Franz Anton von Weber

Franz Anton von Weber, painter unknown

Franz Anton von Weber (born September 26, 1734 in Zell im Wiesental , † April 16, 1812 in Mannheim ) was a German musician, conductor and theater director . His life was shaped by extensive travel.

He was the uncle of Aloisia Lange, b. Weber and Constanze Mozart, b. Weber . His second marriage was to Genovefa Brenner ; from this marriage comes his son, the composer Carl Maria von Weber .

Life

Franz Anton von Weber's ancestors came from Stetten (Lörrach) . Born non-aristocrat himself, he assumed the title of nobility by claiming to be descended from a southern German family of the same name, which was already extinct at the time. He attended the Jesuit school in Freiburg im Breisgau with musical training and received additional violin lessons from his father Fridolin Weber until his death in 1754. Presumably during his military service, for which there is no evidence, he came into contact with the Mannheim court orchestra , where his brother was Franz Fridolin Weber worked as a bass player. In 1758 Weber became the prince-bishop councilor in the Hochstift Hildesheim and Steuerwald . After his discharge from civil service in 1768, he stayed as a privateer in Hildesheim and went on numerous concert tours as a violinist and violist from there. In 1776 he became music director of the Johann Friedrich Stöffler theater company . The company performed in Hildesheim, Celle, Lüneburg, Stade, Hanover, Eutin and Lübeck.

In 1779 he became court conductor in Eutin and later also town musician there. As a local conductor he also worked for traveling theater companies. In between had several stays in Hamburg and Vienna.

In the summer of 1783 he visited his sons Fridolin and Edmund von Weber , who were then tutored by Joseph Haydn , in Vienna. There he met 19-year-old Genoveva Brenner , who was performing as a talented singer in Vienna at the time. On August 20, 1785, he married Genoveva Brenner in the Schottenkirche in Vienna . The groomsmen were court actors Joseph Lange and Vincenzo Righini . It was Weber's second marriage; the first had already had eight children, four of whom were still alive. The marriage to Genoveva Brenner resulted in three more children, of which the two younger ones died at an early age.

The newly married couple initially moved back to Eutin with their two sons from Franz Anton's first marriage. In 1786 Genoveva's first son, Carl Maria, was born there. From 1787 to 1789 the family lived in Hamburg again. In 1789 Franz Anton became Kapellmeister at the acting company of Johann Friedrich Toscani and Peter Carl Santorini in Kassel , Marburg and Hofgeismar, in the same year he finally founded his own theater company and came with them to Meiningen, Nuremberg, Erlangen, Bayreuth and Amberg. In 1794 he lived as a privateer in Weimar and Rudolstadt, where his wife appeared in the theaters of Johann Wolfgang Goethe .

In 1794/95 he became Kapellmeister at the theater company of Franz Xaver Glöggl and tried his own theater company there again in 1795/96. After an interlude in Hildburghausen, the family moved back to Salzburg. His wife died there in 1798, and his son Carl Maria received lessons from Michael Haydn that same year . Further art trips followed, for example to Munich (1798–1800), Freiberg (1800/01), again Salzburg (1801/02), Northern Germany (1802), Augsburg (1802/03) and Vienna (1803/04). From 1804 to 1806 he lived in Breslau , where his son Carl Maria had found a job as Kapellmeister, interrupted by stays in Carlsruhe in Silesia in 1806/07. In 1807 Carl Maria von Weber moved to Stuttgart, where his father later followed him.

Franz Anton von Weber spent his last years in Mannheim , where he died on April 16, 1812.

Web links

• Franz Anton von Weber in the Carl Maria von Weber Complete Edition

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Music in Past and Present Volume 17, (2007) Sp. 506.
2. ↑ Christoph Schwandt: Carl Maria von Weber in his time. Mainz 2014, p. 13.