Carl Maria von Weber

Born at Eutin in 1786 into a family that ran a travelling theatre company, Carl Maria von Weber learned the mechanics of the stage from the inside while studying with Michael Haydn and later with Abbé Vogler, and held posts at Breslau, Prague and finally Dresden, where he was charged with establishing German-language opera against a long-entrenched Italian troupe. As a conductor he insisted on rehearsal discipline and seating that produced a coherent ensemble. Der Freischütz, given in Berlin in 1821, fixed the pattern of German Romantic opera — folk-like melody, spoken dialogue, a forest full of the supernatural, and an orchestral palette in which low clarinets and horns carry the fear — and Marschner, Wagner and Berlioz all took something from it. Euryanthe followed, then Oberon for London. The two clarinet concertos and the Concertino, written for Heinrich Baermann, are part of his instrumental output, alongside the Konzertstück for piano and Invitation to the Dance. He died in London in 1826, weeks after conducting the first performances of Oberon. He was born at Eutin, then in the prince-bishopric of Lübeck, in November 1786 — the scholarly edition gives 18 or 19 November as probable — and was baptised there on 20 November. Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber, a critic as well as composer, pianist and conductor, was born in the year of the premiere of Le nozze di Figaro and was connected to Mozart, whose wife Constanze was his cousin; he wrote his first opera during his studies with Johann Nepomuk Kalcher in Munich and died before he was forty. Der Freischütz reached international stages, and by 1850 had been performed in Sydney, Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. Its overture, built from the first-act tenor aria and the second-act soprano music, has long had a concert life of its own.