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Carl Maria von Weber, 1786-1826
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10290 |
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Section : |
The Arts
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| Issue
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12 / 1986 |
4,805 Words |
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Tom Pniewski
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He is not the best known of his country's composers; he was a modest man, disabled by poor health and a misshapen right hip that left him permanently lame. The unstable circumstances of his family life prevented him from receiving the serious training and nurture his talent deserved. Yet without him, Romantic music would practically not exist. Without his work, composers such as Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt are almost unthinkable. Not only in his compositions but through his writings and administrative genius he helped form a new enthusiasm for German music in general and German opera in particular. As a gifted conductor and articulate critic, he set new standards of performance and encouraged new ideas. He was also one of the most brilliant pianists of his era. His influence on the next generation of music was enormous. His name--Carl Maria von Weber.
Germany at the time of Weber's birth was going through one of the most brilliant periods of its intellectual history. Even a short list of some of the geniuses at work in the late 1700s is impressive--philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, and Schlegel; writers such as Goethe and Schiller; musical giants Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The very lack of a strong central government favored the cultivation of individuals and small groups--artists and thinkers--who often worked in isolation instead of being attracted to a great court.
Nationalism and Romanticism were born at the same time. The death of Frederick the Great in 1786--only months before the birth of Weber--and the collapse of the administration of the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire produced a kind of power vacuum. The way was opened for a growth of national and individual emotional expression. These sentiments, the yearnings of a growing middle class, found their way into the creations of the age's poets and musicians.
It was an ideal time for an artist with an inherited love of theater, a natural sensitivity, an instinct for his country's landscape, affection for her legends and culture, and a certain personal flamboyance. Such an artist was Weber. He was, in many ways, "the right man in the right place at the right time." It is unfortunate that he was unable to fulfill all his great potential. His life was difficult, and he only reached financial stability late in life. His frail body worked against him as well. In a way, all his music is early music--music he would have revised and expanded in keeping with his growing abilities. But he was intimately bound up with his time, perhaps even more strongly because of his weaknesses and frailties. He came to be one of the clearest expressions of the spirit of the times.
He was born in Eutin, in North Germany, a small town close to Hamburg, a charming and quiet place still famous for its rose gardens. It was in late November 1786 that Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was born. For many years a birth date of December 18 was accepted--Weber himself seems to have believed that--but recent research has advanced it by about a month.
Research has also stripped Weber of the "von" of nobility, though custom has retained it. Weber himself believed he was of aristocratic blood and traced his line to an Austrian baron of the 1600s. It is much more likely that the first Weber we can point to with certainty as an ancestor was Hans George Weber, a miller form Stettin (modern-day Szczecin, in Poland). He was Weber's great-grandfather, and his son Fridolin--who married a
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