Tune of the Day: Von Weber's Last Waltz
This piece, part of German composer Carl Gottlieb Reissiger's Danses Brillantes for piano, Op. 26, has been misattributed to Carl Maria von Weber for many years, because it was found among Weber's papers upon his death in 1826.
The piece was very popular in its time, and was even mentioned in Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).
I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber.
The present arrangement for two flutes appeared in Blake's Young Flutist's Magazine, published in Philadelphia in 1833.