Silvana is well worth rehabilitation. Weber wrote it (or rather, rewrote it from a lost juvenile effort) during his Stuttgart years in 1808-10 as a young man more attracted to the delights of wine and women than those of song. It was the kindly Franz Danzi who made him pull himself together, and consequently helped to rekindle his sense of vocation. The complicated tale concerns a forest waif, bereft of her voice, wooed and won by a knight, Rudolph, who no more wants to marry Mechthilde, daughter of the dynastically ambitious Adelhart, than Mechthilde, in love with Albert, wants to marry him. All is straightened out in the end when ‘Silvana’, the sylvan child, turns out to be Adelhart’s long-lost daughter Ottilie, and reassumes her voice. She can now marry Rudolph; Mechthilde can marry Albert.
There are many signs of what was to come in Weber’s career. The knightly world anticipates Euryanthe, the forest world Der Freischutz. The invention cannot, of course, match the best of either work, but there is much to lift it above the conventions which are its starting-point. Not many Singspiel composers had such an instinct for finales propelled by dramatic necessity (something Schubert never learnt), and none that I know had such an ear for the sounds of the forest. Already, in his early twenties, Weber had an extraordinary feeling for instrumental colour as part of the expression, one considerably greater than his skill with the human voice. So the idea of a dumb heroine suited him well. It is a pity that the text and translation with these records do not include more of the score’s stage directions for Silvana, to whose movement, gesture and mime Weber responds with enchanting detail. She is largely associated with an oboe for her lively, engaging side, and for her amorous warmth with a cello that can lead her into kinship with Wagner’s Sieglinde. Weber gives a pioneering portrayal of character through instruments alone. We know Silvana as closely as anyone in the opera. Rudolph, who is gracefully sung by Alexander Spemann, is clearly denied a love duet with her, but Weber turns matters to advantage by creating a Silvana-oboe obbligato for his ardent lines.
The other characters are more conventional. Rudolph’s squire Krips, in the person of the lively Andreas Haller, bumbles away in the tones of any Hiller or Reichardt buffoon, though he has a better tune (it quickly went into the taverns) and he is more wittily orchestrated. Adelhart rages on in the Vengeance Aria convention of the day, and is (like others of his ilk) too often shaken with unsuitable fits of coloratura; Stefan Adam does well with him. Weber cannot manage much with Mechthilde, torn between duty to her father and love for the mysterious Albert, who is mild to the point of nonentity; but Angelina Ruzzafante takes the opportunity of making her vigorous melodic line, coloratura and all, reflect a character of considerable spirit.
Gerhard Markson (who has also recorded Weber’s even more youthful Peter Schmoll, Marco Polo, 4/94) directs a well-turned performance that began life on the stage in Hagen in February 1995. He might have stirred the chorus into livelier action, especially with a huntsmen’s chorus that is some way short of those in Freischutz or Euryanthe but that has cheerful lines and whooping horns. He does excellently with a storm that will later blow up again in the Wolf’s Glen, and with the many instrumental felicities that belong to Weber alone. There is much to enjoy here.'