(b. Eutin, November 19, 1786; d. London, June 5, 1826)
 

German composer, conductor, and pianist. He was among the first com-| posers to discern and give voice to the :: grand themes of musical Romanticism. He \ was the son of an entrepreneurially minded town musician who in 1787 decided to form his own traveling music theater company; as a result, Weber spent his childhood and : youth all over Germany. He received his initial musical training from his father and two older half-brothers, with subsequent instruction from Michael Haydn in Salzburg and Georg Vogler in Vienna.
 

Though he was sickly and nearsighted and limped, Weber was accomplished enough by the age of 17 to be awarded the post of opera conductor at Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland); a couple of years later he served a few months as court musician in Karlsruhe. In the summer of 1807 he landed a job as ducal secretary in Stuttgart and was joined there by his father, who had failed at his business ventures. In a scheme to repay some of his father’s debts along with some of his own, Weber stuck his I hand into the royal till, got caught, and was charged with embezzlement. He was jailed for several days and banished for life from Wurttemburg.
 

Chastened, Weber resolved to begin a new life. He adopted his father’s peripatetic ways, traveling and living off his earnings as a concert pianist and the sale of works to various theaters and publishers. Passing through Prague in the winter of 1813, he was unexpectedly offered the music directorship of the Estates Theater, where, tasked with bringing the desultory opera company back to life, he made a valiant effort, but found himself frustrated both by his inability to cast important works and by the public’s indifference. Weber’s work did not go unnoticed, however, and on Christmas Day 1816 he was summoned to Dresden to create, under royal patronage, an official German-language opera company. Around the same time, he became engaged to Caroline Brandt, a soprano who had been a member of the Prague company; they married the following year.
 

Weber arrived in Dresden in 1817 and immediately went to work building an ensemble. His efforts met with only partial success and brought him into conflict with the long-established Italian-opera tradition in the Saxon capital. But it was in Dresden that he befriended the playwright Friedrich Kind, who would provide the libretto for Weber’s most influential work, Der Freischutz (The Free [i.e., “magical”] Shooter), which premiered in Berlin in 1821 and, four years later, in New York City—in English. In many ways Der Freischutz marked the coming-of-age of German Romantic opera. The social and moral issues woven into the fabric of its folktale plot, along with the elements of the bizarre and fantastic that enliven the drama, mark it as the product of a new artistic age. Weber’s use of the orchestra throughout the work is brilliant and innovative; the overture is one of the most strikingly scored and evocative pieces of symphonic music from the first quarter of the 19th century.
 

The success of Der Freischutz greatly elevated Weber’s standing in the musical world, but the stress of work and the progressive deterioration of his health—he was tubercular and after 1821 suffered increasingly frequent bouts of serious illness—limited his productivity during the last five years of his life. He completed the opera Euryanthe in 1823, but the lukewarm reception accorded its premiere, in Vienna, left him embittered and discouraged. The next year, a commission from London for a new opera, Oberon, to be based on Christoph Martin Wieland’s romance, brought a last burst of creative energy. Weber studied English in order to set the English libretto effectively, and traveled to London in the winter of 1826 to put the finishing touches on the score in preparation for the Covent Garden premiere. Exhausted by these efforts, he succumbed to tuberculosis less than eight weeks after the opera’s first performance.
 

Weber’s output included a good deal of incidental music, two symphonies, several concertos, a small amount of chamber music, numerous songs, and some sonatas and characteristic works for piano, including the celebrated “rondeau brillant” Aufforderung zum Tanze (Invitation to the Dance), later orchestrated by Berlioz. Several of his concerted works have secured a place in the repertoire: There are two particularly fine clarinet concertos (both composed in 1811), and the Konzert-stuck in F minor (1821) for piano and orchestra is a display piece of the first magnitude, completed on the morning of the premiere of Der Freischutz.
 

It was in the realm of opera and in his use of the orchestra that Weber made his most important contributions to the advancement of musical style. Even if the only one of his stage works that has held an unassailable place in the repertoire is Der Freischiltz, its influence on the work of contemporaries such as Meyerbeer and on Weber’s principal successor in the next generation, Wagner, was decisive. Weber’s richly hued writing for the orchestra, notable for its almost unprecedendy adventurous use of woodwind and brass—particularly the sparkle shown in such works as the Konzertstilck and the elfin touches found in the overture to Oberon —would have a profound effect on Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Richard Strauss, indeed, on the whole lineage of 19th- and 20th-century composers concerned with color.