Ii) The Hiemer operas.

Weber's friendship in Stuttgart with the librettist F.C. Hiemer led to his first operas that enjoyed significant circulation to German theatres, Silvana (composed 1808–10) and Abu Hassan (1810–11). Of these, the three-act Silvana is the more ambitious but less even work. That its chivalric plot is a reworking of the old Waldmädchen story is all but certain, and even with Hiemer's revisions the libretto still betrays its origins as a heterogeneous ‘heroic-comic opera’ (as it is designated in the first edition of the piano score). Thus alongside the love-versus-duty conundrum faced by the principal aristocratic characters Rudolf and Mechtilde is an old-fashioned buffo bass in the part of the squire Krips; emblematic of the unevenness of the libretto, however, is the fact that Krips, so prominent in Act 1, has only one piece throughout the remainder of the opera. For ambience the libretto also stresses features like the forest and medieval court pageantry that justify its designation in other sources as a ‘romantic’ opera.

Musically, Silvana deploys a mixture of genres and styles typical of German opera in general and ‘heroic-comic’ opera in particular (apart from the word ‘renovata’ on the autograph of the overture there is little evidence of the extent to which Weber's music might also draw upon the earlier opera). The vocal styles range from that of comic and popular song to italianate bravura singing, and the solo numbers consist of strophic pieces, generally assigned to Krips and to aspects of the ambience of the drama, as well as large-scale multi-tempo aria forms for the serious characters. By Weber's own admission, the new arias for Rudolf and Mechtilde for the Berlin production of 1812 marked an important stage in his development as a composer of arias. Different kinds of ensembles are also present, including an Introduzione and multipartite finales for Acts 1 and 2. For the title character, who is voluntarily mute until the dénouement, Weber wrote a number of formal dances as well as pieces that coordinate mime with expressive orchestral playing, such as no.7 and no.12; the former of these is in effect a ‘duet’ in which she replies to the singing Rudolf through gestures largely accompanied by solo cello. Hunting scenes (Act 1) and court pageantry (Act 2) provide ample opportunity for the use of chorus and stage instruments, and the opera concludes with a lengthy torch dance.

The one-act comic opera Abu Hassan is an altogether less pretentious work, but perhaps for that reason it more fully matches dramatic and musical interest; fittingly, it is the earliest of Weber's operas to have enjoyed a modest, but more or less continuous performance history. The plot, taken from The Thousand and One Nights, is the story of the title character and his wife Fatime, who feign their deaths in order to collect burial funds that will enable them to pay off their considerable debts; the comical treatment of this subject may well have been inspired by Weber's own unhappy experiences with creditors in Breslau and Stuttgart. Through its economy of means (demanded in part by the small scale of the work) the opera exemplifies a level of maturity that Weber attained with his second period of study with Vogler in 1810. Though the opera falls into the tradition of ‘Türkenoper’, it makes relatively little use of so-called Turkish music and other exoticisms, confining these to the overture (to set the couleur for the entire work) and the final two pieces (which bring the Caliph on to the scene). Instead, the focus falls on the love between Hassan and Fatime, who are treated as sentimental but clever characters, more like Figaro and Susanna than Belmonte and Konstanze.

Weber: (9) Carl Maria von Weber, §13: Operas

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 655