Weber: Overture to Euryanthe

Overture to Euryanthe

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)

Carl Maria von Weber might seem to be a familiar name in music history, but anyone skimming through an account of this remarkable man’s career will be astounded to discover how little is generally known about his life, as well as how little of his finest music is ever heard. Part of the problem is due to the fact that Weber’s most important works, the operas, are rarely performed outside of Germany, while the instrumental music tends to be overshadowed by that of his immediate contemporaries, Beethoven and Schubert. Apart from a number of rather facile compositions for wind instruments few of his concert works are ever performed. And it is not widely known that Weber was one of the key figures in the development of early musical Romanticism in Germany, and a serious-minded figure in operatic history comparable to Wagner and Mahler----not merely a precursor of Richard Wagner, whose works have quite unfairly overshadowed the accomplishments of the earlier composer.

Weber was born in a middle-class family filled with professional musicians---the aristocratic “von” was a fanciful embellishment added to the family name by his father. Linked by marriage with Mozart, whose wife Constanze was a relative, he showed remarkable musical gifts at an early age, and began his professional career in opera as a teenager, becoming a Kapellmeister before the age of EIGHTEEN, with positions in Breslau, Stuttgart and Prague, later Berlin and Dresden, where he would be a predecessor of Richard Wagner. Before the age of thirty Weber had held a dizzying succession of appointments, with tours and appearances in every important city in the German-speaking world. Along the way there were commissions for the woodwind concerti, symphonies, songs, chamber music and piano works, including the “Invitation to the Dance,” today best-known through the orchestration by Hector Berlioz, a passionate advocate for Weber’s works.
By the time Weber was in his mid-twenties he was deeply absorbed in the emerging “Romantic” movement, heralded by the work of writers and poets such as Byron and Scott (in translation), and in Germany such figures as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Goethe, both of whom Weber came to know. As with composers such as Berlioz and Schumann, Weber was keenly involved in the world of literature, even writing articles, poems, sketches for a novel, and turning out important musical criticism. He even made plans to write a guidebook for musicians travelling in Germany [“Musikalisches Topographie Deutschlands.”]

Weber began writing operas in his teens, but there were to be but three major works for the stage, composed in his last decade, DER FREISCHUTZ, EURYANTHE and OBERON. These excited wide attention for their vivid Romantic elements: the exotic settings, the looking back to a fairy-tale “past,” elements of the supernatural, the descriptive, the heroic, the exploration of a dream world. These elements would have great impact upon the music dramas of Wagner, as well as exerting a powerful influence upon such composers as Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt and a host of German composers throughout the 19^th century. (As late as the 1880s the young Gustav Mahler would undertake to complete Weber’s unfinished opera, DIE DREI PINTOS.)

Weber ’s professional life in the world of opera was marked by the highest artistic standards, with close attention to details of stage design and dramaturgy, and a breadth of musical vision quite exceptional for the early 19^th century.

Not again until the appearance of Richard Wagner would such a comprehensive perspective be brought to bear upon the slapdash world of opera---it is quite understandable that Wagner viewed himself as the natural successor to Weber as the standard-bearer for German opera.

The very existence of “German opera” owed much to Weber’s accomplishments. In Dresden, for example, when Weber was appointed music director in 1817, the lingering influence of Italian OPERA SERIA still held sway, supported by the Saxon court, with Italian singers and composers occupying the key positions.

In his post as music director at Dresden Weber set out to build a genuine German opera company in the teeth of fierce opposition, and soon began work on DER FREISCHUTZ, which had a sensational success at its premiere in Berlin in 1821. Although he would never be entirely free from financial and professional pressures (and began to show alarming effects of the tuberculosis which would soon cut short his life), Weber was now at the height of his powers. A commission for a new work came from Vienna, which led to plans for a “grand opera,” EURYANTHE, on a libretto by the Dresden poet, Helmina von Chezy. Although well-received at the first performance in October, 1823, the opera’s originality baffled many listeners, and failed to win the overwhelming acclaim shown FREISCHUTZ.

Weber’s health began to decline rapidly in 1824, and he composed little. In the final years of his life Weber appeared with great success as a conductor, not only of opera, but orchestral and choral works (including Handel’s MESSIAH.) He was one of the first to conduct STANDING before the orchestra, using a baton, and giving attention to the seating position of the players.

Weber’s last opera, OBERON, was composed to an English text for a gala premiere at Covent Garden, where it was first heard in April, 1826.

Despite his weakened condition, the composer fulfilled many musical and social engagements, and was shown lavish care and attention by his English friends.

Shortly before his planned return to Germany he died on June 5, 1826, and was buried in London amid great public mourning. In 1844, Richard Wagner, who was a successor to Weber at Dresden, organised the transfer of Weber’s remains for reburial in Germany.

The failure of EURYANTHE to win a place in the operatic repertoire is most of all due to the libretto: a tangled tale which attains a wondrous level of absurdity and word-spinning. Anyone hearing a recording (and a quite fine one exists, with Jessye Norman in the cast) may discover why Donald Francis Tovey described it as a “tremendous work,” of a quality which sometime exceeds that of Wagner’s LOHENGRIN - !

Whatever EURYANTHE’s difficulties, the Overture has always been popular. It is a clear-cut sonata form structure, leaping into action with a wonderfully zestful declamatory opening figure, which immediately is followed by a solid, “chivalric” first subject, more than a little suggestive of the medieval swagger soon to appear in LOHENGRIN and TANNHAUSER. This is followed by a sweeping lyrical secondary theme in the strings, rounded out by a closing theme of “heraldic pomp,” as Tovey puts it. True to the spirit of the age, there is a ghost scene in EURYANTHE, which suddenly is evoked at the start of the development section, in an eerie passage played by divided violins and violas in the remote (and “haunted”) key of B Minor. Returning to the primary tempo, the development is built around an inverted version of the closing theme worked out contrapuntally, at first hushed, then swelling in intensity, moving ahead to a brilliant recapitulation. The major components return in their proper places, ending with the kind of energy and dash which so fired the imagination and admiration of the young Wagner and so many others of his generation.