Der Freischütz

With its subject, taken over from the German collection of ghost stories Gespensterbuch (Book of Spectres), and its dramatic music, Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (The Marksman) is a quintessentially Romantic piece, deemed one of the first, and most renowned, Romantic operas.

Set in Bohemia shortly after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, it depicts the story of the young hunter Max. Eager to win a shooting contest and the hand of the forester’s daughter Agathe, he enters into a fateful agreement with dark forces, which nearly results in his beloved’s death …

The motif of magic bullets that never miss the target is far from being a “fantasy requisite” from days of yore. The temptation of achieving success even at the price that turns against us certainly did not disappear with the end of the Romantic era …

Weber’s score abounds in vivid, fiery energy and lyrical moments, as well as references to the folk milieu amid which the story unwinds. The apex of the opera is the famous Wolf’s Glen scene, with Max arriving in order to get “magic bullets”. Here the music is not a mere “accompaniment” to the singing, it itself constitutes the content of the drama.

Abandoning lucid form, Weber works with extreme dynamic contrasts, dark orchestral colours, fragments of sound, as well as silence, introducing to opera means of expression that would later on be embraced by Richard Wagner, an ardent admirer.