Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera

1. Introduction: Inventing German Opera

1 Introduction: Inventing German Opera Two Hunters’ Choruses By the end of act 3, scene 2, of Weber’s opera Euryanthe, the fortunes of the heroine have reached their lowest ebb. Falsely accused of in¤delity and banished by king and court, she has just been abandoned by her beloved Adolar deep in the forest, to perish of hunger or be devoured by wild beasts. In the scene and cavatina that forms the body of scene 2,Euryanthe prepares herself for this unjust death and calls on the ¤elds, streams, and ®owers to bear witness to her chastity and faithfulness. Death seems to settle around her, yet the orchestra is strangely turbulent. The upper strings pulsate while the cellos and basses play a fragmented melody in the new key of G minor. Suddenly we hear a horn, answered two measures later and then at more frequent intervals. The wandering tonalities of the end of the scene settle into a lusty E-®at major as the horns gather themselves together during an exciting accelerando, breaking out into a stirring call as the joyful hunters appear on the stage. The crisis has passed, for the hunters accompany a forgiving king who will soon put everything to rights. Euryanthe begins her path back toward exoneration and the loving arms of the tenor. Weber was justi¤ably proud of the music of Euryanthe, for in passages such as these he seemed to realize some of his most deeply held critical and compositional ideals. Weber used transitions such as the one described above to smooth over and partially obscure the boundaries between the individual pieces of the number opera and move toward a solution of what he saw as the essential problem of the genre, namely, to bring unity to an art form that was a “whole containing other wholes.” Indeed, this passage is not only a kind of musical elision between two set pieces, but also a dramatic transition from the feminine world of Euryanthe’s spiritualized suffering , with its chromatic harmonies and irregular phrase structures, to the diatonic, masculine world of the hunters’ chorus. Here Weber reconciles his goal of creating an organically uni¤ed opera with his self-imposed demand for music “full of situation and character”—through this transition these two strongly contrasting musico-dramatic environments are held in dynamic tension with one another. In this passage, it seems that chimerical “new German opera” moves from the pages of Weber’s criticism onto the operatic stage. Even before the premiere of Euryanthe, however, Weber was concerned that the extraordinary success of Freischütz would imperil his new grosse romantsiche Oper. That “cursed Freischütz,” he wrote to his friend Lichtenstein , “will make things dif¤cult for his sister Euryanthe, and I sometimes get hot ®ashes when I consider the fact that the applause cannot really increase any more.”1 After the enthusiastic crowds that had applauded the Vienna premiere of Euryanthe failed to ¤ll the opera house for subsequent performances, Weber also blamed Der Freischütz. “The expectations of the masses,” he wrote to Franz Danzi, “have been puffed up to such an absurd and impossible pitch by the wonderful success of Der Freischütz, that now, when I lay before them a simple serious work, which only aims at truth of expression, passion, and characteristic delineation, without any of the exciting elements of its predecessor, what can I expect? Be it as God will!”2 It was indeed Freischütz that in many ways became the German national opera, while the work that more closely re®ected the critical goals of the “search for a German opera” quickly passed from the repertoire. Euryanthe was frequently admired but much less frequently heard, particularly after midcentury . The failure of Euryanthe, coming so closely after Freischütz’s phenomenal success, is even more striking in light of the many commonalities between the two works. In Euryanthe Weber is clearly moving beyond Freisch ütz into a different operatic genre; nevertheless, the two operas employ many of the same musico-dramatic tropes. If in his critical commentary Weber stressed the revolutionary elements in Euryanthe, he was also shrewd enough to recognize and “recycle” many of those elements that had made Freischütz so successful. One of those elements was the hunters’ chorus, part of the volkstümlich (folklike) musical environment that had proved so popular in Der Freisch ütz.3 The similarities of musical style between “Was gleicht wohl auf Erden ” and the chorus that...