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iii) Mature operas.The great leap forward from Abu Hassan to Der Freischütz is less a matter of style or compositional technique than of clarification in Weber's thinking about the problems of opera in general and German opera in particular. The six-year gap between the completion of Abu Hassan and the start of work on Der Freischütz allowed Weber as a critic and conductor to reflect upon questions of character, dramatic truth and wholeness as they pertained to the lyric stage and to find in works that he admired – Mozart's operas, the opéras comiques of Méhul and Cherubini, Beethoven's Fidelio, Spohr's Faust and Hoffmann's Undine – models for realizing his goals. With Friedrich Kind's libretto for Der Freischütz Weber finally had the basis with which to implement his mature conception of opera as total theatre. Drawing principally upon Johann August Apel's novella Der Freischütz: eine Volkssage (1810), about a hunter who bargains with demonic forces to obtain magic bullets, Kind, in close collaboration with Weber, developed a story depicting the conflict of the sharply opposed worlds of good and evil. The story plays out against a rustic 17th-century backdrop, a Bohemian village set in a forest that is similarly dichotomous: whereas the forest beneficially provides the livelihood for the community, it can also be unholy, as the darkest part of the forest, the Wolf's Glen, is a locus for demonic activity and the place where the protagonist, Max, obtains the magic bullets from the demon Samiel in a spectacular nocturnal scene filled with ghostly apparitions and novel stage effects inspired by popular theatre (Newcomb, P(iii)1995). Apel's novella abuts on a tragic ending, but the Biedermeier, moralizing sensibilities of Kind (and presumably also Weber) lead their version to a happy ending, as the childlike trust in Providence of Max's bride Agathe averts disaster and reaffirms the social order (Reiber, P(iii)1990, 1993). Like Silvana, Der Freischütz exhibits a wide diversity of types and styles, a fact signalled in the autograph score by Weber's polyglot designations of pieces according to the national origin of the type (see the edition, with facsimile of the autograph, by Georg Schünemann; P(iii)1942). The large-scale scene ed arie of Agathe and Max, for instance, reveal a composer knowledgeable of recent Italian developments that he appropriates and modifies. But, more than before, the diverse elements are deployed in ways that reinforce the central dramatic lines of development. As the critic and theorist J.C. Lobe (P(iii)1855) pointed out in an essay allegedly based on an interview (probably apocryphal) with the composer, Weber developed an overall ‘Kolorit’ for the opera by delineating musically, in conjunction with visual details, the two sharply opposed dramatic spheres. The world of simple rustic virtue and trust in God is treated primarily in a lyrical fashion that is rhythmically square, euphonious, consonant, diatonic and in the major mode. The purest examples of this type approximate to folk music (in which Weber was immersed during 1817–1818 with the composition of the folksong settings of opp.54 and 64) and the chorus no.14 is actually designated as a ‘Volkslied’. A.W. Ambros (J1860) identified another simple piece, the Act 1 march, as a borrowing from a popular march that was current in Prague in the early 19th century. In contrast, the powers of evil are consistently characterized through antitheses to the foregoing: minor mode, dissonance, chromaticism, rhythmic disturbance and unusual sonorities (e.g. flute and clarinet in their lowest, ‘hollow’, registers) in conjunction with vocal styles that are either non-cantabile, inappropriate (like the coloratura for the bass-baritone villain Caspar), or not even song at all. In the Wolf's Glen scene, for instance, the invisible spirits sing on a monotone, and song is denied altogether not only to Samiel but eventually also to Max, who ceases to sing as he descends into Samiel's realm. Features that cut across this dichotomy serve to characterize the overall ambience, like strophic form, which is taken up as an emblem of folk life both by the villagers and by Caspar (but to very different effect), and the sound of the horns, which characterize not only the hunting activities of Max's colleagues but also the demonic ghostly huntsmen in the Act 2 finale. Max also cuts across the dichotomy, inasmuch as he is caught between the two spheres; his multi-sectional scena ed aria, for instance, juxtaposes the demonic style in sections pertaining to his current despair with more lyrical sections devoted to thoughts about the past and Agathe. A number of technical means also serve to reinforce the wholeness and character of the work. Following Spohr and the French composers, Weber made extensive use of reminiscence motifs in order to overcome the potential autonomy of the individual piece. Of these the most important by far is the ‘Samiel chord’ used to mark appearances and invocations of the demon. In an entity that is rather more a distinctive sound than a motif, evil is defined through syncopation, hushed and dark sonority, tremolando, the absence of melodic motion and the dissonance of a diminished 7th chord tied to a particular set of pitch classes (F The two completed operas written after Der Freischütz are built from similar principles; inasmuch as their ambience and dramatic issues are quite different, however, they differ profoundly from the earlier opera and each other with respect to style and Kolorit. The invitation to compose an opera for Vienna, the operatic centre of the German-speaking world, encouraged Weber to conceive his next opera, Euryanthe, on a far larger scale. Designated in most authentic sources as a ‘grosse romantische Oper’, the work combines the defining attribute of ‘grand opera’ as Weber understood it, the technique of through-composition (normally associated with classical subjects), with various attributes of the newer ‘romantic’ opera such as a medieval setting with a supernatural component and a high degree of structural and genre variety (Tusa, P(v)1991). Although seriously flawed in certain respects, Helmina von Chézy's libretto nevertheless allowed Weber to realize ideals of organic wholeness and ‘Totaleffekt’ even more thoroughly than in Der Freischütz. Like its predecessor, Euryanthe involves distinct dramatic spheres with contrasting musical colours. The overarching world of medieval chivalry is suggested by a level of seriousness, artifice, elegance and brilliance not found in Der Freischütz. Against this chivalric background the dramatic and musical opposition of good and evil is once again crucial to the dramaturgy, the former represented by the troubadour-knight Adolar and his beloved, Euryanthe, and the latter by Lysiart and his accomplice Eglantine. Another dramatic plane is inhabited by the ghost of Adolar's sister Emma, the principal element added by Chézy and Weber to the original plot. Slow, chromatic and seemingly aimless music for divisi muted violins and violas characterizes the ethereal but restless existence of a spirit condemned to eternal wandering; with Emma's redemption at the end of the opera, however, this music is transformed into a diatonic form. While Euryanthe's dependence on Der Freischütz is evident in a number of ways, there are also features in the later opera that go beyond its predecessor. Weber himself noted in his correspondence with Brühl the more active role for the chorus in Euryanthe. The larger-than-life passions elicit a higher degree of chromaticism throughout the opera than in the earlier work. Because of its through-composed status as a ‘grand opera’, the tonal organization and instrumentation of Euryanthe were planned with greater ingenuity than ever, and groups of pieces often form extended scene complexes with a clear sense of dramatic and musical progression towards a local climactic goal (e.g. nos.1–4, 12–13, 17–20). And where dialogue separates the formal pieces, Weber composed a flexible, expressive type of accompanied recitative that has little in common melodically or harmonically with conventional approaches to recitative (A.A. Abert, P(v)1967). As already noted, Euryanthe's failure to capture the public's imagination was a source of bitterness and puzzlement for Weber. In retrospect, however, it is easy to identify some of the causes for its fate. Unquestionably the obscurities and logical lapses in the libretto caused much ambivalence towards the opera. But contemporary reception also suggests that audiences of the day did not always warm to its music either. On the one hand, the opera's selfconscious distancing from the tuneful, popular folk music style of numbers in Der Freischütz doubtless disappointed many listeners. And on the other, Weber's attempts to express every nuance of feeling through characteristic details of melodic shape, instrumentation and harmonic progression worked against the kind of melodic and rhythmic ‘flow’ that operagoers of the time, an age dominated by Rossini, wished to hear. For Franz Grillparzer, Weber's harshest critic, the music to Euryanthe ceased altogether to be music because it did not allow melody to grow out of itself in an ‘organic’ way, and even the mature Wagner in Oper und Drama (1850–51) felt compelled to criticize the ‘mosaic’ qualities of the melodic construction. In accepting a commission from Covent Garden in London, Weber virtually guaranteed that his last opera, Oberon, would stand apart in many ways from his earlier efforts. Behind J.R. Planché's libretto, based principally on Wieland's romance of 1780, lay a tradition of English opera more closely allied to 18th-century popular theatre than to contemporary continental opera, a concept of theatre orientated more towards visual spectacle than the musical realization of action and conflict (Warrack, P(vi)1976). The plot involves a large number of non-singing roles and the main developments take place primarily in spoken dialogue. In such a conception, music is largely relegated to incidental functions that establish ambience and character and draw attention to scenic effects (Dahlhaus, P(vi)1986), although it must be said that Planché's libretto accorded music a greater role than most English librettos of the time. Obvious parallels with Die Zauberflöte point up further ties to the 18th century: the disposition of the four principal characters into two pairs of lovers, heroic (Reiza and Huon) and comic (Fatima and Sherasmin) respectively; exotic settings (Baghdad and Tunis); magical effects and scene transformations; a magic instrument (Oberon's horn) that on more than one occasion saves the principal characters from harm; and the Enlightenment theme of human perseverance in the face of severe trials. Despite its distance from Weber's ideals of romantic opera as total theatre, Planché's libretto nevertheless played directly to many of his strengths as a composer. For example, it gave him the opportunity to delineate three distinctive musical spheres through music of great originality and charm: a Western-chivalric style, associated primarily with Huon of Bordeaux and the music of Charlemagne's court in the third act, builds on the courtly style of Euryanthe; the Islamic courts of Baghdad and Tunis are characterized not only by the traditional Turkish instruments but also by Egyptian and Turkish melodies that Weber found in books in the Royal Library in Dresden; and for the realm of elves and nature spirits Weber invented soundscapes of unprecedented lightness and transparency, such as the gossamer music of the opening fairy chorus, the ethereal music for mermaids and fairies in the Act 2 finale, and the recurring music for high flutes and clarinets that accompanies Oberon himself. The libretto's specification of music as an accompaniment to scenic effects also prompted some of Weber's most striking music, like the powerful storm scene in Act 2 and the majestic ‘Ocean’ aria, Weber's most fluid adaptation of scena ed aria form (Schmierer, P(vi)1986). Although Oberon remains true to Weber's goals of dramatic truth and Kolorit, certain features in the compositional approach do seem different from the earlier operas; however, in the absence of further operas it is difficult to know whether such differences arose primarily from the character and demands of the libretto, from a desire to make concessions to specific singers and to an English audience that Weber probably considered unsophisticated by continental standards, or from new impulses in his artistic development that death prevented him from pursuing further. For example, the amount of coloratura in the music for Reiza and Huon is greater than one might expect on the basis of the preceding operas, where bravura singing had been principally associated with the rage of Caspar, Lysiart and Eglantine. The musical style of Oberon is on the whole more tuneful, less chromatic and less dissonant than Euryanthe, more ‘Classical’, doubtless a consequence of the libretto but perhaps also a reaction on Weber's part to various criticisms of the earlier work. The motivic approach is arguably also different from any of the preceding operas. The storm music is developed quite symphonically, the degree of motivic elaboration in Oberon's aria (no.2) has few precedents in any of Weber's earlier vocal pieces, and even the simple way that the Mermaids’ Song develops its accompaniment from a persistent horn motif is unusual for Weber. And as Jähns noted in 1871, the opera points towards a more subtle use of leitmotif technique, as the stepwise rising 3rd with which both of the borrowed ‘exotic’ melodies begin is easily related to the opera's most important leitmotif, the call of Oberon's horn, and can be traced in a number of other pieces as well. Weber: (9) Carl Maria von Weber
Assessment. Like other musicians active in the first decades of the 19th century, Weber lived through a volatile time marked by war, social change and intellectual upheaval. Characteristic of an era of transition, his career is marked by a number of paradoxes and contradictions that make it difficult to limit him to fixed categories. He relied quite extensively on patronage, carefully cultivating contacts with aristocrats such as Duke Eugen, Princess Stéphanie, the King and Queen of Bavaria, the Prussian royal family, Duke Emil Leopold and the Grand Princess Maria Paulovna; and despite recurring frustrations in Dresden, the last ten years of his life were filled with signs of true devotion to the royal family. At the same time, he looked to the emerging middle-class public as the more significant and stimulating audience for art in the new century. Yet he also recognized the risks presented by this anonymous, mass audience, whose tastes naturally ran more to entertainment than to serious art, especially in a period when the hardships of war led audiences to seek escape and diversion. Reluctant to compose in the commercial manner that Dussek had called the ‘selling way’, Weber chose instead to speak to this newer audience by elevating their popular styles and genres like the waltz and folksong to a higher level of artistic significance, and through his efforts as a writer and conductor he strove to educate this new audience to a higher standard of appreciation. Equally paradoxical is Weber's relationship to early 19th-century German Romantic ideology. He has often been regarded as a (even ‘the’) leading exponent of early Romanticism in music, and much of his activity does resonate with the Romantic agenda: his emphasis on the wholeness of the art work; his insistence on the ‘characteristic’, sometimes at the expense of the ‘beautiful’; his appeal to feeling as the ultimate arbiter of the ‘truth’ of an artistic experience; his reliance on ‘romantic’ subjects (in the sense of ‘non-classical’) for his operas; and the high value that he placed on originality. But his must be regarded as a qualified Romanticism, as significant elements in his thought and work are hard to reconcile with the critical thinking of contemporaries like Hoffmann and Tieck. Nowhere in Weber, for instance, does one find the quintessentially Romantic view of instrumental music as a gateway to transcendent experience; his review of Fesca's string quartets in fact seems to assert instead the primacy of vocal music precisely because of its more direct contact with life. Weber's works, novel as they undoubtedly are in so many ways, also seem at times to go against the grain of mainstream Romanticism. The close dependence of his operatic music on text and situation as a guide for melodic, rhythmic and harmonic choices, with resultant fissures in the purely musical logic of melodic development, seems rather different from the kind of relationship between music and libretto described in Hoffmann's writings on opera. The superficially ‘romantic’ librettos of Der Freischütz and Euryanthe – texts that he not only sanctioned but helped shape – manifest strong ties to Enlightenment and Biedermeier values in their avoidance of moral ambiguities, their trust in Providence to guarantee the triumph of virtue and in their implicit support of the social status quo (Reiber, P(iii)1993; Doerner, P(iii)1993–4). And more generally, the triumphant conclusions of the vast majority of large-scale vocal and instrumental works have little in common with Romantic alienation, irony and ambivalence, betraying again a consciousness rooted in Enlightenment optimism and shaped by the Biedermeier desire to restore order to a world shaken by a generation of revolution and war. The question of nationalism in Weber's thinking and artistic output presents another area for paradox and ambiguity. Certain features of Weber's life and personality would seem to contradict the kind of nationalist interpretation evident in Wagner's Rede an Weber's letzter Rühestätte of 1844 and implicit in the dedication of Jähns's thematic catalogue to ‘the German people’. With the exception of the emotional patriotism that he experienced along with many fellow Germans in the heady days of 1814–15, Weber mostly stayed aloof from the political issues of his time. Before 1814 his references to the Napoleonic wars primarily treat them as a nuisance impeding the pursuit of art, and the letters from the last ten years of his life contain very few references to the political conditions and climate of restoration Germany. At first glance, Weber's artistic cosmopolitanism also seems to militate against a nationalist interpretation. His operatic repertories were international, especially at Prague, where he was free to choose works from German, French and Italian traditions, and his own works drew upon the genres, forms and styles of the different national schools much as had the works of Handel, Bach and Mozart. However, various factors did combine to make Weber a potent symbol of German art and nation for his contemporaries and for later generations (W.M. Wagner, P(i)1994). In the patriotic choral songs of Leyer und Schwerdt and the folkloric Der Freischütz the German people found artistic expression of their collective experience and self-image. Cultural politics in Berlin in 1821 further helped establish Der Freischütz as a German antipode to the international grand opera style of the unpopular Spontini. Through his conflicts with the Italian opera in Dresden Weber became a prominent and outspoken advocate of the right of German opera to exist on an equal footing with the other national traditions, and in the wake of the ‘Rossini-Fieber’ of the early 1820s, Weber's operas became important rallying points for resistance to an art that Weber himself considered suspect. And Weber's seemingly cosmopolitan ideal of a German art that not only synthesizes but also deepens and extends the elements borrowed from abroad betrays more than a whiff of cultural chauvinism. A systematic study of the reception of Weber and of his place in 19th-century music remains to be written, but certain aspects are understood well enough to give some support to Philipp Spitta's suggestion that Weber could with some justification be regarded as the most influential musician of the 19th century. Although Weber may not have been the sole ‘creator of German Romantic Opera’, his critical and organizational efforts on behalf of German opera made him the most visible proponent of the genre of his day, and with Der Freischütz he produced a work that competed successfully with popular French and Italian operas not only in Germany but in other countries as well. The impact of Der Freischütz on opera of the 1820s, 30s and 40s is evident, as it inspired a spate of gothic works like the vampire operas of Marschner and Lindpaintner, and even as late a work as Der fliegende Holländer owes much to it; outside Germany, its success as Robin des Bois prepared the way for Meyerbeer's Robert le diable. And though Euryanthe all but disappeared from the repertory of the 20th century, it is clear that this opera left a profound impression on Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. Weber's piano music was held in high esteem by his contemporaries and was demonstrably important for subsequent pianist-composers like Mendelssohn, Chopin and, above all, Liszt (Tusa, Q1999). For Berlioz Weber's music was a revelation that helped him find his own way to originality (Heidlberger, Q1994). More generally, Weber's exploration of novel sonorities significantly enriched the art of orchestration and placed a new premium on the expressive quality of sound per se. And through works like the Fourth Piano Sonata, the Concert-Stück and especially his mature opera overtures Weber pointed ahead to the poetically conceived concert overtures and symphonic poems of the mid-19th century. At the same time, an adequate understanding of Weber's place in 19th-century music must also take into account various negative strands of reception. Contemporary resistance to anti-Classical (and arguably anti-Romantic) tendencies in much of his music is a recurring refrain that merits serious attention. Critical comments by Hegel, Grillparzer, Spohr, Schubert and even Wagner about the ‘realism’, ‘lack of melody’, and ‘mosaic’-like qualities of Weber's music point up the fact that his goals of ‘truth’ and ‘character’ occasionally produced music that was difficult to reconcile with traditional ideals of euphony, melodic-rhythmic flow and formal rounding. Thus, though his operatic successors eagerly emulated numerous effects in scoring, harmony and broad musico-dramatic structure, few seem to have been as willing as Weber to subordinate musical qualities to the goal of continuously truthful expression. The decline of Weber's reputation and the disappearance of much of his music from the repertory also need to be studied, although one may provisionally suggest some reasons for these. On the one hand, with the triumph of Wagner's mature operas came heightened expectations of the logic of plot and character development that made Euryanthe and Oberon increasingly difficult for audiences to accept (efforts to ‘rescue’ these operas for posterity through alternative librettos have all failed); only Der Freischütz has been able to hold the stage, and even this work fared poorly in non-German theatres in the 20th century. And on the other, the emergence of Beethoven's style as the dominant paradigm for instrumental music and of Schubert's lieder as the corresponding model for German song tended to overshadow Weber's significant contributions in these areas. In this regard it seems significant that two of Weber's most prominent defenders in the 20th century were Debussy and Stravinsky, composers whose own distance from the predominantly symphonic style of 19th-century music allowed them to appreciate Weber's art on its own terms. Weber: (9) Carl Maria von Weber WORKS Editions:Carl Maria von Weber: Musikalische Werke: erste kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. H.J. Moser; ii/1, ed. A. Lorenz (Augsburg, 1926), ii/2, ed. W. Kaehler (Augsburg, 1928), ii/3, ed. L.K. Mayer (Brunswick, 1932) [only 3 vols. pubd] [WG]Reliquienschrein des Meisters Carl Maria von Weber, ed. L. Hirschberg (Berlin, 1927) [HR]Carl Maria von Weber: Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Allroggen (Mainz, 1998) [WSW]
stage works incidental music insertion arias and duets concert arias and duets sacred choral other choral vocal ensemble solo songs orchestral concertos, concertante works wind ensemble chamber solo piano piano four hands miscellaneous arrangements doubtful and spurious works Weber: (9) Carl Maria von Weber: Works
Date: 2015-12-18; view: 656
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). As writers since Waltershausen (P(iii)1920) have pointed out, this harmonic feature influences the tonal choices in the Act 2 finale, the famous Wolf's Glen scene, an unprecedented complex of gestural, scenic and orchestral interaction (with relatively little singing) in which the principal, tritone-related keys of F