III
The great significance of Weber in musical history is that he may fairly be called the first German national composer. Preceding composers of the race had been German in the sense that they were of German blood and their works were paid for by Germans, and also in that their music usually had certain characteristics of the German nature. But they were not consciously national in the aggressive sense. Weber’s works are the first musical expression of a German patriotism, cultivating what is most deeply and typically German, singing German unity of feeling and presenting something like a solid front against foreign feelings and art. But we are too apt to wave away such a statement as a mere phrase. At a distance we are too liable to suppose that a great art can come into being in response to a mere sentimental idea. But German patriotism was a passion which was fought for by the best brains and spirits of the time. It was in the heat of conflict that Weber’s music acquired its deep meaning and its spiritual intensity.
To understand the state of affairs we must again go back to the French Revolution. Germany was at the end of the eighteenth century more rigidly mediæval than any other European country, save possibly Russia and parts of Italy. The German patriot Stein thus described the condition of Mecklenburg in a letter written in 1802: ‘I found the aspect of the country as cheerless as its misty northern sky; great estates, much of them in pastures or fallow; an extremely thin population; the entire laboring class under the yoke of serfage; stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built farm houses; in short, a monotony, a dead stillness, spreading over the whole country; an absence of life and activity that quite overcame my spirits. The home of the Mecklenburg noble, who weighs like a load on his peasants instead of improving their condition, gives me the idea of the den of some wild beast, who devastates everything about him and surrounds himself with the silence of the grave.’ If Stein was perhaps inclined to be pessimistic in his effort to arouse German spirits, it is because he has in his mind’s eye the possibility of better things, and the actual superiority of conditions in France and England. Most observers of the time viewed conditions with indifference. Goethe showed little or no patriotism; ‘Germany is not a nation,’ he said curtly.
After the peace of Lunéville and the Diet of Ratisbon the greater part of Germany fell under Napoleon’s influence. The German people showed no concern at thus passing under the control of the French. The German states were nothing but the petty German courts. Fyffe[78] humorously describes the process of political reorganization which the territory underwent in 1801: ‘Scarcely was the Treaty of Lunéville signed when the whole company of intriguers who had touted at Rastadt posted off to the French capital with their maps and their money-bags, the keener for the work when it became known that by common consent the free cities of the empire were now to be thrown into the spoil. Talleyrand and his confidant, Mathieu, had no occasion to ask for bribes, or to maneuver for the position of arbiters in Germany. They were overwhelmed with importunities. Solemn diplomatists of the old school toiled up four flights of stairs to the lodging of the needy secretary, or danced attendance at the parties of the witty minister. They hugged Talleyrand’s poodle; they played blind-man’s buff and belabored each other with handkerchiefs to please his little niece. The shrewder of them fortified their attentions with solid bargains, and made it their principal care not to be outbidden at the auction. Thus the game was kept up as long as there was a bishopric or a city in the market.’
Such were the issues which controlled the national destiny of Germany in 1801. Napoleon unintentionally gave the impetus to the German resurgence by forcing some vestige of rational organization upon the land. The internal condition of the priest-ruled districts was generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance kept life down to an inert monotony. The free cities, as a rule, were sunk in debt; the management of their affairs had become the perquisite of a few lawyers and privileged families. The new régime centralized administration, strengthened the financial system, and relieved the peasants of the most intolerable of their burdens, and thus gave them a stake in the national welfare.
Five years later Napoleon helped matters further by a rule of insolence and national oppression that was intolerable to any educated persons except the ever servile Prussian court. The battle of Jena and the capture of Berlin had thrown all Prussia into French hands, and the court into French alliances. Stein protested and attempted to arouse the people. He met with indifference. Then came more indignities. Forty thousand French soldiers permanently quartered on Prussian soil taught the common people the bitterness of foreign domination. When the Spanish resistance of 1808 showed the weakness of Napoleon a band of statesmen and patriots, including the poet Arndt, the philosopher Fichte and the theologian Schleiermacher, renewed their campaign for national feeling, the only thing that could put into German armies the spirit needful for Napoleon’s overthrow. In all this the House of Hohenzollern and the ministers of the court of Potsdam played a most inglorious rôle. The patriots were frowned upon or openly prosecuted. Schill, a patriotic army officer, who attempted to attack the French on his own account, was denounced from Berlin. Even when Napoleon was returning defeated from Moscow, the jealousies of the court stood out to the last against the spontaneous national uprising. Finally Frederick William, the Prussian king, made a virtue of necessity and entered the field in the name of German unity.
But the nationalist movement had become a constitutionalist, even a republican, movement. The German soldiers, returning home victorious after the battle of Leipzig, received the expected promise of a constitution from Frederick William. After two years of delay the promise had been practically withdrawn. Only the examples of Weimar, Bavaria, and Baden, together with the propaganda of the liberals, kept the issue alive and growing, until it came to partial culmination in 1848.
It was into this Napoleonic situation that Weber was thrown in his most impressionable years. On a little vacation trip from Prague he went to Berlin and saw the return of Frederick William and the victorious Prussians from Paris after the battle of Leipzig. The national frenzy took hold of him and, at his next moment of leisure, he composed settings to some of Körner’s war songs, including the famous Du Schwert an meiner Linken, which made him better known and loved throughout Germany than all his previous works. To this day these songs are sung by the German singing societies, and nothing in all the literature of music is more truly German. To celebrate Waterloo he composed a cantata, Kampf und Sieg, which in the next two years was performed in a number of the capitals and secured to Weber his nationalist reputation. It was well that he was thus brilliantly and openly known at the time; he needed this reputation five years later when his work took on a changed significance.
Carl Maria Freiherr von Weber was born at Eutin, Oldenburg, in 1786, of Austrian parentage, into what we should call the ‘decayed gentility.’ His father was from time to time ‘retired army officer,’ director of a theatre band, and itinerant theatre manager. His mother, who died when he was seven, was an opera singer. The boy, under his stepbrother’s proddings, became something of a musician, and, when left to his own resources, a prodigy. His travellings were incessant, his studies a patchwork.[79] Nevertheless he had success on his infantile concert tours, and showed marked talent in his early compositions. At the age of thirteen he wrote an opera, Das Waldmädchen, which was performed in many theatres of Germany, and even in Russia. From the age of sixteen to eighteen he was kapellmeister at the theatre in Breslau. After some two years of uncertainty and rather fast life he became private secretary to the Duke Ludwig of Württemberg. His life became faster. He became involved in debts. Worse, he became involved in intrigue. The king was suspicious. Weber was arrested and thrown into prison. He was cleared of the charges against him, but was banished from the kingdom. Realizing that the way of the transgressor is hard, Weber now devoted himself to serious living and the making of music. Then followed three undirected years, filled with literature and reading, as well as music. In 1812, during a stay in Berlin, he amused himself by teaching a war-song of his to the Brandenburg Brigade stationed in the barracks. No doubt his life in the court of Stuttgart had shown him the insincerity of aristocratic pretensions and had turned his thoughts already to the finer things about him—that popular liberal feeling which just now took the form of military enthusiasm. In the following year he accepted the post of kapellmeister of the German theatre at Prague, with the difficult problem of reorganizing the opera, but with full authority to do it at his best. From this time on his life became steady and illumined with serious purpose. He brought to the theatre a rigor of discipline which it had not known before, and produced a brilliant series of German operas.
Early in 1817 he accepted a position as kapellmeister of the German (as opposed to the Italian) opera of Dresden. It was a challenge to his best powers, for the German opera of Dresden was practically non-existent. For a century Italian opera had held undisputed sway, with French a respected second. The light German singspiele, the chief representative of German opera, were performed by second-rate artists. All the prestige and influence of the city was for the Italian and French. For the court of Dresden, like that of Berlin half a century before, was thoroughly Frenchified. The king of Saxony owed his kingdom to Napoleon and aristocratic Germans still regarded what was German as mean and common.
But there was a more significant reason for Weber’s peculiar position, a reason that gave the color to his future importance. What was patriotic was, as we have seen, in the eyes of the court liberal and dangerous. To foster German opera was accordingly to run the risk of fostering anti-monarchical sentiments. If, just at this time, the court of Dresden chose to inaugurate a separate German opera, it was as a less harmful concession to the demands of the populace, and more particularly as a sort of anti-Austrian move which crystallized just at this time in opposition to Metternich’s reactionism. But, though the court wished a German opera, it felt no particular sympathy for it. In the preliminary negotiations it tried to insist, until met with Weber’s firm attitude, that its German kapellmeister should occupy a lower rank than Morlacchi, the Italian director. And, as Weber’s fame as a German nationalist composer grew, the court of Dresden was one of the last to recognize it. In the face of such lukewarmness Weber established the prestige of the German opera, and wrote Der Freischütz, around which all German nationalist sentiment centred. But to understand why Freischütz occupied this peculiar position we must once more turn back to history.
‘On the 18th of October, 1817,’ says the ever-entertaining Fyffe, ‘the students of Jena, with deputations from all the Protestant universities of Germany, held a festival at Eisenach, to celebrate the double anniversary of the Reformation and of the battle of Leipzig. Five hundred young patriots, among them scholars who had been decorated for bravery at Waterloo, bound their brows with oak-leaves and assembled within the venerable hall of Luther’s Wartburg castle, sang, prayed, preached, and were preached to, dined, drank to German liberty, the jewel of life, to Dr. Martin Luther, the man of God, and to the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar; then descended to Eisenach, fraternized with the Landsturm in the market-place, and attended divine service in the parish church without mishap. In the evening they edified the townspeople with gymnastics, which were now the recognized symbol of German vigor, and lighted a great bonfire on the hill opposite the castle. Throughout the official part of the ceremony a reverential spirit prevailed; a few rash words were, however, uttered against promise-breaking kings, and some of the hardier spirits took advantage of the bonfire to consign to the flames, in imitation of Luther’s dealing with the Pope’s Bull, a quantity of what they deemed un-German and illiberal writings. Among these was Schmalz’s pamphlet (which attacked the Tugendbund and other liberal German political institutions of the Napoleonic period). They also burnt a soldier’s straitjacket, a pigtail, and a corporal’s cane—emblems of the military brutalism of past times which was now being revived in Westphalia.’
The affair stirred up great alarm among the courts of Europe, an alarm out of all proportion to its true significance. The result—more espionage and suppression of free speech. ‘With a million of men under arms,’ adds Fyffe, ‘the sovereigns who had overthrown Napoleon trembled because thirty or forty journalists and professors pitched their rhetoric rather too high, and because wise heads did not grow upon schoolboys’ shoulders.’ The liberal passion, in short, was there, burning for a medium of expression. It was not allowed to appear on the surface. The result was that it must look for expression in some indirect way—in parables; in short, in works of art. In such times art takes on a most astonishing parallel of double meanings. The phenomenon happened in striking form some forty years later in Russia, when the growing and rigidly suppressed demand for the liberation of the serfs found expression in Turgenieff’s ‘Memoirs of a Sportsman,’ which is called ‘the Russian “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”’ The book was a mere series of literary sketches, telling various incidents among the country people during a season’s hunting. It showed not a note of passion, contained not a shadow of a political reference. There was no ground on which the censor could prohibit it, nor did the censor probably realize its other meaning. But it proved the storm centre of the liberal agitation. And so it has been with Russian literature for the last half century; those whose hearts understood could read deep between the lines.
And this was the position of Der Freischütz. The most reactionary government could hardly prohibit the performance of a fanciful tale of a shooting contest in which the devil was called upon to assist with magic. But it represented what was German in opposition to what was French or Italian. Its story came from the old and deep-rooted German legends; its characters were German in all their ways; the institutions it showed were old Germanic; its characters were the peasants and the people of the lower class, who were, in the propaganda of the time, the heart of the German nation. And, lastly, its melodies were of the very essence of German folk-song, the institution, above all else save only the German language, which made German hearts beat in tune. The opera was first performed in Berlin, at the opening of the new court theatre, on the sixth anniversary of the battle of Waterloo—that is in 1821. The success was enormous and within a year nearly every stage in Germany had mounted the work. It was even heard in New York within a few months. At every performance the enthusiasm was beyond all bounds, and, after nine months of this sort of thing, Weber wrote in his diary in Vienna: ‘Greater enthusiasm there cannot be; and I tremble to think of the future, for it is scarcely possible to rise higher than this.’ As for the court of Dresden, it realized slowly and grudgingly that it had in its pay one of the great composers of the world.
After Freischütz it was indeed ‘scarcely possible to rise higher,’ but Weber attempted a more ambitious task in a purely musical way in his next opera, Euryanthe, which was a glorification of the romanticism of the age—that of Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann, who represented to the Germans of the time vigor of the imagination and the freedom of the individual. Both Euryanthe and Oberon, which followed it, are very fine, but they could not repeat the success of Der Freischütz, chiefly because Weber could not find another Freischütz libretto. The composer died in England on June 4, 1826, after conducting the first performances of Oberon at Covent Garden.
Personally we see Weber as a man of the world, yet always with a bit of aristocratic reserve. He had been one of a wandering theatrical troupe, had played behind the scenes of a theatre, had known financial ups and downs, had lived on something like familiar terms with gentlemen and ladies of the court, had been a roué with the young bloods of degree, had intrigued and been the victim of intrigue, had been a concert pianist with the outward success and the social stigma of a virtuoso musician, had been a successful executive in responsible positions, had played the litterateur and written a fashionable novel, had been a devoted husband and father, and had felt the meaning of a great social movement. Certainly Weber was the first of that distinguished line of musicians who cultivated literature with marked talent and effect; his letters reveal the practised observer and the literary craftsman, and his criticisms of music, of which he wrote many at a certain period, have the insight of Schumann, with something more than his verve. Finally, he was the first great composer who was also a distinguished director; his work at Prague and Dresden was hardly less a creative feat than Der Freischütz.
Musically Weber has many a distinction. He is the acknowledged founder of German opera (though Mozart with Zauberflöte may be regarded as his forerunner), and the man who made German music aggressively national. Wagner, as we know him, would hardly have been possible without Weber. Weber is the father of the romanticists in his emphasis upon the imagination, in his ability to give pictorial and definite emotional values to his music. It is only a slight exaggeration of the truth to call him the father of modern instrumentation; his use of orchestral timbres for sensuous or dramatic effects, so common nowadays, was unprecedented in his time. With Schubert he is the father of modern pianoforte music; himself a virtuoso, he understood the technical capacities of the piano, and developed them, both in the classical forms and in the shorter forms which were carried to such perfection by Schumann, with the romantic glow of a new message. He is commonly regarded as deficient in the larger forms, but in those departments (and they were many) where he was at his best there are few musicians who have worked more finely than he.
Carl Maria von Weber