WEBER'S BIRTHPLACE IN EUTIN, NORTH GERMANY.

We have written with somewhat disproportionate fullness of the beginning of Weber's career because of the light which the recital throws upon his moral as well as his musical development. Fate had it in store that a lovely character and a genius of high order should emerge from the unsightly and much-abused chrysalis; but before then another decade had to be spent under such circumstances as ordinarily wreck men's souls. In this period the interruptions of the peripatetics which had been the curse of his childhood, were few and comparatively brief. Freiberg, in Saxony, Chemnitz, Salzburg, and Augsburg, were in turn the lad's stopping-places, and a tour was made through Northern Germany. Then came two years of study in Vienna with Abbé Vogler, rewarded by an appointment which the Abbé procured for the youth of seventeen and a half as Capellmeister in Breslau. For two years he performed the duties of this office, and then disaffections and quarrels between him and the citizens who maintained the company led to his resignation. The influence of a pupil got him the title of Musik-Intendant to Duke Eugene of Wirtemberg, which he intended to use for advertising purposes on a concert tour; but war interfered with the plan and he went to Schloss Carlsruhe to participate in the music-making at the Duke's court. The conquest of Prussia by Napoleon in 1807 led the Duke to dismiss his band, but he obtained for Weber the post of Private Secretary to a brother, Duke Ludwig, at Stuttgart. The associations into which this new life threw him were more demoralizing a thousand times than any of his past experiences. The profligacy and immorality of the official and theatrical life of the Suabian capital were notorious throughout Europe. The charm of Weber's mind and manners drew about him many good influences, particularly the friendship of Capellmeister Danzi, but the moral stamina to withstand the temptations which beset him on all hands had not been developed, and he abandoned himself to a course of life which threatened his moral as well as artistic ruin. His boon companions were one of the sirens of the theatre and the members of a coterie known as "Faust's Descent into Hell." From the dangers which beset him he was most rudely rescued. He had incurred the anger of the King while delivering one of the many unpleasant messages of Duke Ludwig, who was the King's brother, and avenged himself for the contumely poured on him by directing an old woman, who had inquired for the Royal laundress, into the King's cabinet. It required the intervention of the Duke to save him from imprisonment, but the King's anger was not appeased, and he soon found occasion to punish Weber for the insult. The misrepresentations of a servant to a citizen from whom Weber borrowed money led the former to believe that the loan would purchase an appointment for his son in the Duke's household and consequent immunity from military service. The appointment not following, Weber was denounced to the King, tried by a process quite as summary as a drum-head court-martial, and banished from Wirtemberg along with his father, in whose behalf the loan had been made. It was the year 1810, and it marks Weber's moral regeneration. He resolved thereafter to devote himself honestly and seriously to the service of his art. His artistic achievements during this decade were scarcely significant enough to outweigh the unhappy incidents of his life. At Freiberg he forgot his father's lithographic schemes long enough to set an opera book written by Ritter von Steinsberg on the familiar folk-tale of the Seven Ravens, entitled "Das Stumme Waldmädchen," which was performed in Freiberg, Chemnitz, Prague and even Vienna and St. Petersburg, without making a decided success. In the course of his second stay in Salzburg he composed "Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn," which was brought out with indifferent results at Augsburg. During his trip through Northern Germany he developed a thirst for theoretical knowledge and also a bent toward literature which grew with time, made him a student of the writings of Kant and Schelling, in Stuttgart, and filled his head for a space with thoughts of a critical journal. His choice of Abbé Vogler as a teacher has generally been deplored, but it seems to have been beneficial in this respect, at least, that under the influence of that man of brilliant if superficial talents, he ceased the production of unripe works and took up the analysis of masterpieces and the study of folk-music. The circumstance that his writings for two years are practically summed up in a pianoforte arrangement of the Abbé's opera "Samori" and two sets of variations on themes from that opera and "Castor and Pollux" might be variously interpreted. The Abbé had the gift of attaching young men to himself and was probably not averse to such tributes as his affectionate pupils paid him in the revamping of his ideas; but if Weber's own testimony is to be accepted he must have helped him greatly in the direction where his greatest needs lay. In Breslau he began the composition of "Rübezahl" (text by J. G. Rhode, the managing director of the private company that maintained the theatre), and composed an a Overturn Chinesa," utilizing for the purpose a Chinese melody entitled "Lieu-ye-kin." This overture he remodeled a few years later and prefixed it to Schiller's adaptation of the Italian Gozzi's masque "Turandot" for which he also composed six incidental pieces. How one who was so happy a few years later in the application of local color should have persuaded himself to use a Chinese melody with its characteristic pentatonic scale in an overture to a play based on a Persian subject does not appear. Weber's stay with Duke Eugene was not without profit, though his compositions were chiefly instrumental and, barring two symphonies, in the smaller forms. In Stuttgart where his musical services to Duke Ludwig were confined to instructing his children, he undertook a resetting of "Das Stumme Waldmädchen," the book of which had been worked over by Franz Carl Hiemer, the leading spirit of the dissolute coterie known as "Faust's Höllenfahrt." Weber seems to have spent two years on this work, or rather to have spread it out over two years of time, a circumstance which, when contrasted with the rapidity of his work on his second opera as a lad of thirteen, tells its own tale of the effect of the influences which surrounded him. It was at a rehearsal of this opera, renamed "Sylvana," that the King chose to have him arrested to gratify a petty vengefulness. The work came into new notice in connection with the German celebrations of Weber's centenary in 1886 by reason of a second revision and revival after it had been forgotten for full half a century. This "revision," however, for which Ernst Pasqué and Ferdinand Langer are responsible, is almost if not quite as original a piece of work as that done by Weber in the remodeling of "Das Stumme Waldmädchen." The three-act play is expanded into one of four acts; the dumb maiden is metamorphosed into a particularly brilliant soprano leggiero; a ballet is introduced consisting of the "Invitation to the Dance," which was composed in 1817, and the Polonaise in E-flat which dates back to the Stuttgart period; several of Weber's songs are interpolated (a hint of Widor's having seemingly been acted on), and vocal numbers are constructed out of two sonata movements.

PORTRAIT OF WEBER, IN HIS TWENTY-FOURTH YEAR.

Painted by Jos. Lang, the actor-painter (brother-in-law of Mozart). Engraved by Joh. Neidl.

With the expulsion from Stuttgart Weber's wanderings began again, and for several years, the rest of the time indeed which may be counted in the period preparatory to his entrance upon his estate as a genius conscious of a mission and equipped for its performance, his life is like that of a minstrel knight of old, save for the difference in social and artistic environment. At the very outset of these final peregrinations there is noticeable a sign of his moral regeneration, preceding only by a little most convincing evidences of a determination to make good also the artistic shortcomings due to his desultory early training and his later frivolities. Toward the close of 1810 he wrote in his journal: "I can say calmly and truthfully that I have grown to be a better man within the last ten months. My sad experiences have made me wiser, I am become orderly in my business affairs and steadily industrious." The men whose friendship he cultivated on his travels were worthy of the best he could offer, and he made no more companionships that were hindrances to his growth. In Mannheim, whither he first went with letters from Danzi, it was the theoretician Gottfried Weber who gave him encouragement, help and a friendship that lasted till death. In Darmstadt began a lovely intercourse with Meyerbeer, who was then studying with Vogler, and whose parents received him like one of the family when he went to Berlin. In Hamburg he met E. T. A. Hoffman, that incarnation of the Romantic spirit; and in Munich he formed a social and artistic connection with the clarinettist, Bärmann, which was a source of delight and profit to them both. Duke Emil Leopold August, of Saxe Gotha, with all his crazy eccentricities, was a kind patron, at whose court he came into close relationship with Spohr, whom he had first met at Stuttgart, and on whom he had made an unfavorable impression. He went to Weimar, and learned to love Wieland and would also doubtless have bent the knee to Goethe, had that great man treated him with a little more than scant courtesy. It would seem, however, as if the great poet had imbibed, consciously or unconsciously, some of the prejudice against Weber which his musical oracle, Zelter, cherished. Weber's resolve to give truer devotion to his art bore fruit first in a heightened appreciation of the value of criticism. Not only did he seek to profit by the censure bestowed on his own works on the score of a want of plastic beauty and soundness of form, but he sought to give greater dignity to criticism by cultivating it himself. In Darmstadt he joined Meyerbeer and others in organizing a secret society which had for a motto "the elevation of musical criticism by musicians." He even recurred to his old project of founding a critical journal, and though he did not carry it out, he was thus in a sense a forerunner of Schumann, as the "Harmonischer Verein" (thus the critical coterie called itself) was a prototype of the "Davidsbündler." His conviction that he was profiting by his more serious studies and loftier determination is seen, moreover, in his desire to better his earlier work. He did not try to complete the opera "Rübezahl," but he remodelled its overture, which he thought his finest achievement up to that time, and also the overture to "Peter Schmoll." In his one-act operetta "Abu Hassan," composed during a second stay in Mannheim after his return from Frankfort, where he had produced "Sylvana" successfully, modern critics have found the buds of that dramatic genius which came into full flower in "Der Freischütz." His fondness for literary composition grew so strong in this period that, not content with critical essays, he ventured upon a work of fiction. It is impossible not to see in this circumstance and also in the title chosen for the romance, "Tonkünstler's Erdenwallen," a suggestion which Wagner acted on when a generation later he wrote: "Ein Ende in Paris," and "A Pilgrimage to Beethoven."

We have reached a point in Weber's career when his aims, ambitions, methods and achievements present so many parallels with those of his direct successor in art that the temptation is strong to put aside the story of the man in favor of an essay in comparative criticism. Each succeeding event in the next few years of his life helps to bring those parallels into a light which is particularly vivid to us who view them from the vantage ground of to-day. When he goes to Prague in January, 1813, to organize a German Opera, we see him enter the portal of the temple which enshrined the goddess of his later idolatry. When he emerges from that temple it is as the High Priest of a new cult, consecrated for the greater task which he accomplished in Dresden, whither he went in 1817. The consecration was two-fold; it entered into his moral life and purged it of the last husks of folly when he married Caroline Brandt on November 4, 1817; it entered into his artistic life when he conceived his mission to be to stimulate a national art-spirit in his country worthy of the spirit of patriotism which had enabled the German people to rid themselves of a foreign oppressor. In Prague he formed his last ignoble attachment. It was for the wife of a dancer at the opera, whose purposes were all mercenary, and whose husband was willing to trade in his wife's honor. The liaison caused immeasurable suffering to the gentle soul of Weber, and was the last of his purging fires. The solace which he found in the love of the singer who had sung in his "Sylvana" at Frankfort and been engaged at Prague at his instance, was perfect. Caroline Brandt did not accept him lightly, and he had time, while wooing her, to learn the value of her sweet purity and recover from the wounds struck by a degrading passion.

The spirit of Romanticism which had long before been breathed into German literature and encouraged patriotism by disclosing the treasures of German legendary lore, became a vital force when patriotic sentiments were transmuted into deeds of valor. Theodor Körner was the incarnation of that political ecstacy which had been nourished by the Tugendbund. In the youth of Germany, especially in the students, his songs produced a sort of divine intoxication. Part of Weber's summer vacation in 1814 was passed in Berlin. Prussia was leading in the struggle to throw off the yoke of Napoleon, and Weber drank daily of the soma-juice in Körner's "Lyre and Sword." On his return trip to Prague he visited his old friend the Duke Emil August at his castle Gräfen-Tonna. From this old feudal pile he sent his settings of "Lützow's wilde Jagd" and "Das Schwertlied" to his love in Prague. The world has never ceased to marvel at the fire of those settings; who shall describe their effect in Germany at the time they were written? They were sparks hurled into the powder-magazine of national feeling. All things were conspiring to develop Weber's Germanism from an emotion into a religion. The "Hurrah!" of his apostrophe to the sword found an echo at Waterloo. He planned a cantata to celebrate the event. It was not musical taste as much as patriotic ardor to which the circumstances compelled him to appeal. "Kampf und Sieg" is another "Wellington's Victory," containing the same vulgar realism (the noises of battle, etc.), but disclosing also a higher artistic striving. Beethoven used national melodies to characterize the warring soldiery: the "Chanson de Malbrouk" for the French, and "Rule Britannia" for the English. Weber utilized the revolutionary "Ça ira" for the French "God save the King" for the English, the Austrian and Prussian grenadier marches and the refrain from his own "Lützow." The latter circumstance may be looked upon as evidence of the popularity which the spirited song had won within a year.

WEBER