Carl Maria von Weber, Mozart's cousin by marriage, helped invent German Romantic opera
Carl Maria von Weber's father wanted another Mozart, and the family link was real: Mozart had married Weber's cousin Constanze. The boy could not walk until four, was running an opera house at seventeen, and was once arrested in a ducal bribery scandal. His Der Freischütz later gave Germany an opera tradition of its own.
Weber was born in 1786 in Eutin in northern Germany. His father, a violinist and restless theatre manager, dragged the family between cities including Hamburg, Salzburg, Munich and Vienna, and even added the aristocratic-sounding von to the family name without any right to it. Lessons came wherever they landed. In Salzburg, Michael Haydn, younger brother of the famous Joseph, taught him for nothing. In Munich he wrote his first opera, now lost, and also learned lithography directly from Alois Senefelder, who had invented the process; he printed a set of his own piano variations that way.
Early posts were bumpy. On the recommendation of his teacher Abbé Vogler, who also taught his close friend Giacomo Meyerbeer, Weber took over the Breslau Opera at 17, pensioning off older singers and enlarging the orchestra, though critics grumbled that he conducted too fast. A later job as secretary to a Württemberg duke ended in debt and an arrest on charges of embezzlement and bribery. He disproved them, but was banished from the state along with his father.
His fortunes turned in 1811 when he met the clarinettist Heinrich Baermann and wrote him several concertos; their tour changed opinions of Weber's work. He went on to direct opera in Prague and then Dresden, where he campaigned for German opera against the long domination of Italian styles, drawing on folk song. Der Freischütz opened in Berlin on 18 June 1821 and spread across Europe. His piano writing influenced Chopin and Liszt, and his operas shaped Wagner.
Already ill with tuberculosis, he accepted a London commission and conducted the premiere of Oberon in April 1826, followed by a dozen sold-out performances. He died in his sleep that June at 39, at the home of his friend Sir George Smart. In 1844 his remains were moved to Dresden, where Wagner wrote music for the reburial.
Source: Carl Maria von Weber
