ABSTRACT
The evolution of Weber's Freischiitz according to the currently available documents has been traced with admirable thoroughness, if with now unadmired national polemics, in Georg Schiinemann's introduction to the facsimile edition of the manuscript of the score. 2 The present essay concems only one scene from the opera, albeit a farnous one. It proposes that the influential Wolf's Glen Scene echoes and plays upon a group of popular entertainments rooted in the fertile terrain that Goethe was trying to put beyond the pale. These entertainments, which I shall call paratheatrical, arose out of the intersection in the entrepreneurial mark et of burgeoning technology, fostered by science and the Industrial Revolution, and the insatiable appetite for diversion of the growing urban middle dass. As Goethe remarks above, the tastesthat went with this appetite were not always the most sophisticated. The most striking instances-balloon rides, Madame Tussaud's wax gallery, the panorama, the phantasmagoria-were not considered high art.3 Nonetheless, they were popular and commercially lucrative, they fascinated the contemporary public and press, and their descendants survive in Disneyland, Great America, and the movie industry. The last Iine of ancestry is particularly clear with the phantasmagoria, whose birth and growth in the late 1790s and early 18oos I propose as the source for many distinctive elements in Weber's Wolf's Glen Scene. But I should straightaway say that the phantasmagoria can be directly connected to the genesis ofWeber's scene only by circumstantial evidence.
