Weber resigned his office at Prague on Sept. 3o, 1816, and on Dec. 21, Frederick Augustus, king of Saxony, appointed him kapellmeister at the German opera at Dresden. Weber had pre viously meditated turning Der Freischfitz into an opera, and, with the assistance of Friedrich Kind, he produced an admirable li bretto, under the title of Des lagers Braut. He had dealt with the supernatural in Riibezahl, and in Sylvana with the pomp and circumstance of chivalry; but the shadowy impersonations in Riibezahl are scarcely less human than the heroine who invokes them ; and the music of Sylvana might easily have been adapted to a story of the 19th century. But Weber now knew better than to let the fiend in Der Freischutz sing; with three soft strokes of a drum below an unchanging dismal chord he brings him straight to us from the nether world.
Weber wrote the first note of the music of Der Freischfaz on July 2-beginning with the duet which opens the second act. But nearly three years elapsed before the piece was completed. In the meantime the performances at the opera-house were no less successfully remodelled at Dresden than they had already been at Prague, though the work of reformation was far more difficult. Having, after much difficulty, broken off his liaison with Margarethe Land, Weber married the singer Carolina Brandt, a consummate artist. The new opera was completed on May 13, 1820. He had engaged to compose the music to Wolff's Gipsy drama, Preciosa. Two months later this also was finished, and both pieces ready for the stage.
It had been arranged that both Preciosa and Der Freischiitz no longer known by its original title, Des lagers Braut—should be produced at Berlin. Preciosa was produced with great suc cess at the old Berlin opera-house on June 14, 1821. On June 18, the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, the opening of the new "Schauspielhaus" was celebrated by the production of Der Frei schiitz. The success of the piece was triumphant. The work was received with equal enthusiasm at Vienna on Oct. 3, and at Dres den on Jan. 26, 1822. Yet Weber's position as kapellmeister was not much improved by his success.
For his next opera Weber accepted a libretto based, by Frau Wilhelmine von Chezy, on the story of Euryanthe, as originally told in the 13th century, in Gilbert de Montreuil's Roman de la Violette, and repeated with alterations in the Decamerone, in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, and in several later forms. The work was produced at the Karntnerthor theatre in Vienna, on Oct. 25, 1823, and received with enthusiasm.
Weber's third and last dramatic masterpiece was an English opera, written for Covent Garden theatre, upon a libretto adapted by Planche from Wieland's Oberon. It was disfigured by the spoken dialogue abandoned in Euryanthe; but in musical beauty it is quite equal to it, while its fairies and mermaids are as vividly real as the spectres in Der Freischiitz. Though already far gone
in consumption, Weber began to compose the music on Jan. 23, 1825. Charles Kemble had offered him LI,000 fur the work, and he could not afford to rest. He finished the overture in London, at the house of Sir George Smart, soon after his arrival, in March 1826; and on April 12, the work was produced with triumphant success. Weber grew daily perceptibly weaker, and, notwith standing the care of his kind host, Sir George Smart, and his family, he was found dead in his bed on the morning of June 5, 1826. For eighteen years his remains rested in a temporary grave in Moorfields chapel; but in 1844 they were removed and placed in the family vault at Dresden, Wagner making an eloquent speech.
Besides his three great dramatic masterpieces and the other works already mentioned, Weber wrote two masses, two sym phonies, eight cantatas, and a large number of songs, orchestral and pianoforte pieces, and music of other kinds, amounting altogether to more than 25o compositions.
Weber's style rises, in his three greatest works, to heights which show his kinship with the great classics and the great moderns. His intellect was quick and clear; but yet finer was the force of character with which he overcame the disadvantages of his feeble health, desultory education and the mistakes of his youth. With such gifts of intellect and character, every moment of his short life was precious to the world; and it is impossible not to regret the placing of his training in the hands of Abt Vogler. Weber's master was an amiable charlatan, whose weak ness as a teacher was thoroughly exposed, in perfect innocence, by his two illustrious pupils. Meyerbeer wished to be famous as the maker of a new epoch in opera. Weber could not help being so in reality. But all his determination could not quite repair the defects of his purely musical training, and though his weaknesses are not of glaring effect in opera, still there are moments when even the stage cannot explain them away. Thus the finale of Der Freischfaz breaks down so obviously that no one thinks of it as anything but a perfunctory winding-up of the story, though it really might have made quite a fine subject for musical treatment. In Euryanthe Weber attained his full power, and his inspiration did not leave him in the lurch where this work needed large musical designs. But the libretto was full of absurdities; espe cially in the last act, which not even nine remodellings under Weber's direction could redeem. Yet it is easy to see why it fascinated him, for, whatever may be said against it from the standpoints of probability and literary merit, its emotional con trasts are highly musical. Indeed it is through them that the defects invite criticism.