The complete idiot's guide to classical music (34 page)

Wagner called Weber (1786–1826) the most German of German composers, by which he probably meant that he had cribbed more ideas from Weber than almost anybody else, including the use of leitmotifs, freer forms, and subjects derived from medieval German legends.

Karl Maria von Weber was born in the little town of Eutin, near Lubeck in Germany. His father was a traveling-theater violinist, his mother a singing actress, and perhaps because they were on the road so much, they forgot to browbeat the kid into endless hours of practicing. As a result, Karl Maria was a late bloomer. He studied painting with more diligence than the violin, taking piano lessons but not beginning really serious study until the age of 11 when the family moved to Salzburg and signed him up for lessons with Haydn’s greatly gifted, but far less famous brother, Michael.

 
Music Word
German for “leading motive,” the
leitmotif
is a musical phrase that symbolizes a person, place, idea, or emotion. We encounter it all the time on TV and at the movies (think of the pulsing music from the movie
Jaws
that gets us on the edge of our seat even before the shark is anywhere in view), but it was a revolutionary concept in Weber’s day.

Although Weber later maintained that he had learned little from Michael Haydn (and, he grumbled, “that little with great effort”), he had assimilated enough knowledge by the age of 14 to write his first opera. It was a flop, but the experience filled the young composer with a sense of operatic mission, and he was soon hard at work on another one called
Peter Schmoll and His Neighbors
. Michael Haydn called it “full of fire, great delicacy, and appropriate feeling,” but the thing flopped anyway. While Weber was sulking and wondering how to find the secret of success, he started conducting other people’s operas, first in Breslau and then in Prague where he reorganized the whole operation and revived the sagging fortunes of the opera company there.

Even while he was becoming a superb conductor, Weber kept trying to establish himself in the composing business. He had another disaster with the opera
Silvana,
but at least it wasn’t a total loss because he eventually married the leading soprano. Next came
Abu Hassan,
a reasonably successful one-acter, based on a tale from
The Arabian Nights
, and then his first big hit, a dramatic cantata,
The First Note
, dealing with no less momentous an event than the creation of the world. That cantata, by the way, was more important historically than musically because it included the first important use of the leitmotif technique that Wagner would later elevate to such glorious heights.

While Weber was rather frantically searching for a good libretto, he met the brilliant clarinetist Heinrich Barmann, and wrote a whole series of pieces for him—among them two concertos, a concertino, and the gorgeous quintet—that are still mainstays of the clarinet repertoire.

Still, opera was Weber’s grand passion, and gradually he evolved the idea of creating a kind of German folk opera, based on ancient legends, and occasionally using actual (or imitation) folk melodies. By now his reputation had spread sufficiently for the king of Saxony to choose Weber as music director of the opera in Dresden. This was a bit of a sticky wicket, since the Dresdenites were huge fans of Italian opera at the time, and here was Weber pushing German themes. On the other hand, nobody was about to argue with the king of Saxony, so that was that.

Weber immediately put his stamp on the company by forbidding the singers from taking liberties with scores and interpolating fancy cadenzas along the way as was their custom in Italian operas. He also rearranged the seating plan of the opera orchestra, started conducting with a baton so the players would know who was boss, and then unveiled one of the three operas on which his reputation still stands,
Der Freischutz.
(The title doesn’t translate neatly in English, but it’s something like “The Free-Shooter.”)

Here was a wildly romantic tale indeed, complete with magic bullets, forest demons, sorcery in a wolf’s glen, and a hunter’s pact with the devil. To project these scenes of supernatural mystery, Weber innovated all sorts of orchestral effects, using instruments at the extremes of their ranges, subdividing the strings, combining massed voices with the instruments, and in general creating a hitherto unknown synthesis of orchestral music and stage drama. The premiere was a wild success; with the overture and several arias cheered so loudly that they had to be encored. Fifty performances followed, bringing the composer a higher degree of fame and fortune than he had ever experienced, with only some diehard critics remaining unconvinced.

After the enormous acclaim of
Der Freischutz,
and its production in most of the opera houses of Europe, Weber wrote
Euryanthe.
This time, though, the libretto—based on another medieval tale—was so wildly implausible, even incomprehensible, that a great deal of his beautiful music came to naught, and only the overture remains in the active files today.

Weber’s favorite amongst his own operas proved to be his final achievement. Commissioned by the celebrated Covent Garden Opera House in London,
Oberon
had an almost as hopelessly confusing plot as
Euryanthe,
but maybe the English were used to that. In any case, it was another stupendous success. At its premiere, the composer was treated to a 15 minute ovation even before the curtain rose, and when it fell again, Weber pronounced the whole experience “simply unbelievable: The emotion produced by such a triumph is more than I can describe.” Despite poor health, Weber conducted the opera 11 more times and played at a number of other London concerts. Two months later, still in England, Weber felt ill, bid his host goodnight and went to sleep, never to wake again. He was buried in London, where he lay peacefully for 18 years, until his body was reclaimed by his homeland. On December 14, 1844, Weber was re-interred at the Catholic cemetery in Dresden, while themes from
Der Freischutz
were played as funeral music.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Weber’s Dresden funeral ceremony was presided over by Wagner, who gave the eulogy and conducted
At Weber’s Grave
, a choral piece he had written for the occasion, little imagining that it would be sung again at his own funeral many years later.

The remarkable orchestrations for which Weber was so justly renowned are on display in his overtures to
Der Freischutz, Euryanthe,
and
Oberon,
but to appreciate fully the dramatic tension and explosion of supernatural terror he was able to achieve on the operatic stage, listen to the “Wolf’s Glen Scene” from
Der Freischutz.

To slake your virtuosic thirst, there are the Clarinet Concertos, another pair for piano, plus the shorter “Konzertstuck” (Concert Piece) in F Minor. Clarinet fans should also partake of the Quintet, the Concertino, and some delightful themes and variations; and if you happen to have a thing for the lower winds, try the Bassoon Concerto or the quirky Hungarian Rondo, available in versions for both bassoon and viola.

“A divine spark lives in Schubert,” said Beethoven; “he will yet attract much attention in the world.” He was right, of course, but Beethoven died a few months later, and a year after that, Schubert was gone too, at the tragically early age of 31. Schubert had written upward of 600 songs, not to mention all sorts of piano works, chamber pieces, and nine symphonies, yet almost none of them were published, and indeed history records only one public concert of his music during his lifetime (on the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death).

Franz Peter Schubert (1797–1828) was the twelfth child to be born into the Schubert family in Vienna, Austria, so there were plenty of older siblings to teach him the piano, organ, violin, and viola. At the age of 11, he became a choir boy at the Imperial Chapel Choir, and served time at the State Konvict, which is what they called the school next door. Actually it was pretty jaillike at that, with cold rooms, poor food, and annoying work assignments (like oiling the oboes and lighting the tallow candles), but Schubert stuck it out until his voice changed and he became an ex-Konvict.

 
Music Words
Lieder
is German for songs (one song would be a Lied), but the word is normally used to indicate art songs—as opposed to folk or popular ballads—deriving from poetic sources. Customary usage also limits the usage of the word “lieder” to songs in German.

Cycles
are groups of songs (in any language) that are connected by subject matter, author of the poems, or some other unifying factor.

He next took a job as a school teacher. At least that’s what he told everybody he was doing. Actually, he was scribbling down songs a-mile-a-minute, trying to finish them before the “little devils” (as he called his students) would bother him with their foolish math problems. The amazing speed with which he composed may have been honed here. Still a teenager himself, he tossed off what are now some of the most famous songs in the world, including “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel” and “The Erl King,” the latter while two friends stood by his writing desk watching him “hurl notes at the page.” He composed “Hark, Hark the Lark” on the back of a beer-garden menu, and by the time he quit posing as a teacher, his output included more than 350 songs, four symphonies, several operas, two masses, some sonatas, and a string quartet.

With hardly any source of income, Schubert was supported by the generosity of his friends. Only they recognized that this short, nearsighted, plump fellow was indeed a composer of genius; only they heard his new songs and chamber music at their private musical evenings, which became known as Schubertiads.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
When Schubert sent off “The Erl King” to a publisher, the song was not only rejected, but returned to the wrong Franz Schubert, who described himself as a “Royal Court Composer,” but seems rather to have been an itinerant double bass player. In any case, he thanked the publisher, but said he was holding onto the manuscript “in hopes of discovering the scoundrel who so impertinently traded on my name by sending you such rubbish.”