After _Freischütz_ it was indeed ‘scarcely possible to rise higher,’ but Weber attempted a more ambitious task in a purely musical way in his next opera, _Euryanthe_, which was a glorification of the romanticism of the age--that of Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann, who represented to the Germans of the time vigor of the imagination and the freedom of the individual. Both _Euryanthe_ and _Oberon_, which followed it, are very fine, but they could not repeat the success of _Der Freischütz_, chiefly because Weber could not find another _Freischütz_ libretto. The composer died in England on June 4, 1826, after conducting the first performances of _Oberon_ at Covent Garden.
Personally we see Weber as a man of the world, yet always with a bit of aristocratic reserve. He had been one of a wandering theatrical troupe, had played behind the scenes of a theatre, had known financial ups and downs, had lived on something like familiar terms with gentlemen and ladies of the court, had been a _roué_ with the young bloods of degree, had intrigued and been the victim of intrigue, had been a concert pianist with the outward success and the social stigma of a virtuoso musician, had been a successful executive in responsible positions, had played the litterateur and written a fashionable novel, had been a devoted husband and father, and had felt the meaning of a great social movement. Certainly Weber was the first of that distinguished line of musicians who cultivated literature with marked talent and effect; his letters reveal the practised observer and the literary craftsman, and his criticisms of music, of which he wrote many at a certain period, have the insight of Schumann, with something more than his verve. Finally, he was the first great composer who was also a distinguished director; his work at Prague and Dresden was hardly less a creative feat than _Der Freischütz_.
Musically Weber has many a distinction. He is the acknowledged founder of German opera (though Mozart with _Zauberflöte_ may be regarded as his forerunner), and the man who made German music aggressively national. Wagner, as we know him, would hardly have been possible without Weber. Weber is the father of the romanticists in his emphasis upon the imagination, in his ability to give pictorial and definite emotional values to his music. It is only a slight exaggeration of the truth to call him the father of modern instrumentation; his use of orchestral timbres for sensuous or dramatic effects, so common nowadays, was unprecedented in his time. With Schubert he is the father of modern pianoforte music; himself a virtuoso, he understood the technical capacities of the piano, and developed them, both in the classical forms and in the shorter forms which were carried to such perfection by Schumann, with the romantic glow of a new message. He is commonly regarded as deficient in the larger forms, but in those departments (and they were many) where he was at his best there are few musicians who have worked more finely than he.