Concerning the date of Carl Maria's birth there is still controversy. The church records in Eutin give it as November 18, 1786. The date commonly accepted is December 18, 1786. When the boy's first composition was published the father did not hesitate to falsify his age by a year in order to irritate the attention of the _cognoscenti_. The impulse which prompted what must have seemed a trifling peccadillo to the unscrupulous Franz Anton sprang from an ambition which had long consumed his heart and had been intensified by the marvelous career of his nephew by marriage, Mozart: He wished to figure in the world as father of a prodigy. He had been disappointed in the children of his first marriage who, with finer facilities than Carl Maria ever enjoyed, had turned out to be simply good working musicians. The forcing process which he applied in the case of his youngest son was in no respect beneficial. The boy, too, was ambitious to be a Mozart, but in later life, speaking of his second opera, composed at the age of thirteen, he mentioned the circumstance that he had written the second act in ten days, and added: "This was one of the many unfortunate consequences of the numerous tales of the great masters which made so great an impression on my juvenile mind, and which I tried to imitate." The demand which the father made upon the precocious mind of his son was in reality greater than that made upon the boy Mozart's. Leopold Mozart was an ideal instructor and a man of fine moral fibre. In his exploitation of Wolfgang he never sacrificed the things which make for good in art. He may have been injudicious in fanning the spark of genius so industriously that it burst into the too-fierce flame which consumed his son's life prematurely, but the technical training which Wolfgang enjoyed was sound and thorough. This boon was never accorded to the boy Weber. While his father continued the roving life which began anew a year after Carl Maria's birth, he and his son Frederick cared for the lad's education. There was no more stability in the life of the family than in that of a gypsy band. Within a dozen years the father figured in one theatrical capacity or another in Vienna, Cassel, Meiningen, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Weimar, Erlangen, Hilburghausen and Salzburg. Only in the last two towns does it appear that he procured proper instruction for the child. Evidently with all his desire to play the rôle of a second Leopold Mozart he mistrusted his son's gifts, for he once contemplated making a painter out of him, and even after he had exhibited noteworthy fruits of the few months of study pursued under Michael Haydn in Salzburg, and Kalcher in Munich, he seemed willing to sacrifice his son's musical talents to the prospect of making money with Senefelder's new invention of lithography, in which both father and son took a keen interest. The influence of such an irresolute life upon the lad's moral character must also have been pernicious.