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Updated: May 7, 2025
Berg, the director of the music, was amazed, and on the next day acquainted Jenny Lind that he had selected her to undertake the rôle of Agatha in Weber's "Der Freischutz." This was the first character which had awakened our young singer's artistic sympathies, and toward it her secret ambition had long set.
Afterward Weber would groan, "Alas, why did I ever teach you the trick?" In 1821, there rose a famous operatic war between Spontini and Weber at Berlin. Caroline was prostrated with terror. Spontini's "Olympic" was given first with enormous success, and "Der Freischütz," in which Caroline had had so large a share, and which meant so much to the two, was forced into a dramatic comparison.
This showed correct observation on my mother's part; nothing had made so great an impression on me as the music of Freischutz, and I tried in every possible way to procure a repetition of the impressions I had received from it, but, strange to say, least of all by the study of music itself. Instead of this, I contented myself with hearing bits from Freischutz played by my sisters.
I soon decided in my own mind that it should be my destiny, some time, to delight the audience from the stage, but I was still undecided whether I would devote myself to the drama or the opera, for it seemed to me an equally desirable lot to shoot charmed bullets in "Der Freischutz," or, hidden behind elderberry bushes, to shoot at tyrannical Geslers in "William Tell."
Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of DER FREISCHUTZ long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances; and took from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming pleasure.
Of this favored abode of the Evil One, Wagner gave a vivid description in an essay on "Der Freischutz" which he wrote for the Gazette musicale in May, 1841, when the opera was preparing, under the hand of Berlioz, for representation at the Grand Opera in Paris.
Thus Weber became the idol of the lad's boyhood, and he knew "Der Freischütz" almost by heart. If he was not allowed to go to the theater to listen to his favorite opera, there would be scenes of weeping and beseeching, until permission was granted for him to run off to the performance.
And, to cap the climax, the ear of the musical Romanticist of our day has become quite accustomed also to hear in D-minor devilish rage and revengeful fury, as well as all sorts of demoniacal terror and dreadful, midnight, musical vampirism, as, for example, we find the Queen of Night giving vent in D-minor to the "hellish revenge" which boils in her heart, and in the Freischütz hell triumphs in D-minor.
When at length I had got so far as to be able to play the overture to Freischutz myself, though in a very faulty manner, I felt the object of my study had been attained, and I had no inclination to devote any further attention to perfecting my technique.
Everything connected with a theatrical performance had for me the charm of mystery, it both bewitched and fascinated me, and while I was trying, with the help of a few playmates, to imitate the performance of Der Freischutz, and to devote myself energetically to reproducing the needful costumes and masks in my grotesque style of painting, the more elegant contents of my sisters' wardrobes, in the beautifying of which I had often seen the family occupied, exercised a subtle charm over my imagination; nay, my heart would beat madly at the very touch of one of their dresses.
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