Later Franz Anton entered civil service, and succeeded to the position of Court Financial-Councillor Fumetti, and married his beautiful daughter, Maria Anna.  But Franz Anton was so rabid a fiddler that he used to be seen playing his violin in public places, followed by his large family of children, or even sawing away in the open fields, to the neglect of his work and finally the loss of his position.  Thereupon he decided that his large family should help in its own support, and dragged them one and all upon the stage.  The proud mother saw her fortune squandered, and her pride massacred.  She died some years later.  Franz Anton’s heart was too industrious to remain idle long, and, though he was now fifty years of age, he somehow won the hand of Genofeva von Brenner, who was only sixteen years old.  It is gratuitous to say that the young girl was not happy.  In 1786 she bore him the child who was to realise the father’s one great and vicarious ambition:  to bring a musical genius into the world.

While Carl Maria von Weber was still a babe, Franz Anton started once more after the will-o’-the-wisp of theatrical fame, with his “Weber’s Company of Comedians.”  Genofeva, sickly and melancholy, dragged herself about with the troupe until Carl Maria was ten years old, when her health gave way, and the travel was discontinued.  Poverty and consumption ended her days two years later.  Within a year Franz Anton was betrothed to a widow, whom, strange to say, he never married.

Again Franz Anton, the Bedouin that he was, dragged his son back into the nomad life.  The boy seemed astonishingly stupid in learning music, though the father encouraged him with intemperate zeal.  Meanwhile Carl’s character was forming, and he was becoming as brilliant as the mercurial life he was leading, and at the same time as irresponsible.  Like his relative, Mozart, he was precocious at falling in love.  Perhaps his first flame was Elise Vigitill, in whose autograph album he wrote: 

“Dearest Elise, always love your sincere friend, Carl von Weber; in the sixth year of his age; Nueremberg, the 10th of September, 1792.”  We hear of no more sweethearts for eleven long years.  When Carl Maria was seventeen, Franz Anton left him in Vienna, where he plunged into dissipation at a tempo presto appassionato.  As his son writes, “through carolling, kissing, drinking Vienna, he wandered with a troop of choice spirits, drinking, kissing, carolling.”  The intoxicating draught of pleasure quaffed in the lively capital fevered the lad’s blood, and the ardent imaginative temperament burst forth in that adoration of female beauty which strewed his life’s path with roses, not without thorns.  His teacher, Abbe Vogler, however, secured him a position as conductor at the Breslau opera, and he was compelled to tear himself away from a sweetheart of rank, who was somewhat older than he.  His father went with him, and by his bumptiousness brought the boy many enemies, and, through his speculations, many debts in addition to those he acquired for himself.  Here another entanglement awaited him.  His son tells it thus: