Music and the theatre were in Carl Maria von Weber's blood. His father (whose financial irresponsibility eventually embroiled the son in more than one nasty situation) was a composer, violinist, and double-bass player who directed an itinerant musical theatre troupe; his mother was a singer and actress; two of his half-brothers were composers; his uncle was a singer and violinist; and three of his first cousins (including Aloysia Weber, whom Mozart loved but who rejected him, and her sister Constanze, whom Mozart later married) were sopranos. Carl Maria was a sickly child, with a permanent limp caused by a damaged hip-bone. He studied music with a succession of teachers in a succession of cities, including Joseph Haydn's brother, Michael, in Salzburg, and in Vienna, where he also sang and accompanied himself on the guitar in taverns.

By the age of 16 he had written three operas, a mass and many other pieces. He was only 17 when he was appointed music director of the opera house in Breslau, and he held similar positions, successively, at Stuttgart, Prague and, for the last nine years of his life, Dresden - where in 1817 the four-year-old Richard Wagner appeared as an angel in one of Weber's operas. Weber also established himself as a touring piano virtuoso - one of the finest of his day - and the concerts he gave with the clarinettist Heinrich Baermann led him to write several enduringly successful virtuoso pieces for that instrument. After having had an affair in Stuttgart with the singer Gretchen Lang, for whom he wrote a number of songs, Weber fell in love with Caroline Brandt, another singer, whom he had engaged for the opera in Prague. In 1817, after a four-year, off-and-on relationship, they married, and they eventually had two sons. Weber was never physically robust, but by 1818 he was already serious ill with tuberculosis.

In 1823 his health began to deteriorate seriously. When he realised that he would not live much longer, he worked harder than ever in the hope of ensuring his family's economic survival. In February-March of 1826, despite his rapidly deteriorating condition, he travelled through Germany and France to London for the world premire of Oberon, the opera he had composed for Covent Garden. (He had prepared himself for the trip with 153 lessons from an Englishman in Dresden and had attained a fair command of the language.) By the time he conducted the first performance on 12 April, he was already mortally ill. When he died, on 5 June - the day before he was to begin his return journey to his family in Dresden - he was not yet 40 years old. As an opera house music director and conductor, and also as a writer on musical subjects, Weber was a reformer whose goal was to make opera into a total work of art - musical, literary, dramatic and scenographic,

In this sense he anticipated Wagner, who admired him greatly. As a composer, too, he was a progressive who rejected well-worn Italian operatic formulae in favour of a new, intensely Romantic and specifically German style, which, however, was really a cross-breeding of late 18th- and early 19th-century French opera with popular German Singspiel (in which sung pieces alternate with spoken dialogue, a form that had reached its artistic peak in Mozart's Die Entfx.hrung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) and Die Zauberfla.te (The Magic Flute). In Weber's three best-known operas - Der Freischx.tz, Euryanthe and Oberon, all completed in the 1820s - the musical depiction of nature became an important element, and an atmosphere of supernatural mysticism also wafted onto the stage. Thus, it is no wonder that Weber's operas so powerfully influenced the next generation of Romantic opera composers, especially Berlioz and Wagner, just as his evocative instrumental writing, in his concert and salon pieces as well as his operas, influenced Mendelssohn, Chopin and Schumann.

Harvey Sachs

Biographical notes (c) 1996, by permission of Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg A selection of major works:

Orchestral: Andantino e Rondo ungarese (bassoon and orchestra), Aufforderung zum Tanz (Invitation to the Dance, orchestrated by Hector Berlioz), Bassoon Concerto, 2 Clarinet Concertos, Concertino for Clarinet and Orchestra, Concertino for Horn and Orchestra, Konzertstx.ck (piano and orchestra), 2 Piano Concertos, 2 Symphonies

Chamber: Clarinet Quintet, Grand Duo Concertant (clarinet and piano), Piano Quartet, Trio (flute, cello and piano), 8 Pieces (piano duet), 6 Sonatas (violin or flute and piano),

Instrumental solo: Aufforderung zum Tanz, Grande Polonaise, 4 Piano Sonatas, Polacca brillante Vocal/Choral: In die solemnitatis (offertorium), Lieder (Songs), Masses

Stage works:

Operas: Abu Hassan, Euryanthe, Der Freischx.tz, Oberon, Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn, Silvana