(I) Early works.

Our understanding of Weber's early attempts at opera is greatly hampered by the incomplete survival of these works. Beyond its title, nothing is known of Weber's first operatic work, Die Macht der Liebe und des Weins, which the would-be prodigy evidently began to compose shortly after his arrival in Munich in autumn 1798. And only a couple of fragments survive from his second opera, Das Waldmädchen, despite the fact that it apparently circulated to a few theatres after its première in Freiberg (24 November 1800), possibly including the Leopoldstadt Theater in Vienna in 1804–5. A playbill for the performance in Chemnitz in December 1800, which designates it as a ‘romantic-comic opera’, allows us to infer a medieval-chivalric setting in which are mixed serious aristocrats and comical servants; further, the long list of dramatis personae suggests a plot essentially identical with that of the later opera Silvana. Musically, Das Waldmächen evidently grew from the post-Zauberflöte tradition of ‘heroic-comic’ operas, as one of the surviving fragments is a bravura rage aria for soprano whose coloratura rivals that of the Queen of Night, whereas the other is an ensemble with distinct echoes of the Act 2 finale of Die Zauberflöte.

In the case of Weber's third opera, Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn (composed 1801–2; première 1803, Augsburg), the music survives in two complete scores, but since the extant printed libretto (Munich, 1802) provides only the texts of the musical pieces, the plot and dramatic situations must be inferred from the novel of the same name by C.G. Cramer. The opera seems to be a kind of drame bourgeois whose dramatic issues are essentially familial, small-scale problems treated in a sentimental and moralizing fashion. Musically, Peter Schmoll is a modest work that derives its basically consonant, diatonic and syllabic approach from the lighter forms of musical comedy of J.B. Schenk and Wenzel Müller. Echoes of Mozart are strong in the overture and in many of the vocal pieces, and the music for the comical figure Hans Bast takes up traditional basso buffo features like patter. A strophic romance for the female character Minette also betrays some familiarity with French music. At the same time, the work presents a number of features that at least hint at the development of a more personal style: the frequent recourse to obbligato solo instruments in the orchestral accompaniment; experimentation with unusual or characteristic instrumentation; a preference (to the point of mannerism) for dance-like rhythms in triple and compound metres and dotted rhythms; and an urge to interpret the text, gesture and situation through music.

The unfinished ‘romantic opera’ Rübezahl was the major project of Weber's years in Breslau. J.G. Rhode's libretto, based on a folktale in Musäus's Volksmärchen der Deutschen about a mountain spirit who abducts a human princess to be his wife, was partially published in the Breslauer Erzähler in early 1804, before Weber's arrival in the Silesian capital; differences between the published excerpts and a surviving manuscript libretto with holograph indications by Weber (D-Bsb) suggest that even at this early stage in his career he was able to exert a certain degree of influence over his texts. Despite Weber's claim to have composed about half the opera, only two vocal pieces and a fragment of a third survive; from the work done in Breslau also survive the closing bars of the first violin part of the original version of the overture, which Weber later revised as the overture Der Beherrscher der Geister. The extant quintet, which Weber plundered for several later pieces, shows a young composer still indebted to 18th-century models in some respects but free from them in others: thus, whereas its overall fast–slow structure is reminiscent of the Act 1 Zauberflöte quintet, its tonal plan has little to do with traditional tonic–dominant polarities.

Weber: (9) Carl Maria von Weber, §13: Operas