The genius which inspired the three great works, “Der Freischutz,” “Euryanthe,” and “Oberon,” has stamped itself as one of the most original and characteristic in German music.  Full of bold and surprising strokes of imagination, these operas are marked by the true atmosphere of national life and feeling, and Ave feel in them the fresh, rich color of the popular traditions, and song-music which make the German Lieder such an inexhaustible treasure-trove.  As Weber was maturing into that fullness of power which gave to the world his greater works, Germany had been wrought into a passionate patriotism by the Napoleonic wars.  The call to arms resounded from one end of the Fatherland to the other.  Every hamlet thrilled with fervor, and all the resources of national tradition were evoked to heighten the love of country into a puissance which should save the land.  Germany had been humiliated by a series of crushing defeats, and national pride was stung to vindicate the grand old memories.  France, in answer to a similar demand for some art-expression of its patriotism, had produced its Rouget de-Lisle; Germany produced the poet Korner and the musician Weber.

It is not easy to appreciate the true quality and significance of Weber’s art-life without considering the peculiar state of Germany at the time; for if ever creative imagination was forged and fashioned by its environments into a logical expression of public needs and impulses, it was in the case of the father of German romantic opera.  This inspiration permeated the whole soil of national thought, and its embodiment in art and letters has hardly any parallel except in that brilliant morning of English thought which we know as the Elizabethan era.  To understand Weber the composer, then, we must think of him not only as the musician, but as the patriot and revivalist of ancient tendencies in art, drawn directly from the warm heart of the people.

Karl Maria von Weber was born at Eutin, in Holstein, December 18, 1786.  His father had been a soldier, but, owing to extravagance and folly, had left the career of arms, and, being an educated musician, had become by turns attached to an orchestra, director of a theatre, Kapellmeister, and wandering player—­never remaining long in one position, for he was essentially vagrant and desultory in character.  Whatever Karl Maria had to suffer from his father’s folly and eccentricity, he was indebted to him for an excellent training in the art of which he was to become so brilliant an ornament.  He had excellent masters in singing and the piano, as also in drawing and engraving.  So he grew up a melancholy, imaginative, recluse, absorbed in his studies, and living in a dream-land of his own, which he peopled with ideal creations.  His passionate love of Nature, tinged with old German superstition, planted in his imagination those fruitful germs which bore such rich results in after-years.