CARL MARIA VON WEBER.*
THE English reading world is greatly indebted to Mr. Palgrave Simpson for this translation. Carl Maria von Weber was well worthy of a memoir, and it would be difficult for a memoir to be more perfect than this. If it has a fault, it is that it gives us too little of the inner life of its subject, asks us too frequently to construct for ourselves the idea of the man from the materials supplied. That, however, is a natural defect in a biography written by a son who, even when possessed of the marvellous im- partiality of Baron Max von Weber—an impartiality which is visibly perfect, yet consists with the deepest reverence and love— can only know his father in his mature age, has a difficulty in connecting the soul he understood so well in its greatness with the soul embarrassed with the littlenesses of youth. A son may pardon absolutely, as Baron Max does, his father's vie orageuse, yet fail to understand clearly how it could happen that the man so much higher whom he knew so thoroughly, as he thought, could ever have lived that life. One's experience of human nature throws so little light upon one's father, as little as it throws upon one's wife, simply because we see human nature through a half- light which in the special cases is a glare. The best answer we know to the popular theory of the Fall is the fact that it is only the persons placed under a lime light, only those so close that every wrinkle is revealed, whom human beings ever really love. Men worship at a distance, they only love those whom nature or sym- pathy have revealed to them as they are, affection deepening as knowledge perfects itself, till love culminates in Omniscience. But all that is en passant. The biographer of the composer is as im- partial as son may be, and a more charming book has rarely been given to the world. The cant phrase, "interesting as a novel," does not describe it in the least. It is as interesting as life, inter- esting as the life of Charlotte Bronte, or of Benvenuto Cellini, crowded with chapters of which it, is impossible for the most reck- less of readers to miss a single page. Never quitting his subject the Baron is still never dull; revels in kit-cat sketches of great, or notorious, or eccentric people ; crowds his pages with anecdote, disdains no incident however trifling in itself, provided only it was not trifling in its effect on his father's life. Frank of speach,— except when dealing with the Saxon Court, in which he holds high office, and about which he tells many disagreeable truths, and one inevitable fib,—yet delicate of taste, he manages to tell pretty nearly the whole truth about a man whose early life was far from good without either offending the proprieties, or losing for one moment the respect he obviously feels for his father's memory ; to relate the history of a mother who though most excellent was still a charming actress, without ever exciting the thought that the mother would rather not have read that. He is never wearisome and never diffusive, yet never 4eaves us to think with a latent annoyance and suspicion, "Well, one would like to know the exact truth about that." You do know the truth, and, that you never- theless respect the subject of whom the truth is told, is due to the fact that there are natures in the world of whom it is possible to tell it, and that one of them was Carl Maria von Weber. And • Carl Maria von Weber. By his Son, Baron Mu von Weber. Traushted by J . Palgrave Simpson. London; Chapman and Hall. the music? For Von Weber was a great maestro, and it is because he was a great maestro that his biography comes to be written. Well, there is less about music than might be expected. People who do not understand or appreciate music are not bored in the least. The reader is conscious, as he travels through these two volumes, that the drama of their subject was acted to the ac- companiment of a glorious orchestra, that his object was to evolve not scenes but music, that he lived, and loved, and sinned, and grew pure, and did transactions in an enveloping atmosphere of melody, but he is suffered to enjoy the pleasure of the harmony, and is not bored with too much descanting on the vibrations which produce it. Of course if any one wants to know the date, and meaning, and motive, and cause, and first cast of any scene in Per Freischiitz he finds it all here, but it is not obtrusive, not unpleasant ; the book is a biography, not a laboured art-criticism upon the meaning of one man's music.
Weber was born on 18th December, 1786, of a strange race, the descendant of a family of Austrian Catholic nobles, who for two hundred years, amidst all mutations of fortune, had been devotees of music and stage-struck maniacs. The second of the. family, Joseph Franz Weber (temp. circa 1550), had erected a theatre on his own estate; his descendant Fridolin, sunk to be steward of a great house, was grandfather of Mozart's wife, herself a brilliant performer, and of three professional singers, and father of Franz Anton, impre- sario throughout life. The father of these women became Privy Councillor to the Elector Palatine, but brought up his daughters to the stage ; his brother, this Franz Anton, was father of Carl Maria. On this father the Baron spends immense pains, but an English- man can describe him in a line. Imagine Harold Skimp3le with some genius for music and a good deal for stage management, a little noisier, a little less gifted with tact, and we have Franz Anton, the man who killed his wife by forcing her to what she thought the degradation of the stage, and nearly tortured his youngest child to death by incessant lessons in art, not because Carl showed any genius for it, but because the father was deter- mined that his son should be an art phenomenon. Little Carl, as time afterwards showed, inherited much of his father's tempera- ment, his vanity, his ambition, his love of fun even when more than a little rollicking, his sense of humour, as well as his laxity about both women and wine. But what in the father were mere impulses in the son were powers, and the child survived a train- ing which would have killed any boy equally nervous and sensitive to be the happiest and most humorous of composers. He was actor from his cradle.
"The boy knew but little of the playgrounds of other children of his age—the house-stairs, the street, the garden, the meadow, or the wood—the scenes which often go so far to stamp a character. His early games, it is true, as far as delicate health permitted, may have been such as those of other boys. But the arena in which they took place was widely different. As child of a theatrical manager, his playfellows were actors' children. His woods, his meadows, and his gardens were daubed on canvass: a painted palace was his street. His boyhood's mimic fights were fought, not with sticks out from the forest bush, but with silvered swords and cardboard shields, with which the actors, as heroes or robbers, fought out their mimic fights upon the stage at night. It was not on the hill-side, beneath the air of heaven, that little Carl Maria stormed the imaginary fortress with his playmates. The stage represented the castle, which was to be defended against the assailants fron the orchestra ; and side-scenes and traps were the vantage points or pitfalls of the battle. Orchestra and stage arrangements were familiar to him before the first lessons of his primer—half-understood theatrical intrigues his first glimpses of life."
He attracted by accident the attention of Johann Henschkel, a musician of the severe school, who compelled him to educate him- self on the moat rigid principles of musical science, while Valesi cultivated a voice which, till an accidental dose of vitriol spoiled it, promised to be of the first class.
The young musician, however, owed more to genius than educa- tion, his first pieces having been produced at an astonishingly early age, and in accordance with the custom of his time and country he sought patronage and maintenance among the petty German Princes who at that time governed their States with unrestrained power. Of many of these princes the Baron, him- self, be it remembered, courtier and politician, draws pictures which are to an Englishman simply horrible, pictures of satyrs rather than of men, sometimes indeed, like other satyrs, with intellects which could invent flutes, but always partaking more of the beast than of the man. Such, for instance, was Duke Carl of Wiirtemburg, under whose reign
"The revenues of the State had been squandered in mad military expeditions ; in hunting excursions of long duration, when miles upon miles of land were devastated and wildernesses created, without a thought of compensation,—when the peasant was forced into the service of the Duke's pleasures, and sank or perished under the cruel labour ; in the gorgeous splendours of his theatre ; in his luxurious ballet, in which Vestris alone received 10,000 florins salary ; in the wondrous scenery- and machinery of the stage, on which the great scene-painter Columba. was employed at a remuneration as extravagant; in wild caprices such as the warming of whole lakes in winter for the ducal duck-shooting ; in the absurdly lavish magnificence of a Court where princes bowed as courtiers and the noblest ladies flaunted as high priestesses of Pleasure ; in equipages ; in orange-houses ; in mythological fifes ; in displays of fireworks,—the least of which had cost its tons of gold."
His nephew Friedrich, the first King, though an abler man than his uncle, was even a worse one. He sold every place in his dominions, carried out the conscription with a brutality to which Frederick the Great's iron rule was gentleness, compelled the highest subject to uncap as he passed the gates of a royal palace, raised a groom to the premiership, sold all titles of nobility, and amidst the burning hatred of all classes of his subjects filled his palace with pages whose mirth scandalized his dominions :—
" One word more as to the personality of a lien with whom, for his woe, the young composer was destined to come in contact. The King was awfully fat ; and his unwieldy corpulence increased so frightfully from year to year that, even in 1807, a semicircular space was cut in his dining-tables to permit him to approach near enough to feed him- self. His face was pale ; his bloated cheeks fell heavily on his fourfold. chin. His eyes were small, but bright and lively ; his mouth was not without expression ; and his smile was even genial and pleasant. He spoke much and rapidly, at times with brilliancy and wit ; but quite as frequently in a tone of coarse jocosity, not unmixed with filth. His anger was terrible, maniacal in its demonstration. But his affection was even more to be dreaded than his rage."
It was for this horrible ruffian, whose very existence seems in- conceivable to those who do not know what Romans did bear and Germans can bear, Von Weber produced Sylvana, an opera, which, though nearly unknown in England, bears many marks of his peculiar genius. Saxony was ruled nominally by a King said to be " just," but really by a Minister, Count Einsiedel, who deliberately tried to make of it an European Japan :- " The mistresses of August II. had been succeeded by the unworthy favourites of August III. But the people was told—and it believed— that there was no air to breathe but the breath of majesty ; no higher standard of cultivation than to think and act as a courtier ; no word of patriotism compatible with loyalty ; no other meaning to the expression ' fidelity' than that of blind obedience. Tho people had suffered all the horrors and miseries of war without any subsequent advantage to nation or prince ; and the thought that it had fought for a great cause was carefully excluded. from its mind. All sense of energy, independ- ence, self-esteem, had been thus trampled out. Under Count Einsiedel's oppressive administration every superiority, every unusual talent, still more every show of genius, were declared to be undesirable and inad- missible in the public service. where mediocrity ruled supreme ; where men or names no longer existed, but only official posts and well-worked machines ; where no man was inspired by the hope of honour, and dis- grace alone was feared. 'Point de sele' was the Maxim written over office-doors."
• • - • • • • •
"The Saxon Court, at the commencement of the century, was not only the pi-imwn mobile, round which the whole life and thought of the capital moved, but the only mainspring of existence. It was the Alpha and Omega of interest in all classes resident in Dresden ; even although a. prudent, perhaps over-prudent, economy had taken the place of the once proud magnificence of the Kings of Poland ; and simplicity and strict morality were the order of the day. To stand in any relation, however remote, to the Court—to bear a title or distinctive appellation, to which the word `Court' might be prefixed, was looked upon by alt alike, from the lowest to the highest, as the greatest of mortal blessings. Did not all honour, all pecuniary advantage, however humble, flow from Court?'" The ceremonial of the Court was intolerably oppressive, and Von Weber's conduct in publishing a letter in a journal about the meaning of an opera he was to produce in Dresden was denounced as an act of revolutionary audacity. Even the Duke of Saxe Gotha, in some respects a model sovereign, was unmistakeably mad, a man who changed his dress and his hair every day till his servants did not know him, who made of his palace a kind of opera-house, who would walk up to a courtier at a levee and say in a confidential whisper, " One, two, three," and then turn with condescending grace to a second and add in a subdued mannerr " Four, five, six." He lived a life of art excitement which nearly killed the composer, who, however, while being killed still loved his patron. Amidst these petty Courts Von Weber had to pass his early years, and he lived in all the same life, that of the artist debauches, steeped to the lips in wine and women and debt, and ostentatious living and rough, low revelliugs, scarcely ever with- out a liaison, yet never wholly forgetting either his art or the duties. to the world which his genius involved. His brilliant humour. gave him great influence with society, his sensitively sympathetic. temperament made his mind a sort of sounding-board, throwing, back every influence flung against it, and therefore a fa- vourite with all men,—but all this wild riot did not deeply affect his character. It crusted it, —to the end of his life Von Weber's wit was reckless of conventional decencies,—but the true nature cleared itself at last of mud. The joyousness of his nature and its melancholy alike helped him, for the joyousness attracted the good and the• melancholy induced him to weary of the bad, he sickened of the little Courts and their frowsy luxury, and after the worst of his liaisons, during which his mistress and her hus- band lived openly in his house, he fell in love with a little actress, Caroline Brandt, who restored him to his better self. She seems to have been a clear-headed, right-minded woman, with a talent for music and a buxom figure, great brain and a neat allele, thorough devotedness and a fine bust. Rather wearisome she would have been to most men, with her delays, and doubts, and calculations about money, and life-long habit of jealousy, but these things were piquant to a lover weary of facile women, and she made him the best of wives, the better because, though tenderness itself, Weber was a determined " house-master." His wife did not like cooking, but Weber was a German, so one fine day he dismissed his servants, and bore his wife's tears and the bad viands till she had learned the necessary art. She became an admirable cook, and Weber's satisfaction was complete. Under her inspiration he produced his greatest works, Der Freischiitz, of the production of which the Baron gives a most eloquent account, and Eurganthe and Oberon, and poured out the moat beautiful of all his Lieder except those inspired by his intense patriotic feeling and hatred of the French, of whose horrible excesses in Wurtemburg he was an eye-witness. To her, when absent, he wrote daily letters full of that loving egotism which is the secret of good letter-writing, full also of that lively and innocent humour and pathos which, so
to speak, coated his character and preserved it from the vitriolic effect of the society amid which he had lived in early life. It had protected him so completely that he wrote to his pupil, Julius Benedict, a noble letter of warning against geniality and the artist habit of " letting oneself go," grew so fond of his family that fits of " heinureh " are recorded of him as if they were diseases, and actually became greedy in his anxiety to accumulate provision for his wife and family. By this time he had been recognized all
through Germany as a great national composer, and Germans know no higher honour. He was on a visit to Ems for health, and,- " The little lame, modest-looking man was received with a sort of sulky indifference at the well-known Hotel of the Four Towers, and shown into a poor apartment. Presently, whilst occupied in shaving before the glass, after unpacking his luggage, he was struck by an uproar in the hotel. In another moment, landlady, and waiters of every rank and description in the hierarchy of waiterdom, rushed into his room. In a state of suffocating agitation the mistress gasped forth the words, 'Had I but known ; Freischatz ! Preciosa ! I'll turn every soul into the streets !' and rushed out again, followed by her whole bewildered troop. Next came, one after the other, a succession of inmates, offering to give up their rooms; one gentleman brought his luggage with him, already packed; and willy-nilly the great compper, more worried than pleased, was ob- liged to transfer his domicile to the State apartments of the hotel. At dinner in the cursaal, for a time he was left quiet, hearing the buzzing conversation relative to the possible, probable, and oven actual arrival of the great composer, listening to anecdotes of himself, his personal appearance, and his adventures. Presently, the rumour spread around that he was sitting at the table. A shout of jubilee was raised—his health was drunk with loud huzzas—the band struck up an air in Der Freischatz ; and the poor worried man could only rise and slip away as best he could. Then came serenades from the bath music, from the military bands, from every one who had an instrument to play, or a voice to sing—and ever Der Freischiatz, ever Preciosu. No wonder Weber wrote, I could almost curse the hour I ever composed a note. There is no escape from my own confounded self.' " His nerves were even then slowly decaying, and the glorious life of the Oberon was poured out by him when shattered by incessant coughing and half mad with wretchedness. His power of com- position seemed independent of his body, and he poured out merry melody while racked with nervous pain, as Liston made the pit roar while occupied only with fears for the safety of his soul, and Hood made all England laugh while unable to keep back tears from the paper on which his comic thoughts were recorded. Weber was, moreover, harassed by an annoyance which, from its exces- sive frequency among the class, ought to be called the journalist's disease, a belief that his power of composition was passing away, a belief so strong that he wailed over his own decline while pour- ing out the most brilliant pieces of the Oberon. In 1826, when he went to England, the hand of death was already on him, and his splendid reception finished his constitution. He was worn out with demands for the wonderful choruses in Der Freischlitz, demands which affected him as they would affect no other com- poser. For Weber had the artist irritability, and more than the artist vanity, and he simply hated Der Freischtitz. He believed Euryanthe his greatest work, and considered the popularity of the older opera an insult to Euryanthe, while he always remembered with nervous bitterness that Der Freischtitz brought him no money. In England he made about 1,1001., a great sum for those days, but his exertions wore him out, and on the 3rd June, 1826, he died,
worn to a skeleton with ulcer in the windpipe and tubercles in the lungs. Eighteen years after, on the 14th December, 1844, all Dresden turned out in mourning to see his body brought for a State burial back to the city he had made his home, and " by thelight of two candles still burning on the altar, might be seen the form of a small, now middle-aged woman, who had flung herself upon the bier, whilst a pale young man knelt praying by her side."
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