Carl Maria von Weber studied in Salzburg as a young man, learning counterpoint from Michael Haydn at St. Peter's choir school. He went on to write Der Freischutz and establish German Romantic opera as a form. Wagner came directly from him. The Salzburg Festival's entire operatic heritage runs through the tradition Weber defined.
The Story
Weber arrived in Salzburg around 1797, part of a family caught travelling when Napoleon's campaigns disrupted the roads. He was ten or eleven years old, already musically precocious, and Salzburg offered him something specific: Michael Haydn, the younger brother of Joseph Haydn, had spent decades as the city's court musician and was one of the most technically accomplished composers of the late 18th century. Weber studied counterpoint under him at St. Peter's choir school, learning the Fux-style discipline that would underpin his later orchestral writing.
The six fughettas Weber published in 1798, while still in or just after his Salzburg period, show Michael Haydn's direct influence. They are small but assured, and they attracted attention: the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung praised his counterpoint. He also absorbed what Salzburg offered more broadly: the Catholic liturgical tradition, the rich orchestral library that the court maintained, and a city still living in the shadow of Mozart, who had died only a few years before Weber's arrival.
He left Salzburg to study with Vogler in Vienna, then pursued a career across Germany that took him to Breslau, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Prague, and finally Dresden, where he became Kapellmeister in 1816. Der Freischutz, premiered in Berlin in 1821, was the work that made him the most celebrated opera composer in Europe. It took German folk legend, supernatural atmosphere, and the sound of the German forest and forged them into a coherent national operatic style. Nothing quite like it had existed before. Wagner, who would dominate the next generation, said plainly that Weber was his primary predecessor.
Richard Strauss, who co-founded the Salzburg Festival with Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1920, grew up in the operatic tradition Weber had defined. The Festival's commitment to German opera, its sense of a distinctly German and Austrian operatic identity worth celebrating and preserving, runs back through Wagner to Weber. The Salzburg years, those early months with Michael Haydn in the choir school, were the foundation.
