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
IV
The scene now shifts to Paris, a city unbelievably frenzied and complex, the Paris that gives the tone to a good half of the music of the romantic period.
‘As I finished my cantata (Sardanapalus),’ writes Berlioz in his ‘Memoirs,’ ‘the Revolution broke out and the Institute was a curious sight. Grapeshot rattled on the barred doors, cannon balls shook the façade, women screamed, and, in the momentary pauses, the interrupted swallows took up their sweet, shrill cry. I hurried over the last pages of my cantata and on the 29th was free to maraud about the streets, pistol in hand, with the “blessed riff-raff,” as Barbier said. I shall never forget the look of Paris during those few days. The frantic bravery of the gutter-snipe, the enthusiasm of the men, the calm, sad resignation of the Swiss and Royal Guards, the odd pride of the mob in being “masters of Paris and looting nothing.”’
This was Paris in Berlioz’s and Liszt’s early years there. In Paris at or about this time were living Victor Hugo, Stendhal, de Vigny, Balzac, Chateaubriand, de Musset, Lamartine, Dumas the elder, Heine, Sainte-Beuve, and George Sand among the poets, dramatists, and novelists; Guizot and Thiers among the historians; Auguste Compte, Joseph le Maistre, Lamennais, Proudhon, and Saint-Simon among the political philosophers. It is hard to recall any other city at any other time in history (save only the Athens of the Peloponnesian War) which had such a vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Thanks to the centralization effected by Napoleon, thanks to the tradition of free speech among the French, the centre of Europe had shifted from Vienna to Paris.