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 After two years of delay the promise had been practically withdrawn.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.