Weber’s Juvenilia: A Fifteen-Year-Old’s Prophetic Voice
Peter Schmoll and his Neighbours (1802)
Soloists; Hagen Philharmonic Orchestra/Gerhard Markson
BRILLIANT (originally Marco Polo) [91:48]
What do we hear when we listen to a fifteen-year-old’s opera? Precocity, certainly. Perhaps some clumsy ambition. But genius?
Carl Maria von Weber’s Peter Schmoll — his first surviving stage work, composed in 1801–02 — presents a curious case. Here’s a teenager who would eventually revolutionize German Romantic opera with Der Freischütz, already grasping at something substantial. The orchestration shows a confidence that shouldn’t exist yet. The melodic invention is… well, it’s genuinely charming, though that word undersells what’s actually happening in these two discs.
The circumstances matter. Weber’s father ran a traveling theater troupe — the boy literally grew up backstage. His cousin-by-marriage was Mozart’s widow Constanze. He studied briefly with Michael Haydn in Salzburg. So this wasn’t some provincial wunderkind scribbling in isolation; this was a hothouse plant, force-fed the best models. You hear it immediately in the opening trio, which could almost pass for late Mozart if you weren’t listening carefully. Almost. Weber’s harmonic language already shows small divergences — a chromatic inflection here, an unexpected modulation there.
The plot, adapted from a novel by Cramer (now mercifully forgotten), is hopeless. Two friends separated by revolution, various romantic entanglements, eventual reunion. The original libretto was so inept that it required rescue operations in 1944 and again in 1963. This release uses Werner Göttig’s revision with abridged dialogue — averaging eighteen seconds between musical numbers, which is just about tolerable even if your German is rusty or nonexistent.
But the music. There’s a duet in Act I where rippling woodwinds dance around the vocal line while the horns punch out the rhythmic foundation — it’s delightful construction, the kind of thing that makes you sit up and think, “Wait, how old was he?” The short "finale" reveals genuine skill in thematic integration, weaving motifs together with more sophistication than you’d expect. Weber’s arias often embrace multiple melodic ideas within a single number; one extended piece on the second disc incorporates the main theme from the overture, showing the kind of cyclic thinking that wouldn’t become fashionable for another generation.
The Hagen Philharmonic under Gerhard Markson plays with appropriate lightness—this isn’t Freischütz, after all, with its dark forests and demonic pacts. The orchestral sound captured in 1993 is clean without being antiseptic. The soloists blend well in the ensembles, which is crucial since Weber structures much of the opera around duets and trios rather than extended solo scenes. Individual voices are competent without being memorable; one wishes for more interpretive personality, but the singing is always musical.
The real question: is this merely a historical curiosity, or does it deserve revival? I’d argue for the latter, with reservations. Yes, it’s apprentice work. Yes, the dramatic pacing sags. But Weber’s melodic gift is already fully formed, and his orchestral imagination — that quality that would later produce the supernatural shimmer of Oberon — shows itself in flashes. This is music that deserves to be heard, not just studied in musicology seminars.
The reissue on Brilliant (originally Marco Polo) makes the case as well as anyone could. The documentation is thorough, the sound perfectly acceptable. If you’re interested in how genius develops — how a fifteen-year-old absorbs Mozart and Haydn and begins the process of becoming himself — this set provides genuine illumination. It’s not a masterpiece. But it’s something almost as interesting: a masterpiece in embryo, already kicking.
Raymond J Walker’s original review is referenced but this assessment is independent
