Carl Maria von Weber (1786 – 1826): Der Freischütz
It begins delicately enough: a unison C, reverberating softly across the strings, oboes, clarinets and bassoons. It swells to a forte before dissipating itself in a short fragment of melody. Silence, followed by a brief answering phrase in the violins.
The whole passage repeats itself, this time beginning on a long unison G, an identical rhythm with different notes. The same answering phrase follows. It’s all a little enigmatic and sparse so far – already a minute in, and we still haven’t heard a single harmonising note or chord.
And then suddenly comes a small miracle: the various string instruments subdivide into six different parts to produce the warmest, most delicious C Major harmonies. Against this radiant backdrop, four French horns enter with a solemn, chorale-like melody. Just briefly, it’s as if the musical spheres have all perfectly aligned.
For many people, this memorable, iconic passage represents nothing less than the birth of German Romanticism.
The moment does not last. As the horn chorale concludes the strings take on a more mysterious and menacing form, their soft, shimmering tremolo accompanied by eerie low chords in the clarinets, and ominous downward leaps in the ‘cellos. The piece is about to work itself up into a state of considerable turmoil and drama.
Whether you are hearing this music for the first or the hundredth time, you always get the same sense of transformation: of entering an unfamiliar, ancient-seeming world, simple yet psychologically complex, full of dramatic landscapes and huge, majestic forests filled with divine magic and dark spirits – all governed by a powerful, pantheistic Nature which is your friend and protector, so long as you obey its unspoken laws.
The author of this ground-breaking music, the opening to the opera Der Freischütz, is of course Carl Maria von Weber. We last met him in 1811, at a time when he was attempting to reform himself after a somewhat misspent youth. But even as Weber belatedly matured as a man, he lost none of his manic energy or sparkle. He continued to earn a living from full-time kapellmeister roles, while still composing, dazzling audiences on the piano and writing critical reviews. He even found time to create the Harmonischer Verein, a society of musicians and literary men who were committed to “the elevation of musical criticism by musicians themselves.”
Weber worked principally as an opera house director during these later years, firstly in Prague and then in Dresden from 1817. His duties were typically wide-ranging and exhausting. By his own account, they included “organising all the contracts, new regulations for orchestra and chorus, bringing a muddled library into order, as well as being overrun by hordes of people – it’s indescribable… I get up at six and often work through until midnight.”
But even with this back-breaking schedule, Weber positively excelled in such roles. He had by now developed a happy instinct for improving things almost wherever he went. Directing an orchestra was no exception. Rather than discreetly keeping his players in time from behind a keyboard, as was the custom of the day, Weber would stand in a prominent position and take full control of his orchestra, focusing not only on correct speeds, but also on instrumental balance and performance style. His pioneering example would directly inspire later great conductor-composers of the nineteenth century such as Berlioz, Wagner and Mahler, and help create the popular conception of the modern-day conductor.
But Weber had another agenda in Dresden. He was dismayed to find a local repertoire heavily dominated by Italian and French operas. Weber wanted to change that, and not long after arriving in the city he published an essay entitled “To the art-loving citizens of Dresden”:
No people has been so slow and so uncertain as the German in determining its own specific art forms. Both the Italians and the French have evolved a form of opera in which they move freely and naturally. This is not true of the Germans, whose peculiarity it has been adopt what seems best in other schools, after much study and steady development; but the matter goes deeper with them. Whereas other nations concern themselves chiefly with the sensuous satisfaction of isolated movement, the German demands a self-sufficient work of art, in which all the parts make up a beautiful and unified whole.
And in Weber’s view, if no German opera already existed that fitted that description, then he would write one himself.
It was however a monumental undertaking. Weber was no Rossini – he could not dash off a new opera in a few weeks. But nor indeed would he have wanted to. Rather than putting together a dazzling package of beautiful melodies with colourful instrumentation, he wanted to build much more from the bottom up, applying painstaking care to the whole inner structure of the work. Not only would the new opera be more integrated and more symphonic, it would also be in Weber’s own words, “a self-sufficient work of art in which every feature and every contribution by the related arts are moulded together in a certain way and dissolve, to form a new world.” This would essentially become the forerunner to Wagner’s conception of a Gesamtkunstwerk – a “total work of art”, embracing multiple art-forms, not just musical but also literary and visual.
In his youth, Weber had been heavily influenced by the Romantic folklore of Ludwig Tieck as well as the Naturphilosophie musings of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling. Both these men had formed part of the new movement of German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, with its rejection of the old eighteenth century ideals of order, discipline and reason (with their now repressive, Napoleonic overtones) in favour of a much more individual creativity and expressiveness, one which was far closer to the natural world.
The movement often looked backwards rather than forwards, idolizing the distant, unbureaucratic past as a time dominated by heroic chivalry and valiant knights, and of magic and mysticism. It brought a renewed fascination with the supernatural and the occult, both as possible forces for good but also sometimes harbingers of doom.
The opera that would emerge from all of Weber’s labours was Der Freischütz (literally the “The Freeshooter”, although often referred to as “The Marksman”). Its plotline is lifted from an old, popular German ghost story, depicting a young man, a forester, who needs to prove himself as a marksman in order to win the hand of the lady he loves. Finding his skills deserting him just before an important tournament, a scheming friend leads him unwittingly into a pact with the devil, who grants the forester a number of magic bullets designed to hit whatever object he wishes. Unbeknown to the forester, the devil has arranged control over the seventh and final bullet, with which he intends to kill the young man’s sweetheart.
The work was eventually premiered at Berlin’s newly-built Schauspielhaus in June 1821. Despite some grumbles from several critics, nonplussed by the work’s novelties, it immediately took a firm hold over the public’s imagination. This wasn’t a tale about lofty kings, gods or heroes. Rather it centred on ordinary, rural Germans, with the latter usually represented by warm, rich orchestral harmonies, soulful French horns and unpretentious, folksy melodies. But just beyond the boundaries of cosy village life lay the thick forest containing both enchantment and potential terror.
The scene where the forester meets the devil in a particularly dismal corner of the woods is pure Gothic horror. There are macabre spectres and ghastly night birds. Two different storms, of rain and fire, approach from opposite directions. Weber saves some of his best and most imaginative music for this key moment: the German philosopher, Theodor Adorno, would later praise the “low clarinets and pizzicato basses [which] create a blacker blend of sound than Beethoven could ever have dared conceive.” According to the composer’s son, the scene drew “thunderous applause” at its first performance.
It wasn’t the only part they were applauding. Having struggled to attain due recognition for his previous six operas, Der Freischütz would change Weber’s life almost overnight. It was quickly recognized as something of a phenomenon and was soon being performed all over Germany before spreading further afield. According to one contemporary critic it “set the German people’s pulse racing”, while the early twentieth century conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, would even describe the opera “a great moment for mankind”.
The irony was that even as Der Freischütz was widely praised for its innate Germanness, the opera took much of its inspiration from foreign sources. Not least it owed a great deal to the recent advances of French opéra-comique, at the hands of Étienne Méhul, Luigi Cherubini and others (all well known to Weber), with their more serious, integrated structures, their use of unifying musical motifs, and their heightening of the role of the orchestra. You could argue that Der Freischütz is really the first German opéra-comique. As Weber himself observed, “I am in favour of quality, wherever it comes from.”
When Beethoven became aware of the new opera, he responded enthusiastically that “Weber must now write operas, nothing but operas.” Weber would take the great man’s advice, even though he was now seriously ill with tuberculosis. His next operatic masterpiece was Euryanthe, produced in Vienna two years later, with Weber this time dispensing with spoken dialogue and creating a fully scored work in a way that was still quite novel for the time.
His final operatic venture came three years later, in 1826, via a lucrative commission from London. Weber’s health was by now on the point of collapse, but he decided to take up the offer for purely practical reasons: he had a young family to think of after he’d gone. “Whether I go to London or not, in a year I’m a dead man”, he told a friend. “But if I go, my children will eat when their father’s dead, and if I stay they’ll starve.” The result was the English-language Oberon. Now based in London, Weber worked as tirelessly as ever, learning English, overseeing rehearsals, composing extra numbers wherever required, giving private recitals and attending innumerable social functions – all the while burning up his very last dregs of energy. After the opera’s first performance, Weber sensed it was an unsatisfactory hybrid of English and German styles, and fully intended to re-write it when he got back to Germany.
Sadly, he was never to make it back. His body finally gave out on a bright, midsummer morning in June 1826, while staying with his friend, Sir George Smart. He was just 39 years old.
Despite his tragically short life, Carl Maria von Weber had nonetheless assured for himself and his music a lasting legacy by the time of his death.
Suggestions for further listening
One of the best online performances of Der Freischütz can be found here, staged appropriately enough in Dresden’s opera house, where Weber was kapellmeister at the time he was writing the music.
Weber tended to write his operatic overtures last, drawing closely on the music for the opera itself. The Overtures for Euryanthe and Oberon are highly impressive tone poems in their own right and are often performed separately.