occurrence he received an invitation to compose an opera for the Kärnthnerthor theatre, in Vienna, under the management of Barbaja. He chose the blue-stocking, Helmina von Chezy, as his collaborator, and began work on "Euryanthe." It was another tremendous stride in the path of progress; but the world did not know it, for now Weber was the forward man leading the way into the hitherto unexplored fields of dramatic music. He went to Vienna in September, 1823, to bring out his new work. Of all the incidents of the memorable visit none is more significant than his meeting with Beethoven. It was a tardy meeting. As lad and youth he had been in Vienna without manifesting the slightest desire to meet the great master. In his self-elected capacity as critic he had attacked the symphonies in E-flat and B-flat. It is not improbable that it was the study of "Fidelio," which he produced at Prague, and afterward at Dresden, that opened his mind to the significant relationship which Beethoven bore to his own efforts to reanimate a national art-spirit in Germany. At any rate when the composer of "Euryanthe" went to Vienna it was as a musician filled with veneration for the composer of "Fidelio," and the reception which he met with at the hands of the great man touched him most profoundly. "We dined together in the happiest mood," Weber wrote to his wife; "the stern, rough man paid me as much attention as if I were a lady he was courting, and served me at table with the most delicate care. How proud I felt to receive all this attention and regard from the great master-spirit; the day will remain forever impressed on my mind and those of all who were present." Beethoven, it is said, promised to attend the first performance of "Euryanthe," which took place on October 25, but did not. He would have heard nothing of the music if he had, but there is a story that after the representation, which was tremendously successful, he wrote to Weber: "I am glad, I am glad! For this is the way the German must get the upper hand of the Italian sing-song." The success of the opera was not lasting, however. It was marred by the dramatic faults of its book, and after Weber's departure its score was horribly disfigured by excisions made by Conradin Kreutzer.

The vital forces were rapidly leaving Weber's frail body. For nearly a year and a half after the completion of "Euryanthe" he composed nothing except a French romance for voice and pianoforte. Then he marshalled his intellectual and physical forces for a last endeavor. Charles Kemble in 1824, stimulated by the success of "Der Freischütz" in London, commissioned him to compose an opera for Covent Garden. The work was to be in English, and after some correspondence on the subject Weber agreed to compose an opera and produce it in person for an honorarium of £1,000. While the negotiations were in progress he consulted his physician, who told him the acceptance of the commission would bring about his death in a few months, or even weeks, whereas a year's respite from all work in Italy would prolong his life five or six years. The sum offered was large and Weber's mind had been haunted by the apprehension of leaving his wife and children unprovided for. He decided to sacrifice his life for the welfare of his family, and accepted the commission. The decision made, his physical and intellectual lassitude gave way to another fit of energy. The subject agreed on was "Oberon," and Planché was to prepare the book. As a preparation, the dying composer learned English. The first two acts of the book came into his hands on January 18, the third on February 1, 1825. He began at once but suspended it in order to take the waters at Ems during the summer. He resumed work in the fall and completed the overture, which, in the usual manner of composers, he composed last, in London, on April 29, 1826. He had reached the city a week before, having travelled to Calais in his own carriage and made a stop in Paris, where he was cheered by the kind attention of men like Cherubini, Rossini, Onslow and others. No time was wasted in beginning the preparations for the production of "Oberon," nor, indeed, was there any time to waste. He superintended sixteen rehearsals, and conducted the first performance on April 12, 1826. It was his last triumph; "The composer had an even more enthusiastic reception than Rossini two or three years before," says Spitta. Weber conducted twelve performances according to contract, took part in a few concerts, gave one of his own which was a failure financially because of the indifference of the aristocracy, and then in feverish anxiety to see his family again, began preparations for his return journey. On the morning of June 5, 1826, his host, Sir George Smart, found him dead in his bed: "his head resting on his hand as if in sweet slumber; no traces of his suffering could be seen in these noble features. His spirit had fled--home indeed!" His body was buried in Moorfields Chapel on June 21, but eighteen years later, largely through the instrumentality of Richard Wagner, it was brought to Dresden and interred in the family vault with impressive ceremonies. Wagner pronounced the oration at his final resting-place, and thus emphasized the trait in his character which lay at the foundation of his greatest achievement in art: "Never lived a musician more German than thou! No matter where thy genius bore thee, in what far-away unfathomable realm of fancy, always did it remain fastened with a thousand sensitive fibres to the heart of the German people, with which it smiled and wept like an undoubting child listening to the fairy tales of its native land. This ingenuousness it was which led thy manhood's mind like a guardian angel and preserved it chaste; and in this chastity lay thy individuality: preserving this glorious virtue unsullied thou wast lifted above the need of artificial invention. It was enough for thee to feel, for when thou hadst felt then hadst thou already discovered the things which have been from the beginning. And this lofty virtue didst thou preserve even into thy death. Thou couldst not sacrifice it, nor divest thyself of this lovely heritage of thy German lineage; thou couldst not betray us!--Behold, now the Briton does thee justice, the Frenchman admires thee, but only the German can _love_ thee! Thou art his, a lovely day out of his life, a warm drop of his blood, a fragment of his heart--who will blame us for wishing that thy ashes might become a portion of his earth, his precious German earth?"

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The works of Weber comprehend examples of nearly all the vocal and instrumental forms, except the sacred oratorio. He completed and published six operas, and left fragments of three others. Of his first boyish effort, "Die Macht der Liebe und des Weins," not a bar has been discovered, and it is believed that he destroyed it. Of smaller dramatic works including the melodrama "Preciosa," the overture, and incidental music for "Turandot," airs for interpolation in operas of other composers, etc., he wrote twenty-eight. His cantatas, using the word in both its old and newer sense as a composition for soli and chorus with accompaniment, number eight. He wrote two masses and a separate offertory for each; ninety songs, ballads and romances for single voice with pianoforte or guitar accompaniment; nineteen part-songs for men's voices; fourteen canons, part-songs, etc., for mixed voices with and without accompaniment; and he arranged ten Scotch songs. The summary of his purely instrumental music is not so large. He was not a master of the great epic form, and the two symphonies which he composed have no significance in an estimate of his work. In addition to the overtures to his published operas he wrote three overtures which have appeared separately: that of "Peter Schmoll" published as "Grande Ouverture à plusieurs instruments," "Rübezahl," known as "Beherrscher der Geister," and "Jubel"; he also wrote five orchestral dances and marches. He composed three pianoforte concertos, ten smaller works with pianoforte accompaniment, thirteen concerted pieces for various solo instruments (clarinet, bassoon, flute and violoncello) and orchestra, four pianoforte sonatas, seventeen pianoforte pieces of various other forms for two hands (counting sets of Fughetti, Allemandes, Ecossaises and Waltzes as single numbers) and twenty similar pieces for four hands.

Weber's significance lies in his dramatic works. His songs, charmingly poetical and beautiful as many of them are, have been pushed into the background by those of his contemporary Schubert and his successors in the song-field, Schumann, Franz and Brahms. His part-songs for men's voices, especially his settings of Körner's patriotic lyrics, will probably be sung as long as the German gives voice to his love of Fatherland through the agency of _Männergesangvereine_. It is no depreciation of their artistic merit, however, to say that they fill a much larger page in the social and political history of Germany than in the story of musical evolution. As a composer for the pianoforte Weber long ago became archaic. His sonatas are seldom heard now-a-days outside of historical recitals whose purpose is, in the first instance, instructive. The "Concertstück," once the hobby of nearly all performers of the brilliant school, is rapidly sinking into neglect, and one might attend concerts for a decade in Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, Boston or New York without hearing either of the other concertos. The circumstance that in the "Concertstück" and the "Invitation to the Dance," Weber displayed a distinctly Romantic tendency in the sense of striving to give expression to a poetical conceit placed at the foundation of the composition and kept in mind throughout, accounts in a great degree for the greater vitality of these two works. Yet even the "Invitation" is admired more to-day in the embellished version of Tausig and the orchestral paraphrase of Berlioz than in its original shape. The value of this exquisite little dramatic poem in tones, we are inclined to place so high that the estimate may seem out of all proportion with the rest of this review. The world has learned, however, that merit lies in contents and felicity of expression rather than pretension and dimension, and in view of the subsequent idealization of the dance by Chopin and his followers, we incline to the belief that what once may have been regarded as a trifle really outweighs in importance the bulk of Weber's pianoforte pieces whose formal titles give them dignity. The professor and the amateur are one in their admiration for this delicious composition, and there is no one so unlearned in music that he may not arrive at the composer's purpose from a simple hearing, so he bring love and a bit of fancy into the concert-room. How many pretty pictures of brilliant ball-rooms and loving couples has not this music conjured up in the minds of imaginative people. Even old Dr. Brown, whose "Rab and his Friends" will ever keep him dear to Anglo-Saxon hearts, felt the intoxication of these strains a quarter century ago, and put on record in _The Scotsman_ one of the most eloquent critical rhapsodies extant. He pictures the ball-room, the lovers, the meeting in a shadowy recess, where she (the interested maiden) had been left by her mother. He (a Lochinvar, of course) is bending down and asking her to tread a measure. She,--but we must let Brown go on in his own way--"She looks still more down, flushes doubtless, and quietly in the shadow says 'No' and means 'yes'--says 'Yes' and fully means it, and they are off! All this small, whispered love-making and dainty device, this coaxing and being coaxed, is in the (all too short for us, but not for them) prelude to the waltz, the real business of the piece and evening. And then such a waltz for waltzing! Such precision and decision! Whisking them round, moulding them into twin orbs, hurrying them past and away from everything and everybody but themselves." And so old Brown goes on until you are almost dizzy with reading and entirely ready to vote that his rhapsody is only a little less delicious than Weber's music. The decadence of the liking for chamber music with wind instruments and of solos for them has relegated Weber's compositions for the clarinet and its brethren of the harmonious choir to the museum of musical history.

It is then to his operas that we must go to study Weber's music as an expression of artistic feeling and conviction and as an influence. He was one of the forward men of his art, one whose principles and methods are as vital now as they were when he was yet alive in the body. In a very significant sense they are still new to a large portion of the musical world. They are just dawning in Italy. It is through Wagner's restatement of them that they are acquiring validity in new fields. Weber's full stature, indeed, can only be seen in the light which the example of Wagner throws upon him. This light goes out in several directions, but in each instance it discloses Weber as a precursor. The intense Teutonism of Wagner which led him to aim at a resurrection in a new and glorified body of the "dramma per musica" of the Florentine reformers was an inheritance from his father-in-art and predecessor as Capellmeister at the Dresden opera. The Romanticism of Weber displayed in his choice of subjects had a literary tincture; it went no further than it was propelled by the example of Tieck, Schlegel and their companions, and it was colored by the mystical and sentimental Catholicism which was one of the singular reactionary fruits of the Romantic movement in German literature. Wagner's Romanticism is that of a period in which the pendulum had swung back again; it is psychological, almost physiological. The old myths will not serve in their mediæval form; they must be reduced to their lowest terms. Yet though we note this difference in manifestation, the root of Wagner's Romanticism strikes through Weber's. We have seen how Weber's sincerity of purpose led him to overturn the humdrum routine of operatic representation. His made his intelligence and his feeling to illuminate all sides of the work in hand. He was an intermediary not only between the composer and the performers in all departments, but also between the art-work and the public. He was wholly modern in his employment of all the agencies that offered to induct the public into the beauties and meanings of the operas which he conducted. He was the precursor of Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, and all the present tribe of literary musicians. To do things perfunctorily seems to have been foreign to his nature. He labored as conscientiously to win appreciation for Marschner's "Heinrich IV. und d'Aubigné" and Meyerbeer's "Abimelek" as for Beethoven's "Fidelio." It is to Weber that we must trace the essential things which are recognized to-day as marking the difference between German and Italian opera outside of language and style of composition.