Durch die Wälder, durch die Auen (Der Freischütz)

Max opens Der Freischütz having lost a shooting contest he should have won, and the aria moves from recollection of the forest he used to walk in confidence to the conviction that heaven has abandoned him. Weber wrote it in 1820 for a Berlin audience that heard, in its horn writing and its darkness, something recognisably German rather than Italian, and the opera's success in June 1821 is usually taken as the moment romantic German opera arrived. The aria is the hinge: at its end Max is ready to go to the Wolf's Glen.