Carl Maria von Weber.(Review)

Missa sancta Nr. 1 Es-Dur (WeV A. 2) mit Offertorium "Gloria et honore" (WeV A. 3); Missa sancta Nr. 2 G-Dur (WeV A. 5) mit Offertorium "In die solemnitatis" (WeV A. 4). Herausgegeben von Dagmar Kreher; Redaktion: Joachim Veit und Frank Ziegler. (Samtliche Werke, Ser. I: Kirchenmusik, vol. 2.) Mainz: Schott, 1998. [Edition introd. in Ger., Eng., p. xi-xiv; vol. introd., p. xv-xx; abbrevs. and library sigla, p. xxi-xxiii; instrumentation, p. xxiv; score, 285 p.; crit. notes (genesis and transmission; description of sources; editorial reports), p. 287-471; appendixes (texts and facsimiles), p. 472-95; indexes, p. 496-98. Cloth. ISMN M-001-12365-5; WGA 1012. DM 770.]

In his "elegy" for the Western literary canon, Harold Bloom has wistfully observed that "the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called 'the learned world.'" (The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994]. 1). In recent decades the European musical canon too has been under assault, though of late, German musicology has striven to prop up, if not reinvigorate, certain parts by launching high profile and ambitious Gesamtausgaben, including collected editions of Robert Schumann (Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke [Mainz: Schott, 1991--]), Johannes Brahms (Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke [Munich: G. Henle, 1996 --]), and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Leipziger Ausgabe der Werke [Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & HarteI, 1997--]). These scholarly undertakings aim toward a critical comprehensiveness that easily dwarfs the more modest pretensions of comparable nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century efforts to monumentalize canonical fi gures (such as the older, "standard" editions of the same composers). Thus, Christian Martin Schmidt, supervising the new Mendelssohn edition under the auspices of the Shchsische Akademie der Wissensehaften in Leipzig (begun in the sesquicentennial year of 1997 and scheduled for completion during the bi-centenary of 2047), has announced the intention to offer nothing less than "all the available compositions, letters, writings and other documents relating to the artistic work of Mendelssohn in an appropriately scholarly form" (Leipziger Ausgabe gen. pref., p. x). The Neue Schumann Ausgabe is similarly ambitious in scope: its inaugural volume of 1991, Bernhard R. Appel's edition of the Missa sacra, op. 147 (ser. 4, sec. 3, vol. 2), includes the full orchestral score, reduced score with organ accompaniment, a transcription of the autograph sketches, and a handsome supplement of some thirty pages of facsimiles of primary sources, enabling even the most inquisitive scholar to reconstruct in detail the chronology and reception of what had been one of Schumann's lesser known works from his Diisseldoff period.

Among the recent efforts to reconstitute scholarly monuments is the Samtliche Werke of Carl Maria von Weber, under the general editorship of Gerhard Allroggen on behalf of the Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe. According to its prospectus, this complete works edition will present Weber's entire oeuvre, including piano reductions and arrangements, in ten series, "with reference to all available relevant sources (p. xi). The new project succeeds an aborted, earlier attempt. Musikalische Werke: Erste kritische Gesamtausgabe, of which only three volumes, including portions of some of the early operas, appeared between 1926 and 1932 (Augsburg: Benno Filser; Braunschweig: Henry Litolff's Verlag; reprint, New York: Broucle International Editions, 1977). The inaugural volume of the Samtliche Werke, edited by Dagmar Kreher and containing Weber's Masses of 1818 and 1819, achieves its stated goal admirably, if exhaustively, in a nearly five-hundred-page volume, two-fifths of which is tak en up with a meticulous Kritischer Bericht treating the genesis and transmission of the Masses and their manuscripts and variant readings (a generous selection of fifteen facsimiles of primary materials appears as an appendix).

Today Weber is generally remembered as a pivotal figure in early German romantic opera, whose immensely popular Der Freischutz (1821), premiered on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, sent shock waves throughout German realms and raised hopes for a national German opera. (Heine reported that throughout Berlin washerwomen, barbers, and school boys hummed its infectious tunes.) Weber was a consumptive, hapless singer (who as a young man nearly died after swallowing some engraving fluid carelessly left in a wine bottle) and an acclaimed virtuoso pianist snubbed by Goethe when Weber visited the poet in Weimar in 1812. Apart from operas, Weber left a substantial amount of piano music, of which the Aufforderung zum Tanze (1819), later orchestrated by Hector Berlioz, offered early stylizations of a popular new dance, the waltz, while the Konzertstuck (1821), with its sentimental program and telescoped formal design, proved formative for the piano concertos of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Franz Liszt, and others. B ut the bulk of Weber's remaining compositions, including ...