CARL MARIA VON WEBER
HE plenitude of genius in the classical period of German music has a striking illustration in the rapid succession in the kingship which followed the wresting of the musical sceptre from Italy. Beginning with Bach, there has been no break in the line of succession. Had such a thought occurred to the father of modern music, he might have established a sentimental foundation, a handgrasp, a kiss, or an apostolic laying on of hands, which might have been transmitted down to our day without once leaving the direct and royal line. In the musical succession there is an over-lapping, a concurrence of reigns, nearly all the time. The most significant phrase of this phenomenon is exemplified in the subject of this study. Gluck and Mozart might have come like the good fairies of the nursery tale to kiss him in his cradle. Haydn and Beethoven might have waited till their salutations would inspire his youth. He himself might have blessed the infancy of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner. This it is which helped to give Carl Maria von Weber a position in musical history which now we recognize to be commanding in a sense never realized so fully before. His activities range over the territory through which is drawn the indeterminate line of demarcation between the Classic and Romantic schools. He embodies the spirit of both tendencies, though not in an equal degree. Not only does he touch hands with the kings of the eighteenth century and their successors of the nineteenth, but some of his life threads in the fabric of history were interwoven with theirs. We shall see how in the story of his life.
The influence of heredity has a twofold illustration in this story. The musical talent of Weber and, indeed, the general bent of his artistic predilections were an inheritance. An ardent devotion to music and the drama can be traced back a century in the family from which he sprung. The family belonged to the minor nobility of Austria. Of the tastes and inclinations of the first Freiherr von Weber, who was endowed with the title in 1622, nothing is known. But a brother, who had taken up a residence in Suabia, probably after the loss of the family estates in the Thirty Years' War, was musical. He was the ancestor of Fridolin Weber, who, in turn, was the father of several daughters who would have merited a paragraph in the annals of music had they not won a page through the circumstance that Mozart fell in love with one, Aloysia, and married another, Constance. Franz Anton von Weber, a brother of this Fridolin, was the father of Carl Maria, who through Constance became cousin by marriage to Mozart. The brothers, though many other things besides, during the latter portion of their existence were, for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, musicians. Fridolin, who had dropped the "von" from his name when Mozart met him in Mannheim, was reduced to the position of a sort of general utility man in the Court Theatre; Franz Anton, who clung to the sign of nobility and conveyed other titles to himself to which he had less right, enjoyed the distinction of being one of the best viola players of his time and was also an admirable performer upon the double-bass. He even ventured upon the sea of composition with some songs with pianoforte accompaniment, which frail craft bore him up for a considerable time.
Here was one manifestation of the law of heredity; contemplation of the other is less agreeable. From Franz Anton von Weber his son inherited an instability of character which for a time threatened to make shipwreck of his divine gifts. The whole of Franz Anton's life was the career of an adventurer. In his youth he was a titled rake in Mannheim. He became a soldier and was slightly wounded fighting against Frederick the Great at Rosbach. The Elector of Cologne, Clément Augustus, gave him an appointment and on the death of his father-in-law advanced him to the posts which the latter had held—Steward and Court Councillor. From these posts he was dismissed with a small pension by Clément Augustus's successor in the Electorate. It is said that his devotion to music was partly the cause of his dismissal. He was fonder of his fiddle than of his duties, and often went walking in the fields, playing on his viol, his eight children trooping behind him as if he were another Pied Piper. He married into a councillorship and fiddled himself out of it. The Prince-Bishop who appointed him was the gay prelate who "danced himself out of this world into another" and who gave employment to Beethoven's grandfather and father in his court band; the Prince-Bishop who dismissed him was the serious-minded and thrifty Maximilian Frederick, who became the master of Beethoven himself. Those who are fond of delving for remote causes may associate the birth of Weber with this action of Beethoven's patron. Franz Anton, having lost his position and squandered his wife's fortune, started out on a dramatic and musical itinerancy. His wife did not survive her humiliation. He wandered through Germany after three years of service as Chapelmaster to the Bishop of Lübeck and Eutin, and in 1784 found his way to Vienna, where he placed two of his sons under the tuition of Haydn, and a year later married the sixteen-year-old Genoveva von Brenner, a daughter in the family that had given a home to his sons. This delicate flower the adventurer of fifty plucked out of its genial surroundings in the Austrian capital and transplanted to Eutin, whither he now returned to accept the post of town musician, another having meanwhile won the once despised but now coveted chapelmastership. Small wonder that when Carl Maria Friedrich Ernest, the first child of this mistaken marriage was born he should have brought with him into the world a frail and puny body afflicted with a disease of the hip which was the cause of the composer's lifelong lameness.
Concerning the date of Carl Maria's birth there is still controversy. The church records in Eutin give it as November 18, 1786. The date commonly accepted is December 18, 1786. When the boy's first composition was published the father did not hesitate to falsify his age by a year in order to irritate the attention of the cognoscenti. The impulse which prompted what must have seemed a trifling peccadillo to the unscrupulous Franz Anton sprang from an ambition which had long consumed his heart and had been intensified by the marvelous career of his nephew by marriage, Mozart: He wished to figure in the world as father of a prodigy. He had been disappointed in the children of his first marriage who, with finer facilities than Carl Maria ever enjoyed, had turned out to be simply good working musicians. The forcing process which he applied in the case of his youngest son was in no respect beneficial. The boy, too, was ambitious to be a Mozart, but in later life, speaking of his second opera, composed at the age of thirteen, he mentioned the circumstance that he had written the second act in ten days, and added: "This was one of the many unfortunate consequences of the numerous tales of the great masters which made so great an impression on my juvenile mind, and which I tried to imitate." The demand which the father made upon the precocious mind of his son was in reality greater than that made upon the boy Mozart's. Leopold Mozart was an ideal instructor and a man of fine moral fibre. In his exploitation of Wolfgang he never sacrificed the things which make for good in art. He may have been injudicious in fanning the spark of genius so industriously that it burst into the too-fierce flame which consumed his son's life prematurely, but the technical training which Wolfgang enjoyed was sound and thorough. This boon was never accorded to the boy Weber. While his father continued the roving life which began anew a year after Carl Maria's birth, he and his son Frederick cared for the lad's education. There was no more stability in the life of the family than in that of a gypsy band. Within a dozen years the father figured in one theatrical capacity or another in Vienna, Cassel, Meiningen, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Weimar, Erlangen, Hilburghausen and Salzburg. Only in the last two towns does it appear that he procured proper instruction for the child. Evidently with all his desire to play the rôle of a second Leopold Mozart he mistrusted his son's gifts, for he once contemplated making a painter out of him, and even after he had exhibited noteworthy fruits of the few months of study pursued under Michael Haydn in Salzburg, and Kalcher in Munich, he seemed willing to sacrifice his son's musical talents to the prospect of making money with Senefelder's new invention of lithography, in which both father and son took a keen interest. The influence of such an irresolute life upon the lad's moral character must also have been pernicious. He grew up behind the scenes of a theatre. One can easily imagine the value of the familiarity with the mimic world thus obtained after he had become a dramatic composer, but it fastened a clog upon his talent which he was never quite able to fling off. When a good teacher, who valued his gifts and devoted himself assiduously to their development, was found in Hilburghausen, study had already become irksome to the lad.
Michael Haydn had been his master for only six months when, his mother having died of consumption in March, 1798, he accompanied his father to Vienna and remained there till July. Next came a removal to Munich, and study under Kalcher for composition and Wallishauser (of Valesi, as he called himself) for singing. Even with imperfect cherishing, however, the boy's creative faculty asserted itself. The first of his music which was published consisted of six fughettos written under the eyes of Michael Haydn. Guided by Kalcher he composed an opera, "Die Macht der Liebe und des Weins," a mass and several vocal and instrumental pieces in the smaller forms. All of this music is lost except a set of variations which he dedicated to his teacher and printed himself by the new lithographic method.
