Overture: Der Beherrscher der Geister (The Ruler of the Spirits)

“I’m waiting in agony for a good libretto…I don’t feel right when I haven’t got an opera in hand.” The sad fact is that Weber, the most gifted opera composer working in Germany before Wagner, only once found a libretto anywhere near worthy of him and, as a direct consequence, wrote only one opera which survives in the standard repertoire today. Even Der Freischütz has its problems but it is a model of the librettist’s art in comparison with the texts of the next two operas he completed. Euryanthe    and Oberon – his last large-scale works and the ultimate examples of the Weber dilemma – are both of them abundant in music of the highest quality and both of them are scarcely stageable.

The consolation is that Weber’s genius is most succinctly and most engagingly represented in his overtures. He was an inspired melodist, a brilliant orchestrator and a consummate designer of single-movement structures which – although their primary function was to create the appropriate atmosphere in the theatre or opera house – are entirely convincing as separate items in the concert hall. Not all of the ten surviving overtures are masterpieces but, while there are some amusing oddities, there is not one dud. Brought up in a theatrical family and heir to many disappointments, Weber was acutely aware of the risks involved in mounting any kind of stage production: a well written overture, presenting the best of the musical material in a self-contained form, was an insurance against total failure.

Weber usually turned to the overture when he had more or less finished the rest of the opera. In the case of Rübezahl however – a project begun in 1804, 17 years before the completion of Der Freischütz - he seems to have approached the overture at an early stage in the composition. Certainly, although the opera was never finished, there was enough of the overture for Weber to return to it seven years later and issue what he described as “a complete reworking” of it as a concert overture he called Der Beherrscher der Geister (“The Ruler of the Spirits”). While the new title refers to the sinister central figure of Rübezahl, the overture is now quite independent of the opera, dramatically orientated though it is. What it is really about is the contrast between the impulsive and brilliantly scored violin theme at the beginning and the lyrical material later introduced by woodwind – above all the lovely oboe melody which is triumphantly taken up by the brass with militaristic drum accompaniment not long before the end.   

Gerald Larner © 2009