day, published by bis son, and paraphrased for
this country (we doubt not with chastisement of
much rapture and rhapsody) by Mr. Palgrave
Simpson.

There is stuff in the tale, had it been simply
told, to make a book as good as a romance, and
more instructive (no offence to " the cloth")
than ninety-nine out of a hundred sermons. It
is full of character. The father of the genius was
one of those blustering, vain, scheming men, who
think nothing of the treasure committed to their
charge, save as a means of contributing to their
own (not his) aggrandisement and fortune.
Whereas Leopold, the parent of the great
Mozart, shows himself to have been sagacious,
moral, and clear-sighted in his attempts to order
the career of his son the genius,—the old Von
Weber was bombastic, grasping, utterly unfit for
the stewardship of any one's destinies—a
dishonest, showy, vulgar adventurer; a man who
set up miserable assertions of ancestral pride,
yet could drag about his hapless family, when
following the course of a strolling player's life,
till the weaker ones dropped by the way and died
of fatigue. He had no scruple to deter him from
underhand transactions, as in the case of Aloys
Sennefelder, the discoverer of lithography, whose
secrets he may be said to have pirated, after
having associated himself with the discoverer;
when his son was installed in a foul service
belonging to the court of Würtemberg,
compared with which attendance among the rabble
of Comus looks like a white-handed transaction,
tracked out his luckless child, and was accessory,
if not principal, in the act of embezzlement,
the shame and sorrow of which cling to
Weber's name, let recognition for his fascinating
genius be ever so eager, ever so grateful.

And fascinating Weber's genius was—to a
point unattained by any previous opera
composer, so purely German as himself.
"Flattering," Mendelssohn called it, with his racy
appropriation of English. Even Spohr, the self-
engrossed, was compelled to admit that Weber
knew how to get at " the masses"—which the
grave and elaborate man himself never could do
in opera. There was born to Weber that inborn
spirit of melody, lacking which music is
"nought." Of all the modern writers of German
opera who have plodded and " pottered an
immensity" (to quote Mrs. Fanny Kemble's
quaint phrase), among the Lindpaintners and
the Lachners, and the contrivers and the
combiners, Weber stands out as the one man.
He was never well taught—how could he be,
with a wretched father like his, urging him on
from place to place, from master to master, from
anybody to anybody, out of whom anything
showy was to be got? His best chance of
learning was under the Abbé Vogler;— but that
clever dreamer, with all his instruments and
inventions, and the scrap of genius involved in
both, was (pace Mr. Browning) a quack:
dangerous as an influence in proportion to his
apparent pretensions of science—a man better able
to stimulate than to settle the spirits of younger
persons.

But in spite of his horrible father—in spite of
his empirical master—in spite of a youth forth
from which the young man did not emerge
without soil, damage, all that is worst to youth, all
that is least easily to be laughed or to be
washed off—in spite of the seeds of premature
death having been sown in a frail body—abused
by prodigious exertion and precocious
dissipation, let the student of German opera, as distinct
from opera in the Italian style—or according
to French conventions—let him look at what
Weber did, what his doings foreshadowed—and
the place of the man will assert itself as above
any writer of German opera—Beethoven not
excepted—if only for this reason—that the writer
of Opera must not be satisfied to devote himself
to great and noble ideas of art, but must get his
public.

This Weber did with a power, an originality,
a genius, such as make him the last of the great
Germans. There is not a bar of his music which
is Italian (save, perhaps, his grand scenas,
"Portia," " Atalia," and a few others), still
less is there a bar which owes anything to
French inspiration. Intensely German as he
was, he had, nevertheless, beyond any of his
countrymen of whom I am cognisant, a feeling
for national colour. It was not merely, with
him, a case of making the gloomy scene of
conjuration in "Der Freischütz," which has
unsettled the brains of many a dozen would-be
composers, and driven them to extremes of
ugliness, utterly intolerable to every sane
person. When he had to write a preface for—
such is an overture—to Carlo Gozei's " Turandot,"
he got up a Chinese humour. When he
had to deal with " Oberon," he could Orientalise
himself. The opening of " Euryanthe," with its
glorious chorus of ladies and knights, is animated
with the very breath of French chivalry, though
the handling of the groups is German. Most
of all, must be cited the exquisite prelude to
"Preciosa," with its Spanish and gipsy humour.
I dwell on these things, because they are so
familiar as to have been overlooked as so many
matters of course—and because Weber has not
had fair justice done him. Only the other day a
lecturer on modern music, no less intelligent
and ingenious than Mr. John Hullah, could
discuss modern opera, and absolutely leave this
greatest among the pure Germans (the distinction
being borne in mind) without a single
passing word.

There is no need to dwell on the incompletenesses
of Weber; to point out how, rich as he
was in the spirit of melody, he had never subjected
himself to a due study of materials, their
tints, and their beauties. He did not care whether
the singer was torn to pieces or not, provided a
certain effect was created; and thus, it may be
said, that though those who have supported the
parts of his heroines can be counted by hundreds,
only one could be named who filled out the
outline offered by him to perfection. This was
Madame Schroeder Devrient; who was as truly
the type of a German opera singer, as he was the
type of a German opera composer. Both were