By no means just "Freischütz"

Anyone who has read the e-book and is curiously waiting for the bound book to compare it with the digital version will be completely perplexed by how extensive it is: with the font size I had chosen as ideal, the e-book had well over a thousand pages; I knew that this would not correspond to the size of the paper version, but was still amazed when the "real" book had over 600 pages. It was also exactly one hundred grams heavier than my iPad, with which I have already read and saved over fifty e-books. The two versions are identical not only in the text, but also in the additional apparatus (notes, bibliography, list of works, index of persons and list of illustrations), as well as in the number of illustrations, although some of them are also in color in the e-book.

The biography itself: The author succeeds excellently in bringing to life the times into which Carl Maria von Weber was born, in social, political and cultural terms. The patchwork of smaller and larger principalities that made up Germany at the time and made it difficult for a composer and conductor to travel and organize, comes clearly to mind. One marvels at how Weber, as a young man growing up in his father's itinerant theater with a restless and insecure existence, was able to build up a network that he was able to use throughout his life - the music business functioned much more spontaneously, but was also riskier. He worked in Breslau, Stuttgart, Prague and Dresden for long periods of time. He stretched his health to the limit. The rapid success of the Freischütz 1821 in Berlin, when he was 35 years old and had been court conductor in Dresden for five years, established his fame and three years later led to an invitation to write an opera for London. Oberon was premiered there in April 1826, Weber conducted a further twelve performances, on June 5 he was dead - not yet forty!

This rich, purposeful and intensively savored musical life is illuminated down to the dense network of relationships and production, but also down to the family details, whereby the political events with Napoleon's campaign in the East and the attempts to reorganize Germany are included as well as the Congress of Vienna and the events of the Restoration. The works are illuminated in the process of their production, but not analyzed musically, whereas the music writer Weber is quoted extensively as an observer of the music scene. Schwandt makes one thing clear several times: that Weber was never the emphatically German composer that his son Max Maria made him out to be in a three-volume biography (1864-66) and later in nationalist circles.

Three major advantages of the electronic book version: it is possible to search for each individual term and it works quickly, and the terms can also be tapped directly for searching on the web or in the Wikipedia encyclopaedia. The numerous annotations can be accessed in seconds at the tap of a finger, as can the return to the starting page. It is possible to add notes at any time, all of which are listed at the beginning of the book and can be called up just as quickly. None of this will be of paramount importance for fiction, but these advantages should not be underestimated for a book with an additional device.

Christoph Schwandt, Carl Maria von Weber in his time. A biography; printed: 607 p., € 35.00; e-book, € 24.99; Verlag Schott, Mainz 2014, ISBN 978-3-7957-0820-7