croak of ravens was as the song of nightingales.  And now again deep silence; all motion ceased; only in the depths there seemed a sluggish writhing, and the owl flapped its wings as though in a dream.  The most undaunted huntsman, the best acquainted with the wood’s nocturnal terrors, fled like a timid roe in speechless agony, and, heedless where his footsteps bore him, ran breathless to the nearest hut, the nearest cabin, to meet some human soul to whom to tell his horrible adventure, yet ne’er could find words in which to frame it.” {2}

So much for the folklore and mythology of “Der Freischutz,” the element which makes it not only a national but also the chiefest of romantic operas.  We are grown careless in our use of musical terms, or else it would not be necessary to devote words to an explanation of what is meant by romantic in this case.  We hear a great deal about romanticism as contradistinguished from classicism, but it is seldom that we have the line of demarcation between the two tendencies or schools drawn for us.  Classical composers, I am inclined to think, are composers of the first rank who have developed music to its highest perfection on its formal side in obedience to long and widely accepted laws, preferring aesthetic beauty over emotional content, or, at any rate, refusing to sacrifice form to characteristic expression.  Romantic composers would then be those who have sought their ideals in other directions and striven to give them expression irrespective of the restrictions and limitations of form—­composers who, in short, prefer content to manner.  In the sense of these definitions, Weber’s opera is a classic work, for in it the old forms which Wagner’s influence destroyed are preserved.  Nevertheless, “Der Freischutz” is romantic in a very particular sense, and it is in this romanticism that its political significance to which I have referred lies.  It is romantic in subject and the source of its inspiration.  This source is the same to which the creators of the romantic school of literature went for its subjects—­the fantastical stories of chivalry and knighthood, of which the principal elements were the marvellous and supernatural.  The literary romanticists did a great deal to encourage patriotism among the Germans in the beginning of the nineteenth century by disclosing to the German people the wealth of their legendary lore and the beauty of their folk-songs.  The circumstances which established the artistic kinship between Von Weber and Wagner, to which I have alluded, was a direct fruit of this patriotism.  In 1813 Von Weber went to Prague to organize a German opera.  A part of the following summer he spent in Berlin.  Prussia was leading Europe in the effort to throw off the yoke of Bonaparte, and the youths of the Prussian capital, especially the students, were drunken with the wine of Korner’s “Lyre and Sword.”  While returning to Prague Von Weber stopped for a while at the castle Grafen-Tonna, where he composed some