At the moment Agathe rushes forward, crying, “Do not shoot; I am the dove!” The bird flies toward a tree which Caspar, impatient for the coming of his purposed victim, had climbed.  Max follows it with his gun and pulls the trigger.  Agathe and Caspar both fall to the ground.  The holy man of the woods raises Agathe, who is unhurt; but Caspar dies with curses for everything upon his lips.  The devil has cared for his own and claimed his forfeit.  Ottokar orders his corpse thrown amongst the carrion in the Wolf’s Glen and turns to Max for an explanation.  He confesses his wrong and is ordered out of the Prince’s dominion; but on the intercession of Cuno, Agathe, and the Hermit the sentence is commuted to a year of probation, at the end of which time he shall marry his love.  But the traditional trial shot is abolished.

* * *

Though there are a dozen different points of view from which Weber’s opera “Der Freischutz” is of fascinating interest, it is almost impossible for any one except a German to understand fully what the opera means now to the people from whose loins the composer sprung, and quite impossible to realize what it meant to them at the time of its production.  “Der Freischutz” is spoken of in all the handbooks as a “national” opera.  There are others to which the term might correctly and appropriately be applied—­German, French, Italian, Bohemian, Hungarian, Russian; but there never was an opera, and there is no likelihood that there ever will be one, so intimately bound up with the loves, feelings, sentiments, emotions, superstitions, social customs, and racial characteristics of a people as this is with the loves, feelings, sentiments, emotions, superstitions, social customs, and racial characteristics of the Germans.  In all its elements as well as in its history it is inextricably intertwined with the fibres of German nationality.  It could not have been written at another time than it was; it could not have been written by any other composer living at that time; it could not have been conceived by any artist not saturated with Germanism.  It is possible to argue one’s self into a belief of these things, but only the German can feel them.  Yet there is no investigator of comparative mythology and religion who ought not to go to the story of the opera to find an illustration of one of the pervasive laws of his science; there is no folklorist who ought not to be drawn to its subject; no student of politics and sociology who cannot find valuable teachings in its history; no critic who can afford to ignore its significance in connection with the evolution of musical styles and schools; no biographer who can fail to observe the kinship which the opera establishes between the first operatic romanticist and him who brought the romantic movement to its culmination; that is, between Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner.  It is even a fair subject for the study of the scientific psychologist, for, though the story of the opera is generally supposed to be a fanciful structure reared on a legendary foundation, it was a veritable happening which gave it currency a century ago and brought it to the notice of the composer; and this happening may have an explanation in some of the psychical phenomena to which modern science is again directing attention, such as hypnotism, animal magnetism, and the like.