On 20 November 2015 as part of celebrations marking two hundred and fifty years of the Bergakademie of Freiberg there came the historic revival of Carl Maria von Weber’s forgotten opera Das Stumme Waldmädchen at the Mittelsächsisches Theater in Freiberg, where it was first performed more than two hundred years ago.
The only copy of this early opera by the great German romantic composer surviving today is retained in the Mariinsky Theatre Sheet Music Archives (formerly the Central Music Library of the Board of the Imperial Theatres) in St Petersburg.
As a mark of the deep respect of the longstanding traditions of cultural collaboration between Russia and Germany the Mariinsky Theatre gave the Mittelsächsisches Theater of Freiberg music and production materials produced from Carl Maria von Weber’s historic original in order to return it to its native theatre.
The romantic comic opera Das Stumme Waldmädchen, written by von Weber when he was thirteen years of age, was the wunderkind composer’s first experience of theatre. Composed two years earlier, the score of Die Macht der Liebe und des Weins was lost in a fire, never having been performed. Von Weber’s next work, composed especially for the musical theatre in Freiberg, was more successful and on 24 November 1800 it was presented to a local audience to great acclaim before going on to be performed at theatres in Chemnitz, Prague and Vienna.
Das Stumme Waldmädchen came to St Petersburg thanks to the opera’s librettist – Karl Ritter von Steinsberg, an acclaimed actor, singer and director of the time who came to Russia’s imperial capital to work with a German theatre company.
The premiere took place in 1804 at the German (Kushelevsky) Theatre, where St Petersburg residents of the large and affluent German diaspora came to relax. That was very probably the first performance of the young composer’s music outside Germany and Austria, forming a kind of prelude to the Russian public’s enthusiastic welcome of von Weber’s timeless opera Der Freischütz.
Later, in 1810, having destroyed the original copy of his youthful opus, von Weber again turned to the libretto, writing for Frankfurt am Main the more developed romantic and heroic-comic opera Silvana, thus sentencing Das Stumme Waldmädchen to more than two centuries of oblivion.
The work first returned to the stage as recently as 2010. At the time, the concert performance of von Weber’s opera at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre under the baton of Valery Gergiev was deemed a colossal discovery of the early work of the great musician Carl Maria von Weber by the modern music world.
On 20 November 2015, two hundred and fifteen years later, Das Stumme Waldmädchen returned to the same Mittelsächsisches Theater in Freiberg where it was first performed.
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