Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Carl Maria von Weber

I was looking through the online catalogue of Dover Publications and noticed that they have a volume of Weber's piano music:

Complete Sonatas, Invitation to the Dance and Other Piano Works

He wrote a significant amount of piano music, including sonatas and concertos, that has fallen into relative obscurity; though his name is widely recognized, he's rarely discussed despite a resurgence of interest in lesser known composers. I wonder if it's generally known that he died quite young, too—just five months before his 40th birthday, like Chopin.

Somewhere, I still have a cassette of Garrick Ohlsson playing the sonatas. I never became very familiar with them, but thought they were interesting and comparable in style and substance to those of Hummel. The minuet of the first sonata (Op. 24 in C) in particular has great verve, and I found it immediately appealing.

Are there any Weber fans here? (Or foes, even? ) Any thoughts on why his piano works dropped out of the teaching and performing repertoire (and why they haven't (yet) been revived)? Does even the Konzertstück for piano and orchestra get programmed much anymore?

Steven

I know Weber for his clarinet concertos. They're really classy.

I know Weber for Invitation to the Dance, Der Freischutz, and his clarinet concerti - regretfully I am not very familiar with his piano works other than the Konzerstucke (and even that I am only marginally familiar with). What I've heard of this composer, though, is promising and I for one would be interested in hearing some of his piano works programmed more often.

I'm a huge Weber fan. The Ohlsson recordings are on CD: Arabesque 6584.

His finest opera, Der Freischütz is still a repertory staple in German-speaking countries, though like the operettas of, say, Lortzing, it tends to resist export. Yet it contains some of Weber's most potent music: Agathe's 'Leise, leise', Kaspar's devilishly difficult aria at the close of the 1st act, not to mention the 'Wolf's Glen' scene. With it's exotic depiction of the supernatural, it can still knock your socks off. When Weber wrote it in 1820 it took Europe by storm, launching romanticism in music. Wagner would be inconceivable without Weber's example.

In addition to the Konzertstück, he wrote two piano concertos which I have loved since I was a boy. A Roman Catholic, Weber also wrote a damn good setting of the Mass.

Liszt discovered Weber after hearing someone play the Ab sonata- he went bonkers, and for a while Weber's piano music was far more often played than Beethoven. Everybody got into the act: there were all sorts of transcriptions of Weber (not just the well known ones of Liszt), and Henselt's version of Aufforderung zum Tanz had a vogue for a while. Even Godowsky got his hands on it.

Weber's popularity with pianists lasted up through the First World War, and those who collect 'historic recordings' will certainly know his music. Several years ago I heard Kissin play the Perpetuum mobile from the 1st sonata. It was hair-raising.

Mendelssohn, too, was bowled over by Weber...I think the affinities are noticeable...and, of course, Wagner, too, was influenced by Weber's operas, especially Freischutz.

I think the most consistently good of Weber's Sonatas is the first in C major which closes with the celebrated Perpetuum Mobile, which both Brahms and Tchaikovsky made paraphrases of.
The remaining sonatas, I feel, have each a movement or two which, being weaker, spoil the whole.

I have played the Konzertstuck and the Variations on the Romance from "Joseph."

I played the Grand Duo Concertant with a clarinetist a few years ago. It's a wonderful piece, but not at all easy for either clarinet or piano.

All of his clarinet works are worth hearing. We're truly fortunate the Weber had a drinking buddy who was also the best clarinet player in Europe. Or at least I think that's the story.

Although I'm not fond of some of his works (his Clarinet Quintet is not exactly ideal chamber music in terms of distribution of material, and I've never been able to muster much enthusiasm for the Konzertstück -- it always seemed unintentionally funny to my ears), I've always thought Weber was a worthwhile composer on the whole. Of the piano sonatas it seems only the second is performed (and quite rarely at that), though Richter was very fond of the last two sonatas -- with good reason. Incidentally, Brahms made an arrangement of the last movement of the First Piano Sonata, with the virtuoso figuration of the right hand transferred to the left hand. When Brahms was assigned the movement by his piano teacher (Marxen), he played it both ways in his next lesson.

Both of his Clarinet Concerti are perhaps my personal favorites amongst his works (I accompanied the F minor and the Concertino via piano reduction). I like both Piano Concerti quite a bit -- at the very least, they're more tightly constructed than Field's! And I've always found both of his symphonies quite delightful.

Of course Der Freischütz is perhaps his most enduring work overall, but I'm quite fond of Oberon as well, even though it has never been highly thought of in general.

I saw a production, many years ago, of Euryanthe in English which had the audience laughing in all the wrong places at the absurdities of the plot.

I enjoy Weber despite not having many recordings of his works. I've found that, for me at least, Weber is a composer I have to be patient with but, in the end, his music is really charming and, in fact, some of the happiest on earth oftentimes. I really like his first sonata, especially the jovial third and fourth movements.

Euryanthe has some spiffy music in it (never seen it, though), not to mention Oberon as Janus points out. I would love to see that one someday, though I've read that it doesn't 'quite' come off on stage. Would be worth it just for Rezia's monstrous -and glorious- pre-Wagnerian aria.

Which reminds me. I saw a production of Bartered Bride (unfortunately in English) some years back. The music of course is a joy from beginning to end, but in between giggles, I kept asking myself: are Bohemians really that simple minded?

I suppose this is another case of an opera not exporting well, and I believe this is even more the case with Smetana's other operas, which are seldom done outside of Bohemia anyway.

English National Opera used to be far more adventurous in its repertoire than it is nowadays. It was there I saw Euryanthe and on another occasion Smetana's Dalibor. Martinu's Julietta was another production which I saw and I was rather hoping they might revive it for the 50th anniversary of the composer's death.
When I saw Freischutz there a few years ago I wasn't impressed by either the singing or the production; the sets seemed to have been lumped together from other productions, including a huge "Moon" which probably had already seen service in their production of Russalka.
Funnily enough, when I visited Prague last year, I just missed a production of Smetana's "Two Widows" ( a very charming opera as is The Kiss) and had to settle for Russalka instead.

Godowsky and Michalawski also did versions of it, both of which are interesting to study (and very challenging to play). Kalmus published a convenient little volume that has the original plus the Brahms, Tschaikovsky, and Michalawski versions. Don't know if it's still in print.

Speaking of heaping Pelion on Ossa, Godowsky, not satisfied with the virtuoso paraphrase that Tausig made of the "Invitation to the Dance", added further excrescences of his own to produce yet another of his almost unplayable versions of works which are already complete and perfect in their original forms.

In the past, I've played his Concertani in E-flat for Clarinet and Piano. The piano got the orchestral transcription, which was quite difficult, and was very hard to learn in only a few days. But...It was one of the most enjoyable works to learn and then perform.

Hummel, Von Weber, Pleyel and many others wrote some really great piano works. Like many of these late 18th through the early to mid 19th century composers, he got lost in the crowd with Chopin, Liszt, and many others taking the forefront.

Wood-demon, you make a good point regarding Tausig. I too find his "rewriting" of important works also makes them impossibly difficult for the sake of making them difficult. I came across a Scarlatti sonata. I think it his K.9 in D-minor. Where the trills are, he turns them into third-trills which are very difficult to play, and to be honest, do nothing for this piece other than make it more difficult than it should be.

John

But John, you have to admit that Tausig's 'arrangement' of Schubert's March Militare is rather impressive, especially when Horowitz has a go at it.

I have to confess that I play the Scarlatti-Tausig arrangement; it's the first movement of a famous two-movement set usually called Pastorale & Capriccio. Tausig arranged several more Scarlatti sonatas, but these aren't often perfrormed.

I can understand that Tausig might have wanted to adapt the music of Scarlatti to the modern piano (even though the originals "play" very well on it). What is more difficult to accept is the re-writing of pieces that were already conceived in terms of the piano. Many pianists make slight alterations to some repertoire to make awkward or badly-conceived passages more effective, but with Tausig - and Godowsky, even more so - we're talking wholesale re-writing. Perhaps these pieces are interesting to perform now and again as a "stunt" but I, wonder, do they add to the music or detract from it?
Having said that and to show that the exception proves the rule I note that there are some of the Chopin-Godowsky etudes (like the Aflat from op.25) which are so far from the originals that they become a completely new creation, and they can be very beautiful.

Yeah... particularly when Horowitz plays it, but of course Horowitz can make anything impressive.
His Rachmaninov Preludes are to die for just like his Scarlatti and Mozart.

Yes, there are a few execptions like the Godovsky-Chopin etudes, which are really wonderful, but they are rare. To be honest, I like the originals of things a lot more than the rewrites. For some reason, when things are rewritten for the sake of "making" them better to suit the 19th century tastes, they've actually taken away the original meaning of the works.

The 19th and early 20th century perceptions of Baroque and early Classical period music is pretty aweful as far as I'm concerned. They've gone as far as altering the key signatures because the works didn't sound right to their ears.

What they've done is take pieces written in the church modes, and altered them to the modern minor keys, wich makes the music sound heavy and terribly awkward. The also altered time signatures too to make the pieces "better", and or rewrote the music to fix it.

John